US to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine: The “most escalatory action to date”

Andre Damon

This week, nearly all of the major newspapers and cable news networks in the United States reported that the Biden administration is preparing to imminently send Ukraine at least one battery of Patriot surface-to-air missiles.

The Patriot missile system, CNN reported, is “expected to ship quickly in the coming days.”

With each battery costing over $1 billion and requiring a crew of 90 people to operate, the Patriot would be the most expensive and complex weapons system transferred to Ukraine.

US army soldiers stand next to a Patriot missile launcher in Lithuania in 2017. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

 “This is a major step up in US commitment,” Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council told Syracuse University News. He added, “The Patriots will provoke a Russian reaction,” calling it, “the US’s most escalatory action to date.”

Commenting on the significance of the announcement, Keir Giles, of the pro-war think-tank Chatham House, told NBC, “We’ve seen an incremental process of the US supplying more essential capabilities to Ukraine as it becomes clear that Russia’s ‘red lines’ are no more than bluff and bluster.”

True to US President Joe Biden’s declaration in December 2021 that “I don’t accept anybody’s red lines,” the US has systematically identified and carried out actions that the Kremlin previously implied would provoke military retaliation against NATO.

In April, the US assisted Ukraine in sinking the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. This was followed shortly by the announcement that the American military was actively assisting Ukraine in targeting Russian generals for assassination and the admission that the Pentagon has deployed military personnel to Ukraine.

The United States has in just a matter of months provided Ukraine with many of its most advanced weapons systems, including the M777 towed Howitzer, the HIMARS long-range missile system, the M109 Paladin self-propelled armored gun, the HARM anti-radar missile, and the NASAMS air defense system.

The expected announcement that the US will now deploy the Patriot missile system to Ukraine would continue this pattern of escalation, playing a deadly game of chicken with nuclear-armed Russia.

In November, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that if “NATO supplies Kyiv fanatics with Patriot complexes along with NATO personnel, they will immediately become a legitimate target for our armed forces.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated Medvedev’s remarks on Wednesday, saying the missile system would “definitely” be a target for Russia.

Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Russian Federation Council, said Wednesday, “The US is provoking us into direct conflict with NATO. Especially if they supply the Patriot air defense system.”

He added that the US is “really putting the world on the brink of a third world war.”

The justification for the decision to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine is Russia’s ongoing missile strikes against Ukrainian power infrastructure, which is having devastating consequences for broad sections of the Ukrainian population.

But in reporting the expected decision, Voice of America quoted Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, who questioned why the US was seeking to shoot down Russian drones, each costing $5,000-$20,000, with missiles costing millions of dollars each.

“Patriot is an extremely complex and expensive system to operate. Each round of Patriot is between $3 [million] and $4 million apiece. That is a very expensive system. It would use up a lot of the money being set aside for them, I think, with a very limited return on investment.” He concluded, 'For me, Patriot is not a great answer” to defending Ukrainian cities from drone attacks.

Of course, the Patriot system is not a “great answer” for the problem American imperialism claims to be interested in.

The real aim, however, is not to defend Ukraine’s population centers but to allow Ukraine to obtain air superiority in support of offensive operations. The Patriot, the American military’s most advanced and long-range surface-to-air missile, is capable of shooting down aircraft up to 100 miles away, including those potentially operating over Crimea or the Russian mainland.

The Washington Post commented that the move represented a major shift from Biden’s earlier position that the US would not send “advanced” weapons to Ukraine. It wrote that the administration “has steadfastly resisted sending certain advanced weaponry—including long-range missiles, fighter jets and battle tanks—on the grounds that, in Russia’s eyes, doing so would draw the United States even deeper into the war, and the maintenance and operation of such systems is complex.”

 “The White House National Security Council,” NBC reported, citing an unnamed official, has “recommended reversing course.”

US pundits, meanwhile, are braying for more escalation. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Max Boot demanded that the US “give Ukraine the ability to strike every inch of Russian occupied territory” – which according to Boot includes Crimea.

Boot wrote, “Last week, Ukraine took the war to Russia in a small but symbolic way. Ukraine reportedly used jet drones to strike two air bases deep in Russia—one of them only 100 miles from Moscow—that are used to operate the long-range bombers that launch missiles against Ukrainian cities.”

Boot noted that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken “did not condemn the attacks.” From this he concluded, “The US position seems to be that if US weapons systems aren’t employed, and the attacks are focused strictly on military targets, it doesn’t object to the attacks.”

He concluded, “Gaining access to longer-range ‘fires’ will enable the Ukrainians to more effectively strike such military targets across the width and breadth of Russian-occupied territory. That includes Crimea.”

Commenting in Foreign Affairs, retired Australian Army major general Mick Ryan noted, “If Ukraine can continue to win on the battlefield, Kyiv might try to isolate and possibly even seize all of the Donbas and Crimea. Retaking both areas is a stated goal of the Ukrainian government. But there is a long way to go before Ukraine reaches the point where it can invade Crimea.”

