Rent Seeking Hindutva Government in India

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Essential Commodities

High inflation, growing unemployment and depreciating rupee are three fundamental issues faced by Indian economy today. The educational and health infrastructure is falling apart. Human development is in the bottom of the nadir. Modi government has no plans to take responsibility to navigate Indian economy away from these crises.  It is passing its responsibility on Indian people by reckless hiking of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on food and other essential items. This nationwide rent seeking activities in terms of high taxation on goods and services that are part of the rent-seeking process. It will have devastating impact on poor and malnourished population, small businesses and rural poor. Such a policy will help corporates and it is going to push poor people into a regime of inescapable hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity. Hindutva is transforming India into a rent seeking market society, where welfare and social loss is immanent. The GST hike will have negative impact on all Indians and on all sectors of Indian economy. Taxing small producers, businesses and poor consumers are opposed to the idea of economic growth and development as it creates conditions for declining productivity, economic stagnation and inefficiency.

“One Nation, One Tax, One Market” policy slogan by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed to understand the economic diversities in India in terms of its culture of local production and consumption. “One Nation, One Tax, One Market” policy helps to create conditions, where India becomes increasing dominated by few crony capitalists affiliated with Hindutva. The international experience of mass rent seeking economics in developed countries show that big corporates grab larger share of the wealth without producing any socially meaningful goods and services. The income inequality is a result of rent seeking market society, where wealthy taxpayers gain. It marginalises the poor masses. The centralised project of Hindutva dominance over politics and corporate dominance over Indian economy will squeeze all creative potentials and labour power of the people in terms of their livelihoods, productive powers, innovation, and other income generation abilities. Hindutva is a primarily a cultural project to uphold the economic interests of the higher class and higher caste population in India.

The Hindutva government led by Mr Narendra Modi and his party, BJP cares only for electoral victory to uphold its crony capitalist classes. The BJP government does not care for people and the country. The religious mobilisation of people in the name of cultural nationalism is a political strategy that serves the corporates at the cost of lives and livelihoods of Indians. The market-oriented Hindutva economics creates a tax regime on the masses and a pervasive rent seeking government and a corporatized security state that destroys welfare state in India. It is a well-known fact that mass rent seeking society promotes regimes of bribery, corruption, smuggling and black-market. These are foundations for major revenue loss for a developing country like India.  A mass rent seeking state and government led by Hindutva shows that it has failed to create new wealth by generating mass employment or expanding innovation and economic growth.  The sent seeking Hindutva economics is fundamentally inefficient and short-sighted because it reduces productive power of the economy causes revenue loss and increases economic inequalities.

Hindutva alibi Hindu nationalism, economic growth and development, and India first projects are steps towards cultural, economic and political genocide of constitutional democracy and citizenship rights in India. The centralisation economic project of Hindutva is the politics of dominance over production and consumption; the hike of GST and other forms of taxation is just a means in this direction. It seeks to transform India into a rent seeking market society, where strongman economics and vigilante politics is normalised as an integral part of everyday lives.  Such a strategy helps both Hindutva and their crony capitalist friends.

Hindutva obsession with market dominated economy for economic growth and its politics of dominance must end for any form of security and sustainability of livelihoods of the marginalised masses in India. The ideas of progress, peace and prosperity are alien to Hindutva politics. Therefore, GST hike on food and other essential commodities and services are neither hurting their human sentiments nor their ideological politics. Their economic policies are directly linked with the immediate gain of their corporate friends, who fund their electoral juggernauts and support the activities of the hate factory called RSS.

The rent seeking market society dominated by corporate oligarchy in alliance with reactionary Hindutva politics put India and Indians into an indefinite darkness. The securitised corporate states and governments have never worked for the welfare of their citizens. It will not do so in India under Hindutva government. The defeat of Hindutva is central to the peace, prosperity and progress of India and Indians.

War against Russia plunging Germany into a massive energy crisis

Ela Maartens & Peter Schwarz

Government officials, business representatives and the media are preparing the German public for a massive energy crisis this winter. If gas imports from Russia were to dry up completely, German gas storage facilities would be empty by next February, according to a calculation by the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.

Gas storage facility "Bierwang" of the energy company "Uniper" in Unterreit near Munich (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Numerous plans are already circulating to force lower temperatures in private homes and public buildings and to shut down large parts of the public infrastructure—including swimming pools, libraries and sports facilities. Even the shutdown of air purifiers in schools that work to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection is under discussion.

Business representatives warn of the collapse of large operations in energy-intensive industries such as chemicals. Many small businesses, such as bakeries, fear for their existence. Employers’ President Rainer Dulger told the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “We are facing the biggest crisis the country has ever had... We will lose the prosperity we had for years.”

Under German and European law, private households and critical infrastructure such as hospitals, nursing homes and care facilities are given priority protection. But that is already being called into question. Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) suggested reconsidering their prioritization in allocating gas in favour of industry.

