Biden administration reaffirms “US support” for murderous regime in Peru

Andrea Lobo

On Wednesday, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that Biden administration officials had welcomed and met in Washington D.C. with Ana Cecilia Gervasi, the foreign minister of the Peruvian coup regime of Dina Boluarte.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman “expressed US support for Peru and President Boluarte, and her efforts to affirm Peru’s democracy, ensuring peace, stability and the unity of the Peruvian people,” according to the official statement issued by Price. The Biden administration, moreover, “encouraged the government to continue taking steps to hold those responsible for acts of violence accountable.”

More than 200 troops joined the National Police to clear roadblocks in Arequipa, Peru, on January 27. [Photo: Peruvian Armed Forces]

While accompanied by the threadbare references to “human rights” and “peace,” the Biden administration is endorsing and providing material assistance to an authoritarian regime installed in a US-backed coup last December. The statement openly declares support for Boluarte’s ongoing escalation of military and police repression, which has already involved the killing of nearly 60 unarmed demonstrators, mostly with live ammunition.

The regime recently renewed a state of emergency that authorizes the deployment of troops against protesters and the suspension of democratic rights, including freedom of assembly and speech and the right to life and safety.

Just four days earlier, the capital, Lima, recorded its first confirmed police killing of a demonstrator. At least two videos have surfaced that show police shooting a tear gas canister directly and at close range at Víctor Santisteban, who was left with a 1.5-inch hole in his skull. The 55-year-old plumber and electrician was protesting days before a trip to Argentina to meet his grandson.

Reflecting the levels of bestiality being employed by the security forces, police Gen. Victor Zanabria responded to Santisteban’s autopsy and the videos by claiming that tear gas canisters are not “hard objects” and insisted that a fellow protester standing near the victim must have been responsible for the injury.

It’s worth noting that the Biden administration is echoing the same calls by the Peruvian far right to detain more “instigators” on fraudulent charges as a means of further terrorizing protesters.

Most recently, state prosecutors demanded that the leader of the Ayacucho People Defense Front, Rocío Leandro Melgar, remain in custody for 18 months for allegedly belonging to a “terrorist” organization and participating in a murder in 1992. No evidence other than “intelligence” reports have been presented. The Ayacucho Defense Front has backed the protests and continued to give political support to deposed president Pedro Castillo, who was also vindictively given 18 months of pretrial detention.

On Monday, 20 Democratic members of the US Congress issued an open letter asking the Biden administration to denounce the “human rights violations” in Peru and temporarily halt security assistance funding.

While invoking the hypocritical pretension that US imperialism defends democracy and human rights, the signers knew that the Biden administration would simply ignore them. Anticipating this, the letter muddies the waters and provides a cover for Boluarte’s criminal policies by stating: “While we recognize that a small number of protesters have participated in violent acts, the Boluarte government has a responsibility to distinguish criminals from peaceful protesters…”

The unprincipled and bankrupt appeal, which was signed by all the US representatives who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), responds solely to the interests of US imperialism in sustaining the “human rights” hypocrisy used by Washington to justify the escalation of its war drives against its geopolitical rivals like Russia and China.

Thousands of demonstrators in the southern departments of Junin, Apurimac, Arequipa, Cusco, Puno and Tacna continue to defy the state of emergency and participate in roadblocks and peaceful marches, while hundreds continue to demonstrate in the capital Lima.

On Thursday, the national ombudsman said that protests and roadblocks continue in 27 provinces representing 13.8 percent of the national territory, and that confirmed deaths have risen to 66.

The roadblocks have resulted in major fuel shortages and affected natural gas production across the south, while Bloomberg warned last week that 30 percent of the country’s copper output is at risk in the world’s second top producer, “at a time of low global stocks and high prices.”

On February 1, citing transportation and supply issues, the Chinese-owned MMG Limited halted operations at the Las Bambas copper mine, the third largest in the country, responsible for 2 percent of global production.

The US-based multinational Freeport mining corporation said last week that its Cerro Verde copper mine, the largest in the country, has had to cut back operations 10-15 percent due to the blockages. The major Antapaccay mine, owned by US-based Glencore, remains shut down since protesters invaded it early last month.