The US is massively escalating its involvement in a war that has produced a disaster for the people of Ukraine. The country’s economy has been shattered, and the Russian military’s new strategy of degrading power and water infrastructure is having a devastating impact during the cold Ukrainian winter.

The White House is calculating that putting ever greater military and economic pressure on Russia will intensify divisions within the Russian oligarchy, with the hopes that this will create the possibility of regime change through a palace coup against the Putin government.

However, there are significant forces within the Russian political establishment that are demanding a more aggressive response to the US provocative actions.

Violence against refugees at EU external borders increases dramatically

Martin Kreickenbaum

Serious human rights violations continue at the EU’s external borders. Illegal pushbacks, deprivation of liberty, beatings and sexual assaults are now part of the standard repertoire used by the European Union to repel refugees.

On October 3, this year, 19-year-old Abdullah El Rustum Mohammed almost paid with his life for this criminal policy. On that day, the refugee from the civil war in Syria tried to cross the Bulgarian border from Turkey in a larger group of refugees to seek protection in the EU.

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However, the group was intercepted by Bulgarian police and taken back to the border fence. A riot then ensued there; some refugees swore at the police officers, and some stones were thrown. Then a Bulgarian military truck appeared with more border police, who first fired warning shots and then shot directly at the refugees. Abdullah was hit in the chest and collapsed.

Other refugees provided first aid and managed to get Abdullah to a Turkish hospital, where he was immediately operated on. The projectile missed his heart by a hair’s breadth. “If the bullet had destroyed the vein, I wouldn’t be alive now. It is a miracle. I never thought I would be shot at. In a country that calls itself European,” Abdullah told broadcaster ARD a few weeks later.

A refugee had filmed the incident with his mobile phone. The video has been forensically analysed by the Netherlands-based research platform Lighthouse Reports and presented to an audio expert, who confirmed Abdullah’s statements. According to these, the shot must have come from the direction the camera was pointing—from the Bulgarian side of the border.

The Bulgarian Interior Ministry has confirmed an incident at the border but denied border police had fired at refugees. Speaking to journalists, Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev claimed, “There are no incidents of violence against refugees. There is no evidence that a Bulgarian border police officer fired a shot, and there have been no acts that violate human rights.”

However, in early November, Demerdzhiev had indirectly ordered border police to shoot at refugees after a Bulgarian border police officer was shot dead by two suspected drug smugglers. When asked by journalists whether the border police would dare to shoot, Demerdzhiev replied, according to the Euractiv website, “I will personally take responsibility, and they will dare.”

He reiterated this stance to ARD: “Migrants who try to enter our territory illegally are becoming more and more aggressive. In some cases, they use stones, knives and other weapons. A Bulgarian police officer was killed. Those who expect our police not to react to these acts and not to protect the lives and health of Bulgarian border police officers are mistaken.”

Indeed, Bulgaria’s border police are known for their brutality against refugees. In May this year, Human Rights Watch documented the illegal ejection of refugees through violence and the use of police dogs at the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

Last week, WDR television magazine Monitor showed footage of crates in which asylum seekers are locked up by the Bulgarian border police. Together with European media partners and the research platform Lighthouse Reports, the journalists investigated witness statements and found a barracks where refugees were locked up in rooms with bars. They were led there by refugees from Afghanistan and Syria, who told of their horrific experiences with the European border guards.

“The Bulgarian police set dogs on us, which bite us. And they beat us, they are very brutal. They beat us with wooden sticks before sending us back to Turkey.” They were also imprisoned, he said. “We were kept in a terrible barred shed. It stinks there like a dirty toilet. It’s like a cage, everything there is dirty.”

This cage is located off the beaten track at a Bulgarian border police station. The refugees are sometimes locked up here for days, without a toilet, without food and with only a little water to drink. Then they are dragged back to Turkey without a chance to apply for asylum.

Legal scholar Constantin Hruschka of the Max Planck Institute in Munich told Monitor, “One thing is the inhuman and degrading treatment. And the second is the unlawful deprivation of liberty. Because people simply cannot be detained without trial and deprived of their liberty. Especially if the deprivation of liberty is then used to return them unlawfully across the border.”

Common practice on the Balkan route

Setting up lawless spaces to illegally imprison refugees, humiliate and abuse them is not solely a specialty of the Bulgarian border police, but a widespread practice across the Balkan route, which is covered up and encouraged by the European Union. Bulgarian border police are massively supported by Frontex, the European border management agency, whose officers are also on duty at the police station where Monitor discovered the cage with refugees.

In Hungary, border police maintain containers in which they cram refugees and squirt them with pepper spray before driving them back across the border to Serbia in illegal pushback operations.

In Croatia, minibuses without windows serve as cells for refugees. One woman refugee told Monitor how she was held in such a minibus for hours in the intense heat: “The bus has room for eight people, but they put in 20, with children, 25 people in it. They just kept us in it for four hours. We were getting worse and worse. Then you start throwing up in the bus. And then they start driving, very fast. When they brake, you fall over each other, you vomit on each other.”