The relevant regulation was intended for short-term disruptions, he said during a visit to Vienna. It made no sense in the case of months-long gas supply disruptions. Industry could not automatically be put at the back of the queue, and this would have to be “thought about,” the minister said.

Siegfried Russwurm, president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), said the current prioritization rules for a gas shortage were “only created for short-term interruption of individual pipelines.” For the tough new energy reality, he declared, “politicians in Berlin and Brussels must create a new set of rules.”

But even if critical facilities and private households retain their priority in energy allocation, many will no longer be able to afford the expensive prices for gas and electricity. According to the Federal Statistical Office, prices for energy products already rose by a whopping 38 percent in June compared to the same month last year. Natural gas registered a 60.7 percent hike and electricity now costs 22 percent more.

Last week, Klaus Müller, president of the Federal Network Agency—the regulatory office for electricity, gas, telecommunications, postal and railway markets—and a former Green Party politician, spoke to the news agency RND and clarified the extent of the additional financial burden: “For those who are now receiving their heating bill, the costs are already doubling—and that’s not even taking into account the consequences of the Ukraine war.”

He went on to explain, “From 2023, gas customers will have to be prepared for a tripling of their bills, at the very least.” It was “absolutely realistic,” he said, that customers who currently pay €1,500 a year for gas will be asked to pay €4,500 and more in the future.

In addition to record energy prices, the continuing high rate of inflation is also a massive burden. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the average price level in June was 7.6 percent higher than a year ago. Foodstuffs were 12.7 percent more expensive, and fuels recorded an increase of 33.2 percent—despite the “fuel rebate” in the form of reduced mineral oil taxes, most of which flows into the pockets of the mineral oil companies.

The energy crisis is largely homemade. It is the price that the population must pay for the war NATO is waging against Russia in Ukraine. The attempt to bring Russia to its knees by imposing economic sanctions and supplying billions worth of weapons to Ukraine has triggered the energy crisis.

In a guest article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats) made it clear that the government was not prepared to back down under any circumstances and seek a negotiated solution. With the historic decisions of recent months, the European Union had taken a big step toward becoming “a geopolitical player,” he boasted.

The German government does not want to give up its world power plans, which are linked to the largest rearmament campaign since Hitler. The road was “not easy, even for a country as strong and prosperous as ours,” Scholz wrote. “We will need staying power.” Many citizens were already suffering from the effects of the war and were looking anxiously at their next electricity, oil or gas bills, he acknowledged. But he was convinced that “we will come out of this crisis stronger and more independent than we went in.”

Since the early 1970s, Germany has bought gas reliably and cheaply first from the Soviet Union and then from Russia. Even immediately before Russia’s reactionary attack on Ukraine, which NATO deliberately provoked by its constant advances eastward, Germany was buying more than 50 percent of its gas from Russia.

Since then, because of sanctions and the war, gas supplies cover only 30 percent of demand. The completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline has not been put into operation. The Yamal pipeline, which runs through Belarus and Poland, has ceased operations. Nord Stream 1 ended up delivering only 40 percent of its potential capacity because a gas turbine repaired in Canada fell victim to the sanctions.

Moreover, Nord Stream 1 is currently undergoing annual maintenance, which is expected to be completed by Thursday. However, it is unclear whether Russian gas will flow to Germany again. It would be impossible to compensate for a complete outage.

The EU Commission has calculated that if supplies were completely halted this month, only just under 15 percent of the gas that Russia has supplied to Europe so far this year could be offset by other suppliers. It said the EU would miss its target of filling gas storage facilities to 80 percent by early November, with a maximum of 65 to 71 percent possible.

In the first half of this year, the EU did import more natural gas than in the first half of 2021, although imports from Russia fell by 30 billion cubic meters. But alternative import options are now largely exhausted. Norway and the Netherlands, which supply pipeline gas to Germany, have reached maximum capacity.

The global supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is also unlikely to increase now. Demand from China, the world’s largest LNG importer, is expected to rise significantly in the coming months. In addition, there is a fire at Freeport, the second largest export terminal in the US, which will not return to full operation until the end of the year.

Germany has no LNG terminals of its own. The two floating terminals currently under construction could unload at most one billion cubic meters of natural gas per month, about 10 percent of consumption in a winter month.

LNG is also extremely expensive. On the exchanges, the price has increased seven-fold in some cases. This is causing difficulties for intermediaries such as Germany’s largest gas trader Uniper, which had agreed long-term supply contracts at fixed prices. The German government is supporting these firms with billions of euros and in May rewrote the Energy Security Act to allow them to pass on higher prices to end customers.

Government officials are mocking the victims of their policies with cynical advice. Klaus Müller, the Green Party head of the Federal Network Agency, urged people to take technical measures in view of the massive price increases: “Talk to your landlord or a tradesman, if he is still available. What can be done to optimize heating?”

He also suggested: “Voluntarily increase your budget or set aside some money each month, for example in a special account.” Who is he trying to fool with this?

According to a parliamentary question tabled by the Left Party in September 2021, 12 percent of full-time employees paying health and social insurance draw a monthly gross wage under €2,000. And what about the unemployed, pensioners and students? It is simply impossible for such people to reequip their homes or build up reserves. They can barely pay for the bare necessities with the money that is available to them each month.

To compensate for the massive price hikes, there is currently a one-off energy price allowance of €300, which is being paid out in September and which will be taxed—just a drop in the bucket. Unemployment benefit recipients receive even less. Pensioners who do not pay income tax will go away empty-handed.

While a special fund of €100 billion is being made rapidly available for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), the government coalition is letting workers fall off the edge of a cliff. There are already discussions about warming centres and rent moratoriums, because it is clear that many people will no longer be able to afford the rising energy costs.

Freezing and starving for war—that is the price the government is imposing on the population in order to once again become Europe’s leading military power.

US Homeland Security purchased “staggering” volumes of location data to illegally track citizens and immigrants

Kevin Reed

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released on Monday previously unpublished records of bulk smartphone location data purchased by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from private contractors that it used illegally to track the movement of individuals across North America.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in Washington, D.C., February 3, 2021 (Photo: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)

The documents were obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in 2020. The records show that, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, the DHS was procuring huge volumes of people’s cell phone location tracking information from two data brokers—Venntel and Babel Street—in violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The trove of records shows how the DHS departments, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, also likely the US Secret Service and US Coast Guard, spent millions in government funds to make bulk location data purchases. An ACLU press release says, “the volume of people’s sensitive location information obtained by the agency is staggering.”

The ACLU has published a set of seven redacted spreadsheets provided by CBP that contain “a small subset of the raw location data purchased by the agency from Venntel.” The press release goes on to provide details, “For one three-day span in 2018, the records contain around 113,654 location points—more than 26 location points per minute. And that data appears to come from just one area in the Southwestern United States …”

Among the documents obtained are email communications between DHS staff and representatives of the data companies in which attempts are made to rationalize the “unfettered sale of massive quantities of data in the face of the US Supreme Court precedent protecting similar cell phone location data against warrantless government access,” the ACLU release says.

Shreya Tewari, the Brennan Fellow for ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said, “These records provide critical insight into the government’s attempts to wash its hands of any accountability in purchasing people’s sensitive location data when it would otherwise need a warrant.”

The ACLU shared the documents with Politico, which published its own analysis. Politico said that the records obtained in the FOIA lawsuit included location information which was “harvested from apps on hundreds of millions of phones” and enabled the DHS to pinpoint “more than 336,000 location data points across North America,” and that this data “may reference only a small portion of the information that CBP has obtained.”

Politico also revealed that the data points included locations in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver, Toronto and Mexico City. Politico also reported that the location data has been used by CBP during the Biden administration which “renewed a contract for $20,000 that ended in September 2021.”

Most of the data obtained by the ACLU comes from Venntel, a data broker located in the Washington DC area that is a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics. These companies specialize in gathering data which tracks the movement of individuals from one destination to another for the stated purposes of targeted marketing.

In making a sales pitch to the DHS departments, Venntel boasted that it had collected location data from more than 250 million mobile devices and processed more than 15 billion location data points per day. On its website, Venntel promotes its services as “Innovative big data analytics for the world’s most challenging problems.”

According to an industry study, location data businesses include collectors, aggregators, marketplaces and location intelligence firms, and generate a combined $12 billion in annual revenue.

Location data is gathered by apps on smartphones and other mobile devices when they are given permission to do so by users. Permission-based location data gathering was implemented on Apple’s iOS in April 2021 and on Android devices in June 2022. Prior to these dates, app gathering of location data could be stopped, but users would need to either turn off location services entirely or for each app individually.

Apps have many reasons for needing to know a user’s location, such as how to provide directions to a retail location or serving up local weather conditions. However, when users enable location services for apps, either while using the app or as it is running in the background, they are not aware that this information is being bought and sold by powerful “big data” companies.

The ACLU revelations show that this information is being purchased from the data firms by the institutions of the national security state for the purposes of developing its police operations in violation of basic constitutional rights.

As reported in February 2020, the Wall Street Journal revealed at that time that the DHS under the Trump administration began purchasing phone location data from Venntel in 2017. It has taken more than two years since that time for Congress to launch an investigation into these practices, and the ACLU revelations are part of this legislative initiative. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “Digital Dragnets: Examining the Government's Access to Your Personal Data.” In April 2021, Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat-Oregon) introduced the “Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act” which states that government agencies cannot purchase the location data of Americans without a warrant.