Such a procedure is torture and a blatant violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Croatian border police were supported by Frontex from 2016 to 2021 and equipped and trained by German officials. Research by the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a coalition of refugee aid organisations, together with ProAsyl, found that 129 German federal police officers with a Frontex mandate and 24 German liaison officers were stationed in Croatia over five years. The German police officers trained Croatian border police in 87 seminars, and Germany also supplied vehicles, thermal imaging cameras and surveillance technology worth almost €3 million to the Croatian border guards.

In particular, support was provided to Croatian intervention police, who are tasked with picking up refugees behind the border and driving them illegally back across the border. These units can be seen on video footage systematically beating refugees with a special multifunctional baton, the tonfa.

The massive expansion of violence against refugees at the EU’s external borders is also shown in the Black Book of Pushbacks, published by the Border Violence Monitoring Network. An update contains 733 new interviews with refugees who refer to pushback operations that deprived more than 16,000 refugees of their right to seek protection in Europe this year and last year.

One example is the experience of a 36-year-old Syrian who, together with his eight-year-old son, was picked up by the Greek border police from a small group of refugees near the border river Evros.

All of them had to hand over their mobile phones and were forced to strip down to their underwear. Those who refused were beaten. Together with refugees from Morocco, Afghanistan and Somalia, they were held for hours in a dark room with a filthy toilet.

The refugees were then beaten up, loaded into a minibus, and taken back to Turkey in the dark across the Evros River. During the whole time they received neither food nor water, there was no medical care or interpreters. And at no time did the refugees have the chance to present their right to asylum under due process.

Hope Barker, co-editor of the Black Book, says of the massive expansion of violence and human rights abuses at the EU’s external borders, “In the beginning, it was just isolated, sporadic events, but now it’s a widespread, systematic crackdown on refugees.”

EU continues pushbacks

Despite the abundance of evidence of scandalous crimes at the EU’s external borders, the EU Commission and EU member state governments persistently deny any human rights abuses. For example, in July of this year, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared that it was “the right of every EU member state to protect its borders while respecting fundamental rights.”

Even when OLAF, the EU’s anti-corruption agency, proved in a report that the Frontex EU border agency had systematically supported and covered up illegal pushback operations in the Greek Aegean and the central Mediterranean, Frontex interim director Aija Kalnaja claimed her agency had complied with all applicable rules: “We would like to reiterate that Frontex operations in the Aegean were carried out in accordance with the applicable legal framework.”

When the brutal pushback operations by Croatian police in 2021 could no longer be denied, EU Domestic Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson declared that “violence at our borders” was “unacceptable, especially when it is structural and organised.” In fact, illegal practices at the EU’s external borders continue to be tolerated and encouraged.

Human rights organisation Bulgarian Helsinki Committee counted at least 2,513 pushback operations at the country’s border with Turkey in 2021. Greek human rights organisation Aegean Boat Report has recorded a total of 1,860 pushbacks of refugee boats in the Aegean alone since March 2020. As a result, 49,237 men, women and children have been denied the right to seek protection in Europe.

More than 2,100 refugees have already lost their lives at the borders of the European Union this year. At least 1,982 people have drowned in the Mediterranean, 367 of them in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece. One hundred thirty-six refugees died at European land borders, most of them at the Turkish-Greek and Turkish-Bulgarian land borders and in the Western Balkans.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser nevertheless called on the EU Commission in October this year to “stem the rising illegal migration via the Balkan route.”

In doing so, Faeser tries to play off refugees from Ukraine against other refugees, whom she defames as “illegal migrants,” even though they have fled wars instigated by the imperialist powers in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and other countries. Faeser said, “We have a joint responsibility to stop illegal entries so that we can continue to help people who urgently need our support.”

The Conference of EU and Western Balkan states, which met in Albania on December 6, decided to tighten border security with massive support from Frontex. For refugees, this can only result in more violence, internment, humiliation and illegal returns.

Thousands of garment workers laid off in the Philippines

Isagani Sakay

In the largest retrenchment this year in the Philippines, 4,485 workers at the Mactan Export Processing Zone and the Cebu Light Industrial Park, both located in the central Philippine city of Lapu-Lapu, were laid off in October.

Five companies, Mactan Apparels Inc, Metro Wear Inc., Globalwear Manufacturing Inc., Feeder Apparel Corporation, and Vertex One Apparel Phils, all owned by the Taiwan-based Sports Center International, issued joint notices of retrenchment on September 26, 2022.

Aerial view of Mactan Island and Lapu-Lapu City, with Cebu in the background, 22 November 2008 [Photo by Lsj / CC BY-SA 3.0]

The companies, which employed a total of 18,000 workers before the mass firing, blamed the terminations on a world now “on the brink of global recession, with higher-than-expected inflation and the global financial conditions are becoming tighter…”

The announcement continued: “Likewise, the unprecedented situations that our company has been dealing with, the COVID-19 pandemic, Typhoon Odette (International name: Typhoon Rai), supply chain issues, increasing gas prices and the conflict war [sic] between Russia and Ukraine have shaken not only our financial health but as well as having unstable operations.”