The use of location data by police agencies is the tip of the iceberg of mass electronic surveillance of the public that has been ongoing and intensifying, beginning with the undemocratic provisions spelled out in the USA Patriot Act passed in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

Even after former NSA and CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed details of the sophisticated techniques being used by the intelligence state to monitor the locations, activities and communications of everyone on the planet, all the assurances by Democrats and Republicans that these programs have been halted have turned out to be lies. The ongoing assault on privacy rights by state agencies, against both citizens and non-citizens alike, is a necessary part of the drive by US imperialism for war abroad and the destruction of democratic rights at home.

European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede

Samuel Tissot

The heat wave devastating southern and western Europe gradually began to recede yesterday, as violent storms brought cooler weather across parts of France and Britain. The heat wave continued in southern Europe, with temperatures close to 40°C across much of southern Spain and Italy, and wildfires are still burning across the region.

Already, the horrific impact of European heat waves caused by global warming is apparent. Health officials confirmed over 1,700 deaths in Spain and Portugal alone, as workers labor in sweltering heat and large numbers of the elderly live without air conditioning. While Spain has lost 15,000 hectares of forest to fire in the last week, Europe’s largest forest fires have been in France’s Gironde, where over 20,000 hectares of forest has been destroyed so far and 40,000 people evacuated.

While the worst of this heat wave may have passed, much of Europe remains in drought conditions. Cities and towns in Italy’s Po Valley region are rationing water. River levels are so low in Southern Germany that river-based transport has been suspended. With several weeks of summer to come, more extreme heat waves, continued drought and larger wildfires are highly likely.

Yet already, top officials across Western Europe are signaling that no substantial action will be taken to halt emissions that are fueling global warming, or build the necessary infrastructure to deal with growing droughts, rising ocean levels, and intensifying wildfires.

In Britain, the Tory government, which has cut 11,500 firefighters since 2010, did not even make a pretense of action in response to the heat wave. Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab blithely told Britons to “enjoy the heat” on Sunday. Yesterday, cabinet minister Kit Malthouse declared: “Britain may be unaccustomed to such high temperatures but the UK, along with our European neighbors, must learn to live with extreme events.”

These comments mimic European governments’ insistence that the population must “learn to live with COVID-19,” which has become a euphemism for mass death and infection without any measures to prevent contagion.

This came after London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II on Tuesday, as fires spread around the British capital on the country’s hottest day on record. London mayor Sadiq Khan told Sky News: “It was the busiest day for the fire service in London since the second world war. They received more than 2,600 calls— more than a dozen simultaneous fires requiring 30 engines, a couple requiring 15, and some requiring 12.”

While other European governments’ statements were less provocatively worded, all of them laid out the same policy of inaction and indifference.

Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who rules in coalition with the pseudo-left Podemos party, tried yesterday to adopt a pose of concern. He announced that over 500 Spaniards had died from the heat, though Spain’s Carlos III Institute had confirmed 678 heat-related deaths the day before. Sanchez concluded by asking “citizens to exercise extreme caution” and to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that “climate emergency is a reality.”

On Wednesday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to La Teste-de-Buch in Gironde to meet with firefighters who have been fighting to contain blazes in the region since July 12. He remarked, “We are at the beginning of the season… We know that it will take several weeks to completely stabilize the situation.'

Trying to put the best face on the situation and look forward to the future, Macron added: “There is the day after. After [the fire is extinguished] we will have to replant and rebuild … We are going to launch a major national project to replant this forest and prevent the risks of today and tomorrow.”

These vague remarks, void of any concrete proposals beyond replanting trees, signal that there will be no real change to his government’s approach to global warming and extreme weather. Indeed, in 2019 French fire-fighters threatened to go on strike against low staffing levels and poor equipment. Though France has among the larger fleets of water-dropping planes in Europe, it is too small, concentrated around the city of Nîmes, and arrived too late to prevent the blazes in Gironde from escalating beyond a size the planes could put out.

The decisive question in addressing climate change and its impact is the mobilization of the working class and youth in a political struggle, taking as its point of departure that fighting climate change requires fighting the capitalist system. It is apparent that Europe’s capitalist governments have no plans to make the vast investments in research and infrastructure that are necessary to protect the population from deaths in future heat waves and wildfires, or halt greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming.

Despite differences in presentation, Macron, Sanchez and the Tories follow the same fundamental policy toward global warming and resulting extreme weather events. While they hand out trillions of euros to the banks and corporations and pour hundreds of billions into NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, no resources are left to take meaningful action on climate change. It is impossible, as Europe descends into war, for capitalist governments to internationally coordinate such action. As a result, nothing is done.

This has had disastrous consequences. Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius. The 2015 Paris Accords, hailed by world governments as the solution to global warming and its effects, seeks to limit this rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Even if one were to suppose that capitalist governments were to stay within this limit, the consequences of just half the target level are already proving to be deadly.

The last five years have already seen unprecedented wildfires in Australia, Portugal, Greece, Russia and the US, wiping whole towns off the map. In the last year, flash floods, another consequence of global warming, have killed thousands in Australia, India, Bangladesh, Germany, the US and Turkey.

Despite scores of deadly wildfire events throughout the Mediterranean in recent years, including 66 deaths in Portugal in 2017 and 90 deaths in Algeria last year, neither the EU nor national governments made any major changes to prepare for wildfires like the current ones.

In Greece, which experienced its worst wildfire season on record last year, evacuations are continuing on Mount Penteli just north-east of Athens. 80 kilometer per hour winds are driving a rapid expansion of the wildfire burning in that area. The localities of Drafi, Anthousa, Dioni and Dasamari have all been evacuated, including a hospital. Emergency firefighters have been called in from Romania to assist in the battle against the blaze.

Kremlin prepares for mass repression

Andrea Peters

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed legislation last Thursday that dramatically increases the repressive power of the state. The law allows the government to label virtually any organization or individual a “foreign agent” on the grounds that they receive support from, or are even just influenced by, outside forces deemed hostile to Moscow.

The law “On control over the activities of people under foreign influence,” which will take effect on December 1, states that any organization, whether constituted as a legal entity or not, as well as any person, whether a Russian citizen or not, may be considered a “foreign agent” if they receive financing, property, organizational-methodological support, scientific or technical advice or “other assistance” from any foreign state, foreign organization, foreign “structure,” foreign person, or “legal Russian entity or citizen” who are themselves viewed as being aided from the outside.

The “foreign agent” label applies when these people or entities are engaged in “political activity in Russia,” the “purposeful collection of information in the areas of military, military-technical activities of the Russian Federation” or “the dissemination of messages and materials to an unlimited audience.”

The extremely broad definitions mean that anyone and any organization which the Russian state decides to target can fall victim to the “foreign agent” law. Whether it be a young person who posts an article published by the Associated Press on her social media, a worker who issues a public call for a demonstration in solidarity with the oppressed people of Sri Lanka, or a teacher who speaks with students about the writings of German revolutionary Karl Marx, all can be accused. Were it not for the exceptions granted to religious organizations, political parties, employer and industry associations, chambers of commerce, the institutions of the Russian state, Russian state companies and the people under the direction of the latter two, Vladimir Putin himself might be a “foreign agent.”

“Foreign agents” must identify themselves as such to the state and label any public materials they release as those of a “foreign agent.” They cannot work at any level of federal, municipal or local government or invest in any “strategic enterprise.” They cannot work in the educational system, have any connection to anything having to do with the education of minors or be involved in the production of information for minors. They cannot organize public events, serve on election commissions or make donations to elections or political parties. They cannot receive any form of state financial support. They cannot be involved in the “procurement of goods, work and services” to meet state and municipal needs—in other words, they are cut out of all government contracts. They cannot be involved with infrastructure tied to information systems and security. They cannot participate in state environmental reviews.

Russian workers—teachers, doctors, civil servants, postal employees, garbage collectors, municipal workers and on and on—will find themselves immediately out of work and worse, if they are deemed “foreign agents.” Violations of the law can result in administrative or criminal charges or “other liability,” which will be imposed “in accordance with the established procedure,” says the website of the State Duma, Russia’s parliament. What fate awaits people is unclear.

The Ministry of Justice, whose head is appointed by the Russian president, will maintain and publish a list of “foreign agents” and “individuals affiliated with them”—in short, the list will metastasize. It will become a blacklist.

Removal of the “foreign agent” designation is only possible at the whim of the state. For non-profit organizations to be relieved of the label, they must prove they are no longer receiving money from foreign sources, halt all political activity or both. There is no clear definition for either of these requirements. For individuals to get off, they must fill out on an application and “attach documents confirming the termination of the circumstances that served as the basis for inclusion in the register.”  In short, they must denounce themselves or provide proof that they have stopped doing something that they were never doing in the first place.

In a country in which millions were rounded up, imprisoned, and killed during the Stalinist Great Terror, this law has vast and sinister implications. During the 1930s, the charge of “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity,” a death sentence for tens of thousands, was connected to accusations of treasonous collaboration with foreign states. The violent and reactionary nationalism of the Soviet bureaucracy is finding modern expression in today’s oligarchy, which emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

The current “foreign agents” law was preceded in March by legislation outlawing anti-war demonstrations and statements, with nearly 200 people, according to official records, now having been charged with various offenses such as the spreading of “false facts” about the war or negative comments about the Russian military. Penalties include fines and prison time, with the most severe punishments resulting in many years behind bars. An artist in Yekaterinburg was sentenced on Tuesday to two weeks confinement in a psychiatric ward for posting anti-war stickers around the city. Numerous media outlets have been shut down and access to Twitter, Facebook and other global social media platforms ended.

The parliament is preparing a new labor code that will give the state the power to “establish the legal conditions of labor relations in individual organizations,” including determining “the conditions of employment at work outside of established hours, at night, on weekends and holidays, and the provision of paid annual leave.” In short, the Russian working class is meant to labor at the order of the state under the terms that it establishes. Those who dare to strike will be confronted with the full repressive powers of the state.