The retrenchment was closely coordinated with the Philippine government. On September 4 2022, a labour department team at the work sites facilitated the doling out of separation pay and the issuance of termination notices, waivers, and quit claims to head off any legal challenges to the termination. On October 4, the social welfare department handed out meagre food packs and cash assistance, which ranged from PHP 2,000 to PHP 5,000 ($US34 to $US85), depending on the length of the laid-off worker’s employment.

In a Business World report, the garment industry’s Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines (CONWEP) warned of further layoffs as global demand continued to decline. Executive director Maritess Jocson-Agoncillo stated, “This will be a trend for some factories whose customers are starting to cut their projections, so we expect temporary closures or partial retrenchment of workforce in the next few months.”

More than 9,400 workers have already been laid off or placed on forced leave, Jocson-Agoncillo revealed, a figure that represents 3.5 percent of the 270,000 workers in the apparel, shoes, bags, and textile sections of the garment industry. She warned that layoffs could reach 8-10 percent if global demand worsens. She also complained that high costs, including labour costs, were forcing companies to consider moving to lower cost countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Workers in the international garment industry are paid poorly, and work long hours, often without overtime to meet orders and quotas. According to the latest available data from the International Labor Organization, in 2019, workers in Myanmar were paid $US139 a month, barely twice the 2019 international poverty line of $1.90 a day for a single person.

Workers in Sri Lanka were paid $161 a month, and in the Philippines garment workers were paid, on average, $218 dollars. The figure in the Philippines is barely above the official poverty threshold for a family of five. Despite the repeated complaints by garment corporations of burdensome mandated wages, only 53 percent of the total workforce were actually paid the legal minimum wage.

The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF) conducted a study in 2013 into four of the five corporations involved in the recent retrenchments—Mactan Apparels Inc, Metro Wear, Inc., Globalwear Manufacturing Inc., and Feeder Apparel Corporation. It found they adhered only to the bare minimum of labor regulations in pay and benefits and required workers to work 12 hours overtime each week to meet production quotas. The companies also openly threatened workers against taking action to fight for better pay and conditions. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of the workers were employed on a contract or casual basis.

In an interview for the research study, a production worker, employed for nearly a decade at Mactan Apparel Inc. who nevertheless earned only the minimum wage, stated, “There is no seniority status in our factory, even if you stay in the company for many years, you will only receive minimum wage. That is why we are forced to take overtime work so at least it supplements our take home pay. Otherwise, how can I survive with such meagre income, how can I pay rent for the small room where I stay, cope with my daily necessities, and send some money for my family in the province? At the end of the day, it is zero balance; there are no savings left for whatever uncertain things that may happen to me and my family.”

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, garment corporations globally conducted a massive assault on jobs and conditions. In 2020, over 1 million garment workers lost their jobs in Bangladesh and, in Vietnam, a million were laid off. In Myanmar, 20 percent of the apparel and garment factories closed and over 10,000 workers lost their jobs.

In the Philippines, a total of 40,000 garment workers were laid off by the end of 2021. In the Mactan Economic Zone alone, over 4,420 garment workers at Sports City International factories, 2,000 at the Yuenthai factory, 100 at the FCO international and 67 at Kor Landa were sacked by September 2020. In November 2020, another 300 workers at the First Glory Apparel factory, many PM/Sentro union members, lost their jobs. 

Like their class brothers and sisters internationally, the remaining garment workers were quickly herded back to the factories even as the pandemic continued to rage. Revenues in the garment industry, after dropping from $US3.99 billion to $US3.46 billion in 2020, began to increase again to $US3.66 billion in 2021 and are projected to reach $US4.58 billion this year and $US5.66 billion in 2026.

As the 2020 mass firing swept through the Mactan Economic Zone, workers at the Yuenthai factory refused to accept their termination notices. Retrenched workers at the First Glory Apparel factory voted to strike. However, instead of uniting and mobilizing workers in the zone with workers, nationally and internationally, to defend their jobs and safeguard their lives, the Stalinist-aligned labor organizations Partido Manggagawa (PM), Sentro ng mga Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa (Sentro), and the MEPZ Workers Alliance helped corral workers back to the factories. They promised to provide “legal assistance,” calling on the sacked workers to seek redress from a labor legal system that explicitly recognizes “retrenchment as a right of the management to meet clear and continuing economic threats or during periods of economic downturn to prevent losses.”

In January 2021, a PM/Sentro union called off a planned strike at First Glory Apparel by the remaining 76 union workers in the factory who had voted to take action to fight for the jobs of the 300 sacked workers. The union accepted the mediation of the local city government without winning a single concession.

The mass sackings in the Mactan Economic Zone are being replicated around the world as corporations seek to impose the burdens of the worsening global crisis of capitalism onto the backs of workers. The basic social and democratic rights of the working class cannot be defended through pro-capitalist unions and political parties, nor within the framework of the nation state.

Iran publicly hangs second anti-government protester after show trial

Jean Shaoul & Keith Jones

In a gruesome attempt to intimidate the populace, Iranian authorities executed an anti-government protester early Monday morning—the second such execution in four days—and publicly circulated photos of his corpse hanging from a construction crane.

Twenty-three-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard was hanged “in the presence of a group of Mashadi citizens,” reported the Islamic Republic judiciary’s own Mizan news agency.