Sri Lankan parliament elects rightwing, pro-US Ranil Wickremesinghe as president

Saman Gunadasa

Yesterday, the Sri Lankan parliament installed Ranil Wickremesinghe as the country’s president by a vote of 134 out of the 223 cast by parliamentarians. The other candidates, Dallas Alahapperuma, an MP from the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), received 82 and 3 votes respectively.

Ranil Wickremesinghe [Source: United National Party Facebook]

Wickremesinghe assumes the executive presidency with its sweeping powers amid an unprecedented economic, political and social crisis. He will serve out the remaining two years of the term of Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who fled the country and then resigned following massive anti-government protests on July 9.

It is a ruling class under siege. Working people not only had no say in selecting the president but were completely excluded. The vote was held behind closed doors in parliament that had been turned into a fortress surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, police and barricades.

Wickremesinghe has no popular base and is widely despised among the masses. He is the only parliamentary representative of the rump United National Party (UNP) that was all but obliterated in the 2020 election. Nevertheless, he was installed as prime minister in May when Mahinda Rajapakse was forced to step down, as acting president when Gotabhaya Rajapakse fled, and now president. Already protests and protest sites in Colombo and regional cities are demanding he resign.

Wickremesinghe has been selected to ruthlessly impose the austerity dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to strangle the popular uprising that has erupted over the past three months. He made his pitch for the presidency, not to the mass of working people with promises to alleviate their suffering, but to the Sri Lankan ruling class, international finance capital and US imperialism as the candidate able to reestablish capitalist “order.”  

Wickremesinghe’s first acts as acting president were to declare a state of emergency, impose a curfew and give a free hand to the military and police to suppress protesters, who he denounced as “fascists.” After being installed as president yesterday, he, in effect, declared war on the popular uprising, saying: “If you try to topple the Government, occupy the President’s office and the Prime Minister’s office, that is not democracy, it is against the law.” To underscore the message, he then went to personally thank the police and military personnel guarding the parliament building.

Wickremesinghe also made a plea to all the establishment parties to close ranks around him against the working class and rural masses. “Sri Lanka is in a very difficult situation… There are big challenges ahead,” he declared, making a special appeal to Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), and former presidents Mahinda Rajapakse and Maithripala Sirisena to work together with him. The opposition parties have been pressing for the formation of an all-party interim government to provide a threadbare charade of “democracy” while the bourgeoisie prepares a ruthless crackdown.

Premadasa, who had backed Alahapperuma for the presidency, immediately indicated his willingness to work together, saying “the opposition will give our utmost support… to put the economy on track and save this country.” Alahapperuma added his voice, cynically declaring: “My effort was to support consensus-based policy-making to provide solutions to a deeply suffering population.”

The entire anti-democratic parliamentary cabal is committed to implementing IMF austerity and police-state repression against the masses. Wickremesinghe was selected for the presidency because of his decades-long political record as an IMF enforcer, a stooge of US imperialism and his support for bloody state violence against workers and the rural poor.

Wickremesinghe was first elected to the parliament in 1977. As the nephew of the right-wing President J.R. Jayawardene, he was quickly handed the portfolios of youth affairs and employment in the UNP government as it rewrote the constitution to establish an executive president with extensive autocratic powers and implemented sweeping open market restructuring that devastated the living conditions of working people.

When mass opposition erupted, he was part of the Jayawardene cabinet that sacked over 100,000 striking public sector workers in 1980. As the education minister he brought down the notorious White Paper on Education in 1981, which was the blueprint for slashing the government spending on public education.

To drive a wedge into the continuing opposition to the impact of its pro-market policies, the UNP resorted to foul anti-Tamil propaganda and provocations that culminated in the savage anti-Tamil pogroms in July 1983. Hundreds were killed by UNP-organised thugs, businesses and homes were burnt to the ground and forced tens of thousands of Tamils to flee. The pogrom marked the start of the reactionary communal war prosecuted by the UNP and subsequent Colombo governments against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and laid waste to large areas of the island.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the UNP government under President Ranasinghe Premadasa, the father of the current opposition leader, unleashed a wave of unrestrained violence directed at crushing rising discontent among unemployed rural youth in the south of the island. The armed forces and their associated death squads indiscriminately killed at least 60,000 youth.

At the time, Wickremesinghe, who now postures as the defender of democracy and rule of law, was publicly accused of overseeing the torture and murder of youth in the infamous Batalanda torture chambers. It is precisely because he has been so closely associated in carrying out the dirty work for the ruling class that he has been chosen to defend capitalist rule through every means including another bloody crackdown.

Like J.R. Jayawardene, Wickremesinghe is also a long-time lackey of US imperialism. He played a key role in the regime-change operation orchestrated by the US in 2015, to oust Mahinda Rajapakse as president and install Maithripala Sirisena. Washington was hostile to Mahinda Rajapakse, not because of his responsibility for the war crimes carried out by the military in crushing the LTTE by 2009, but because of his close ties to Beijing. As prime minister under Sirisena, Wickremesinghe was instrumental in dramatically realigning foreign policy towards the US and integrating Sri Lanka into US war planning against China.

Wickremesinghe is already broadly despised and hated. Whatever the exact composition of the government he installs, its agenda is clear: to defend the interests of the wealthy corporate elite and international financiers at the expense of the working class and rural masses. The ruling class has no money to offer any concessions of any substance. The next government will only heap more hardship and suffering on top of the chronic shortages and skyrocketing prices of essentials that have already created widespread misery.

European Central Bank to make crucial interest rate decision

Nick Beams

The eyes of the financial world today are firmly fixed on Europe as the European Central Bank meets to decide how much to lift its base interest rate.

At the same time, there have been concerns over whether Russia would fully restore gas supplies to Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy following the closure of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline for maintenance. At this point it seems likely the gas flow will resume but there are no guarantees for the future.

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank [Credit: Bernd Hartung/European Central Bank]

ECB president Christine Lagarde has said the central bank will lift its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points (25 basis points) in a gradual move back to the “normalisation” of monetary policy following years of negative rates.

The ECB then pumped hundreds of billions of euros into the financial system.

The crisis was sparked by so-called fragmentation as the interest rates on the government bonds in the more indebted southern countries diverged from those issued by the stronger economies in the north, threatening the stability of banks and the governments that stood behind them.

Fragmentation is again a threat, and the ECB is set to announce a new scheme to buy bonds which it dubs a transmission protection mechanism at today’s meeting. The central bank is grappling with a situation that goes well beyond the problems it faced a decade ago, due to the escalation of inflation, which now hit 8.6 percent across the euro zone.

But this overall figure hides the worsening inflationary situation in a number of countries in the 19-member bloc.

In nine of the member countries inflation has already hit double digit levels and in the Baltic countries it is almost 20 percent. The inflation situation has been worsened by the fall of the euro against the dollar—at one stage last week it went below parity – which is pushing up the price of imports.

Worsening inflation numbers have prompted calls that the interest rate hike must be 50 basis points and that the 25-basis point rise foreshadowed by the ECB at the last meeting of its governing council, with the possibility of a further increase in September depending on inflation numbers, is too slow and too late.

A “more hawkish” member was cited anonymously by the Financial Times (FT) as saying: “It is like antibiotics, it doesn’t help if you take them in September if you are ill now. Interest rates are our medicine and the timing and size of the dosage are of utmost importance.”

The so-called “fragmentation” problem is an expression of the fundamental contradiction that lies at the very centre of the euro zone—that is, the integrated character of production and finance across the continent, and the division of Europe into nation states.

The ECB sets financial conditions across the euro zone but each of the 19-members has its own government and fiscal policy.

On top of this there is growing political instability. The government of Italian president Mario Draghi basically collapsed earlier this month when the Five Star Movement, anxious to hold on to its electoral standing, withdrew its support saying not enough was being done to offer protection for the population against rising inflation.

If a new government cannot be cobbled together, and if elections are called, this will raise concerns in financial markets about the capacity of Italy to finance its government debt, now running at more than 150 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

There is also political instability in France following the failure of President Macron to win a parliamentary majority at the elections last month.

And hanging over the ECB decision is the uncertainty over gas supplies that could be cut or significantly reduced at some point in retaliation for the sanctions imposed by the European powers as part of the NATO proxy war in the Ukraine.

In remarks to the FT, Petr Cingr, the chief executive of Germany’s largest ammonia producing company, and a key supplier of fertilisers and exhaust fluids for diesel engines, warned of the devastating consequences of the ending of Russian gas supplies.

“We have to stop [production] immediately,” he said, “from 100 to zero.”

If gas cannot be stored for the winter months, Germany will experience a major economic contraction.

According to UBS analysts, no gas for the winter will result in a “deep recession” with GDP contracting 6 percent by the end of next year. Problems are already appearing. German economic growth has always been export dependent but the latest data have revealed that its balance of trade has turned negative.

It has been estimated that the rising price of food and energy will deliver a negative blow of €400 billion to the euro zone’s balance of trade this year.

Germany’s Bundesbank has warned that the effects on global supply chains of any Russian cut-off would “increase the original shock effect” by two and a half times.

ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s largest steelmaker, has said that without natural gas to run its furnaces “shutdowns and technical damage to our facilities cannot be ruled out.”

Other major companies, including BASF the world’s largest chemical company, have warned of similar effects.

Continuity of supply is not the only issue. The question of price also looms large. Natural gas prices have increased eight-fold in the past 18 months rising from €20 per megawatt hour to €160, with the price doubling over the past month. Many companies have said they cannot operate with prices at this level.