A court in the northeastern city of Mashhad had convicted Rahnavard of stabbing and killing two Basij security officers and wounding four others in an incident it termed a “terrorist attack.” According to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights, Rahnavard “was sentenced to death based on coerced confessions after a grossly unfair process and a show trial.” He was hanged just 23 days after his arrest.

Majidreza Rahnavard [Photo: @AlinejadMasih/Twitter]

Four days earlier, Mohsen Shekari became the first person to be executed for his role in a three-month-long wave of protests that has been the target of ruthless state repression and punctuated by violent clashes between some protesters and security forces.

Shekari, also just 23, paid with his life for what an Iranian court said were the crimes of participating in the blocking of a Tehran street and stabbing a Basij security guard, who survived the attack and required just 13 stitches. While the authorities claimed Shekari had confessed, his relatives said he was not allowed legal representation, his trial was held in a closed court, his face showed signs of bruising and his body had not been released.

In neither case did the Islamic Republic authorities link their two victims, at least publicly, to the “outside entities,” meaning US imperialism, Israel, and the Saudi absolutist monarchy, which they accuse of fomenting the protests.

Elsewhere, five men have been sentenced to death for killing a member of the Basij in the city of Karaj west of Tehran, with 11 others, including three minors, sentenced to long jail sentences. As many as 25 people have been charged with offences that carry the death penalty. Given that Iran has already executed more than 500 people this year, their lives must be considered to be in extreme danger.

The executions have sparked popular outrage, with a Farsi hashtag for Shekari hitting four million on Friday, with many Iranians noting that the execution was a “declaration of war” on the protesters. That in turn prompted a group of scholars and senior clerics from theological seminaries in the city of Qom to condemn the executions. They criticized the speed of the trials and the disproportionate nature of the punishment and called for a halt to further executions.

The hangings underscore the degree of crisis and fear within Iran’s bourgeois clerical regime. Some voices within the Shia clergy-led political establishment have called for attempts to mollify the anti-government protesters, including by dissolving the regime’s “morality police.” But the current administration, headed by President Ebrahim Raisi; the police, which report directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei; and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appear determined to stamp out the movement through ever-escalating state violence.    

The protests—which began in the Kurdish provinces under the slogan “Women, Life,  Freedom”—have been ongoing since the police-custody death in mid-September of a young Kurdish woman, 22 year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained for wearing the hijab “improperly.” The protest movement began and continues, at least outside the predominantly Kurdish northwest, to be centered among students and youth. In recent weeks some small traders have responded to calls for anti-government “strike” days by closing their shops and businesses in the bazaars. Teachers and some workers at major industrial facilities, including steel works in Isfahan, have staged walkouts in conjunction with the anti-government protests.   

The authorities have responded to the protests, which have denounced the political privileges of the Shia clergy and the endemic corruption of the institutions of the Islamic Republic and increasingly called to overthrow (“Death to”) Supreme Leader-for-life Ayatollah Khamenei, with repression. They have shut down access to social media; mobilised tens of thousands of the Basij—the voluntary police force affiliated with and led by the politically and economically powerful IRGC; carried out mass arrests and intimidated and threatened potential strikers with the loss of their livelihoods, while calling for speedy “justice” to be meted out to those whom the regime claim have committed “crimes against the security of the nation and Islam.” According to the authorities’ own figures, security forces have killed at least 200 people. NGOs outside the country, many of them oriented to the western imperialist powers, put the death toll at more than double that and arrests at around 18,000.

The regime’s harsh repressive measures are rooted in its fear that under conditions of ever deepening poverty and ever-widening social inequality, and after decades in which all factions of the ruling elite from the conservative Principlists to the Reformers have joined together in rolling back the social concessions made after the 1979 Revolution, the working class will erupt onto the scene. Recent years have seen a wave of strikes and protests against the non-payment of wages, privatization, precarious contract-labour jobs, and subsidy cuts.  

Washington, under Trump and now Biden, has been mounting a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran, imposing punishing sanctions that are tantamount to an act of war. The explicit aim of this campaign is to crash Iran’s economy. Its purpose is to leverage the divisions within the Iranian bourgeoisie so as to engineer a political realignment in Tehran, if not full-scale regime change, and impose on the Iranian people a neo-colonial regime, like that of the Shah, that will serve US imperialist interests in the Middle East and across Eurasia.

The hands of the capitalist elites of the US and its European allies drip with the blood of countless colonial and neo-colonial crimes across the Middle East, including the criminal wars of the past three decades that have razed entire societies from Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen to Libya and Syria. Yet with unbridled cynicism and hypocrisy, they have seized on the bloody repression of the Iranian regime to posture as the votaries of democracy and human rights and impose further economic and geopolitical pressure on Iran. The EU’s top foreign affairs official, Josep Borrell, has announced that the EU is preparing “a very tough” package of sanctions against Iran, adding that this is both because of its human rights violations and supplying of drones to Russia.