The deputy head of the Brussels-based Bruegel economic think tank, Maria Demertzis, told the FT, there was an “almost impossible situation.”

“The risk ahead of us is that because of the energy crisis, the euro area could end up in recession, while at the same time the ECB will have to keep raising rates if inflation does not come down.”

Albert Ludwigs, an economics professor at the University of Freiburg and an adviser to the German finance minister, has said policymakers face a “nightmare scenario.”

“It is more difficult than in the 2012 debt crisis, when we have a clear choice between monetary policy or fiscal policy solutions, but now both are much less clear.”

US plans to send NATO-made jets to Ukraine to fight against Russia

Andre Damon

In a massive expansion of US involvement in the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, the Pentagon is actively preparing to send new, modern military aircraft made in NATO countries to fight against Russian forces in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, told the newspaper that “discussions are ongoing” to send the fighters to Ukraine. Speaking at the Aspen Security Conference, Brown was asked, “[i]s it possible the U.S could sell or provide Ukraine more U.S fighter platforms?”

To this, Brown replied, “[i]t'll be something non-Russian, I could probably tell you that.”

By “non-Russian,” Brown was referring to an earlier proposal by Poland to send Soviet-made MiG fighters to Ukraine which was rejected by the Biden administration on the grounds that it was too likely to escalate the war.

At the time, Biden declared that the move could start “World War III,” saying, “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews — just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what y’all say, that’s called World War III.”

Brown’s proposal is, however, a far more provocative move than the earlier plan to send aging and semi-obsolete Soviet aircraft.

His comments came the same day that the Pentagon announced that it would send four more HIMARS long-range missile systems to Ukraine, bringing the total deployed in the country to 16.

“(We) will keep finding innovative ways to sustain our long-term support for the brave men and women of the Ukrainian armed forces, and we will tailor our assistance to ensure that Ukraine has the technology, the ammunition and the sheer firepower to defend itself,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday.

“Ukrainian forces are now using long-range rocket systems to great effect, including HIMARS provided by the United States and other systems from our allies and partners,” Austin said, adding, “[t]he international community has also worked hard to provide Ukraine with better coastal defense capabilities.”

Ukrainian and US officials are more and more openly discussing the details of a plan to amass an enormous stockpile of high-end US weapons systems, allowing Kiev to stage a major counteroffensive in the fall with the aim of sinking the Russian fleet and “retaking” the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, which Russia annexed in the wake of the 2014 coup in Kiev.

During a visit to the UK, Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Volodymyr Havrylov pledged to use US-supplied heavy weapons to mount an offensive against Crimea. “We are receiving anti-ship capabilities, and sooner or later we will target the fleet. It is inevitable because we have to guarantee the security of our people,” he said. “Russia will have to leave Crimea if they wish to exist as a country,”  Havrylov insisted.

On Saturday, Ukrainian military intelligence official Vadym Skibitsky said that Ukraine would use HIMARS missile systems to attack targets in Crimea, which he said “had to be destroyed for the safety of our citizens, our facilities and our Ukraine.”

The increasingly open talk of a Ukrainian offensive to retake Crimea has prompted extremely sharp warnings from Russian officials.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Washington was seeking to provoke a “real war” with Russia, stating, “Our American counterparts … really want to turn this war into a real war and start a confrontation between Russia and European states.”

He warned, “[Ukraine is] not just [being] pumped with weapons. They are forced to use these weapons in an increasingly risky way.”

On Sunday, the former Russian president and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that an attack on Crimea would pose a “systemic threat to Russia,” prompting a “Judgment Day” response from Russia.

In the event of a Ukrainian effort to retake Crimea, “Judgment Day will come very fast and hard,” Medvedev said.

Geopolitical commentators have warned that Russia views the defense of Crimea as a vital state interest and would use nuclear weapons to protect the territory.

Inviting US arms manufacturers to take part in this joint effort by the United States and the Kiev regime, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov openly declared Wednesday that the country should be viewed as a “testing ground” for US defense contractors.

“We are inviting arms manufacturers to test new products here,” he said.

The enormously dangerous escalation of the war comes as the energy crisis triggered by the conflict is having increasingly devastating consequences for the population of Europe and the whole world. “We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday, calling this “a likely scenario.”

On Wednesday, the US rolled out a plan for its member states to begin rationing energy supplies, in preparation for a full shutoff of gas supplies over the winter. That same day, the IMF warned that a total shutdown of Russian gas supplies could shrink the economies of some EU member states by 6 percent and send them into recession.

The revelation that the US plans to send NATO-made aircraft to Ukraine comes just two weeks after New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) released a 90-second public service announcement (PSA), giving instructions to city residents on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack on America’s largest city.

The video begins with the narration, “So there has been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.”

The extraordinary recklessness with which the United States is escalating its war with Russia raises the very real danger of just such a disastrous outcome.