Tehran for its part has sought to justify its violent response to the protests by claiming they are being instigated by its “foreign adversaries,” particularly the US and Israel. It has accused them of using their regional allies, including Iraqi Kurds, to arm and support demonstrators.

In recent weeks, Tehran has carried out a series of military strikes on anti-regime Kurdish groups based inside Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, where the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 and Israel’s Mossad spy agency have long been active. It claims these groups have been sending in armed teams to support protesters in the Kurdish areas of northwestern Iran that have seen the most extensive unrest.

Various rival Kurdish exile groups that are based just inside the Iraqi border —including the Kurdish Democratic Party, Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, PAK (Parti Azadi Kurdistan) and PJAK (Kurdistan Free Life Party)—have received funding from the CIA. They have sought to exploit the legitimate grievances of Iran’s 10 million strong Kurdish minority that have long faced discrimination at the hands of the clerical regime, including the banning of their language as the main medium of instruction in schools, to press for some form of regional autonomy that would benefit a tiny handful of families as has happened in Iraq’s corrupt Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that is dominated by the Barzani clan.   

A December 9 Jerusalem Post article cited officials from these parties interviewed in Iraqi Kurdistan in mid-November as rejecting Tehran’s accusations. It claimed that the Kurdish organizations are not leading the current protests, nor do they claim to do so, although they are involved in activities that assist the uprising. Komala activist Kawthar Fatahi, told the Post, “We have ‘illegal hospitals’,” and “We pay doctors to bring aid to wounded people. We pay the families of wounded people. We assist the movement a lot, but not via armed action.”

This is hard to believe. As the Post stated, “All three of these movements (Komala, PDKI and PAK) have light weaponry, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), as this author witnessed on their bases. The demonstrators inside Iran, meanwhile, are being killed daily. More than 450 people have now died. The organizations are faced with a dilemma. Why not use the available weaponry in order to defend the protesters? And if not now, when? so to speak.” To which the Post’s interviewee responded, “People do call on us to come inside, yes. But we think it’s not yet the time.”

Abdullah Mohtadi, the Komala Party’s Secretary General, has been in Washington in recent days where he has held meetings on the situation in Iran with key members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—including its Democratic Party chairman, Senator Bob Menendez, a leading anti-Iran hawk—and Republican Party Congressman Michael Waltz from Florida He is one of a large new group of military-intelligence veterans in Congress, and an ardent supporter of the war in Ukraine.

The role of the Kurdish groups allied with Washington is far from unique. A whole series of émigré political forces, from the royalists and the remnants of the bourgeois National Front to the Tudeh Party and the pseudo-left, are in the name of the fight for democracy and women’s rights promoting an “Iranian people’s movement” oriented and beholden to the imperialist powers.

Such a movement would express not the interests and aspirations of Iranian workers and youth to win basic democratic rights and social equality. Rather, it would express the predatory ambitions of sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie and upper middle class who calculate that they can profit handsomely by becoming the local clients and police enforcers of an Iran returned to neo-colonial bondage.

The reality is all talk of a struggle for democracy outside of a struggle against the imperialist powers that have ravaged Iran and the entire Middle East for over a century, waging war, supporting one bloody dictatorship after another, and inciting religious and national-ethnic divisions is a monstrous fraud.

Basic democratic rights, including 

Police killings fuel protests across Peru against newly installed US-backed Boluarte regime

Andrea Lobo

Escalating demonstrations demanding the resignation of newly installed president Dina Boluarte in Peru have brought the country’s major cities largely to a standstill, as the police and military have carried out a brutal onslaught that has killed at least eight protesters.

People attend the funeral procession of a child who was killed during protests against new President Dina Boluarte in Andahuaylas, Peru, Monday, Dec. 12, 2022. [AP Photo/Franklin Briceno]

According to national ombudswoman Eliana Revollar on Monday, those slain include Jonathan Encino Arias, 18; Wilfredo Lizarme Barboza, 18; Becan Quispe, 18; Jonathan Lloclla, 26; the minors D.A.Q., 15, and R.P.M., 16; and Miguel Arcana, 38. All were killed as a result of “projectiles from firearms,” and several died during the occupations of the Huancabamba and Arequipa airports, she reported. Moreover, at least a hundred more people have been injured.

On Monday night, an additional killing was reported of a young man from a gunshot to his neck, only a few blocks from the presidential palace in Lima.

The demonstrations follow the rapid installation of Boluarte as president hours after the impeachment and arrest of President Pedro Castillo on December 7. The White House and the European Union immediately recognized Boluarte as the rightful successor and safeguard of democracy and the “constitutional order.” Meanwhile the corporate media launched a campaign to celebrate her as the country’s first female president and congratulated the armed forces for protecting democracy.

Within days, the U.S.-backed Boluarte and the state forces are already violently cracking down on peaceful demonstrations and roadblocks that oppose Castillo’s impeachment. On Monday, Boluarte declared a state of emergency for 60 days in the departments of Apurímac, Arequipa and Ica—all in southern Peru, where support for Castillo is relatively higher—suspending democratic rights including “freedom of assembly, liberty and personal security.”

While Boluarte initially insisted that she would finish Castillo’s current term until July 2026, she has since announced a bill to move the general elections forward to April 2024. But this has failed to dampen the unrest.

Alberto Otárola, who has been defense minister since Saturday, “absolutely rejected” that Boluarte will resign and vowed to “restore order.” Moreover, he said that all the regional prefects in charge of local security and administration that were named by Castillo will be deposed.

Amid an already worsening economic situation and a massive COVID surge, the protests dramatically escalated after two teenagers were killed by police during demonstrations on December 11 in the southern Andean region of Apurimac. The UN Human Rights Office condemned “instances where the police appear to have resorted to unnecessary and disproportionate use of force and indiscriminate use of tear gas,” including against journalists.

Spontaneous protests rapidly spread across the country on Sunday and Monday demanding the resignation of Boluarte, the closing of Congress and the holding of immediate elections. These have shut down the main Pan-American Highway in the north and south, which threatens food shortages in the cities.

While many openly support the liberation and reinstallation of Castillo, the most common slogans on the signs carried by demonstrators demand general elections and to “Throw them all out!”

On Monday December 12, thousands of demonstrators occupied the Arequipa international airport, the third largest in the country, which was re-taken hours later “thanks to the Armed Forces,” according to an official statement. Demonstrators also occupied and set fire to equipment in the Gloria milk processing plant, while students occupied the University of Cajamarca, both in Arequipa. Hundreds of miners also marched against Boluarte in Arequipa.

In Cusco, thousands of students also occupied the University of San Antonio Abad. Later that night, demonstrators shut down the Cusco International Airport, which remained closed throughout Tuesday.

The Agrarian and Rural Front of Peru, an umbrella group of peasants, Indigenous, women and other social organizations, launched an “indefinite strike” on Tuesday demanding the liberation of Castillo, the shutdown of Congress, new elections, and a new constitution. They will be joined by the Peruvian Student Federation on Tuesday.

Moreover, the leaders of the Indigenous Ashaninka community in the Peruvian Amazon announced preparations for a “great march to Lima to dissolve Parliament.”

According to Jornada, Castillo supporters “from humble social backgrounds,” including representatives of rural self-defense committees or ronderos, have gathered at the San Martin Plaza in Lima, a historic gathering place for demonstrations, to discuss how to proceed amid calls for a “popular insurgency.”

Castillo has been able to publish several statements on Twitter declaring that he has been “abducted” and will not resign, while depicting Boluarte as an “usurper” and calling on the police and armed forces to lay down their arms.

Meanwhile, the governments of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia, associated with the so-called “pink tide” released a statement on Monday that continues to recognize Castillo as president.

The main concern cited by the corporate media in Peru and internationally is the lack of any institution, political party or organization that is not discredited or holds any popular support to channel the demonstrations back into the fold of capitalist politics, which is also the reality across the region and beyond.

The Los Angeles Times concludes its report citing an accountant and single mother in Lima: “They all steal, and who ends up with real power? The richest…”

On December 7, President Pedro Castillo tried to preemptively cling to power by dissolving Congress and establishing a ‘state of exception’, which would temporarily suspend democratic rights and begin curfews.

Only a week earlier, the Organization of American States had concluded that it would not agree to Castillo’s appeal to this de facto arm of the US. State Department to oppose the drive by the far-right opposition in Congress and the courts to oust him. Then, almost immediately after Castillo’s speech on December 7, the US Embassy released a statement opposing Castillo’s orders, which was undoubtedly coordinated in back-channel discussions with the military, political and business leaders in the country.

The police and military then announced that they would not comply with Castillo’s orders, and Congress proceeded to impeach him in a 101-6 vote, with 10 abstentions. Congress has since removed his immunity to expedite his criminal prosecution.

Castillo was unwilling to make any popular appeal to oppose the attempts of the far-right to oust him precisely because he is a capitalist politician entirely devoted to protecting bourgeois rule.

The barrage of corruption allegations used to depose his elected administration are a drop in the bucket compared to the massive web of kickbacks and money laundering engulfing the entire political establishment, especially the leader of the opposition, Keiko Fujimori, whose corporate backers confessed to handing over millions to her party.

At the same time, by implementing pro-market economic policies no different from those advocated by the far-right, including lifting anti-COVID mitigations, Castillo had lost virtually all popular support. Barely a year after coming to power, U.S. and European imperialism, precisely the forces that Castillo relied on, had concluded that his presidency was not useful given his inability to maintain illusions in the prospect of social reforms and continue suppressing the class struggle.

Regarding Washington’s claims to defend democracy and oppose corruption in Peru, US aid to the country increased dramatically and was the highest in the region right after former president Alberto Fujimori dissolved the Congress and convened a constituent assembly to draft the current reactionary constitution that all institutions are so keen on defending. He is currently jailed for organizing death squads and engaging in widespread corruption. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who was videotaped paying congress people for backing the Fujimorists, was known for decades as an asset of the CIA, which paid him millions.

Following his impeachment, Castillo had attempted to flee to the embassy of Mexico, whose President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had agreed to grant him and his family asylum, but the leadership of the security forces ordered his escorts to hand over him to the police in Lima, which arrested him for “rebellion.”

FTX founder Bankman-Fried indicted on criminal charges

Nick Beams

When outright corruption and criminality is exposed in the capitalist system, whether it be in the sphere of politics, economics or elsewhere, its institutions, including the corporate media, go into overdrive as they try to maintain that what has been revealed is not systemic but merely the product of “bad” individuals.

This phenomenon is again on display with charging of the founder and owner of the failed crypto currency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, on multiple counts.

Bankman-Fried, who was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday, has been charged by US prosecutors in an indictment unsealed yesterday with engineering “one of the biggest frauds in American history.”

The Department of Justice has charged Bankman-Fried on eight counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers and lenders, money laundering and violating election funding laws.

The charges centre on the claim that Bankman-Fried used the money deposited with FTX to fund the operations of his private firm Almeda Research to make investments and to finance the lavish lifestyle of himself and others.

FTX was once valued in the market at around $32 billion. It is now virtually worthless with untold losses incurred by investors, creditors and retail investors.

In testimony to a US congressional hearing yesterday, John Ray, appointed as chief executive of FTX after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, said creditors were looking at “massive losses.”

“At the end of the day, we are not going to be able to recover all the losses here,” he said, and it would take months, not weeks, to track down all the lost funds.

Outlining the operations of Bankman Fried, Ray told the hearing: “This isn’t sophisticated whatsoever, this is just plain old embezzlement.”

One of the charges against Bankman-Fried unveiled by Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is that he violated election campaign funding laws by funneling tens of millions of dollars to both Republican and Democratic committees which he claimed came from wealthy individuals but in fact were funded by Almeda with the money coming from FTX.

The money was eagerly grasped with both hands, and Bankman-Fried was one of the largest donors to the Democrats.

“All of this dirty money was used in service of Bankman-Fried’s desire to buy bipartisan influence and impact the direction of public policy in Washington,” Williams said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the supposed watchdog of the American financial system, came in behind the Justice Department and filed a series of civil charges. But the remarks by SEC officials amounted to a damning self-exposure.

According to the SEC, Bankman-Fried orchestrated a fraud from the day that FTX was launched in 2019 and that it continued under his personal direction until the company collapsed in November.

Customers’ assets were used to make “undisclosed venture investments, lavish real estate purchases and large political donations.”

SEC Chair Gary Gensler said: “We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto.”

But the SEC boss did not even touch on the question, let alone address it, of how it was that this fraud, perpetrated in plain sight over three years, did not evoke any response from one the supposed guardians of the US financial system.

The answer to that question is not to be found in any supposedly “magical” powers possessed by Bankman-Fried as a con man.

It lies in the broader financial environment, above all, the conditions created by the US Federal Reserve which had pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system after the 2008 crash and injected trillions more after the financial crisis of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

This ocean of ultra-cheap money boosted the value of all financial assets, not least crypto currencies, to record heights on Wall Street and elsewhere as enormous amounts of wealth were created seemingly out of thin air. And while there was money to be made hand over fist, the SEC was not going to intervene.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said FTX “operated behind a veneer of legitimacy” created by Bankman-Fried. “But as we allege in our complaint, that veneer wasn’t just thin, it was also fraudulent.”

But as with Gensler, he made no effort to explain why this “thin veneer” was never penetrated.

Again, that question can only be answered by an examination of the broader context in which the FTX operation was carried out. The supposed “legitimacy” of FTX was not created by Bankman-Fried but by a veritable campaign involving powerful financial and media forces.

Major financial interests, including some of the world’s best-known investors, such as BlackRock, Sequoia Capital and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, backed FTX.

Bankman-Fried was promoted on television, interviewing such “luminaries” as former US President Bill Clinton and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. FTX was promoted by super-model Gisele Bundchen and the most famous NFL player, quarterback Tom Brady.

He will most likely be convicted of fraud and sent to jail. But the real criminals will never appear in the dock as the coverup operation gets underway.

There are parallels here with the political sphere. The essential thrust of the January 6 committee into the coup attempt, orchestrated by the Republican war hawk Liz Cheney, has been to deflect any investigation into the role of the agencies of the state in facilitating Trump’s plot.

Likewise, there will be no investigation, let alone charges, arising from the facilitating of Bankman-Fried’s operations by the supposed financial guardians and the political and media establishment.

His connections with top levels of the political establishment also recall the case of Enron chief Kenneth Lay, convicted of securities and wire fraud in 2001, who was a major financial backer of George W. Bush as he framed energy policies favourable to the company’s operations.

The decision of the powers that be to throw Bankman-Fried to the wolves on criminal charges is aimed at trying to protect the criminality of the system over which they preside.

Just as with Trump in the political sphere, he was not some kind of snake who had mysteriously slithered into a financial Garden of Eden but the representative of its essential modus operandi—the siphoning of the wealth created by the labour of the working class to the upper echelons of society.

The crypto crisis which led to his demise is an expression of a broader process—the ongoing disintegration of the financial house of cards built up over decades to which the ruling financial elites are responding by intensifying the attacks on the working class, the creators of all wealth.