“Due to the protests,” the Canadian-based American Lithium halted its hydrological studies in the Falchani Project in Puno, which could hold one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Mines in the north and shipping have reportedly not been affected, and local business organizations have called for the deployment of the military across the southern mining corridor to clear roadblocks.

Facing a terminal political crisis in Peru, marked by the ouster of six presidents in five years, US imperialism and the European Union are concerned above all by the prospect that mining, energy, shipping and other workers in key sectors will intervene and further disrupt the output of strategic minerals and natural gas from Peru.

As shown by recent statements by the Pentagon and the trip of German chancellor Olaf Scholz to the region, the imperialist powers see Latin America as a key source of natural resources and cheap labor as part of their ongoing efforts to isolate and subjugate Russia and China and redivide the world.

In Peru, and increasingly across the region and beyond, there are no credible institutions or political parties left. With much of the Peruvian political establishment also facing prosecutions and arrest for corruption, the ruling class finds no other answer to the resurgence of the class struggle, which is driven above all by opposition to social inequality, inflation and austerity.

Recent polls show that 71 percent of the population supports elections this year and 74 percent want Boluarte to resign. In response, Boluarte insisted that her resignation is not an option, but vowed to keep demanding Congress approve elections in 2023.

In a nationally televised speech on January 30, Boluarte incongruously repeated the lie that demonstrations are being instigated by “an organized group seeking to sow chaos,” while warning of the “imperative of improving the democratic legitimacy of the country’s political representatives” by “channeling institutionally” the popular demands.

However, the far-right parties that control Congress are demanding an even more brutal repression, insisting that moving forward elections will not resolve the political crisis. After meeting last weekend with Boluarte’s cabinet, the fascistic congressman and former head of the military José Cueto said to RPP Noticias that he asked for “a greater force of authority to prevent new terrorist acts.”

Cueto also demanded that the military remain deployed even after demonstrations stop, proclaiming an international “war” against “Communist hordes.”

Congress “is there to work, legislate and supervise,” he said, confirming that they are calling the shots, while the executive power is there to “maintain order.” Hoping to use the current regime to crush opposition to their reactionary economic and social agenda at the behest of the transnational corporations and local oligarchy, the far right in Congress insists that Boluarte and the current legislators must finish the term until 2026. These are the fascistic political forces backed by the Biden administration in Perú.

After Quran-burning provocations, Turkey-NATO tensions rise amid war on Russia

Hakan Özal

Ankara has suspended NATO membership talks with Sweden and Finland after a far-right politician publicly burned copies of the Quran, a holy book for Islam, in Sweden and Denmark in late January.

As NATO escalates the war against Russia in Ukraine with the delivery of battle tanks to Ukraine, the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Canada have issued successive statements warning their citizens of the possibility of a “terrorist attack” in Turkey due to the Quran burning provocation.

“As long as it [Sweden] allows the burning of the Quran, we will not say ‘yes’ to your entry into NATO,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Wednesday. “Our view on Finland is positive, but not on Sweden,” he added.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on September. 6, 2022. [AP Photo/Armin Durgut]

“It is not possible for us to say yes to Sweden’s NATO membership right now,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu said on Tuesday.

At a joint press conference with his Estonian counterpart on Wednesday, Çavuşoğlu said that his government considers there are “two threats to NATO” in the form of “Russia and terrorism,” Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency reported. He added, “We, of course, understand the legitimate concerns of Estonia and the other two candidate countries [Finland and Sweden], but on the other hand, it is equally legitimate to expect our allies to understand the security concerns of Turkey and other countries.”

Reiterating his government’s support for NATO’s “open door policy,” Çavuşoğlu said, “Of course we oppose the war [in Ukraine]. We continue to support Ukraine. Turkey is also making very important efforts to end this war.” He added that Ankara’s stance was to ensure Ukraine's “territorial integrity” at the “negotiating table.”

In an interview with Radio Sputnik, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that the tensions with Turkey over Sweden and Finland's membership in NATO “show the degree of mistrust within the alliance and among Western states in general.”

Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO last May, in the midst of the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine. The Erdoğan government, however, has declared its opposition to their accession, threatening a veto. A unanimous vote of all 30 member states is required for a country to join NATO.

Amid Washington’s escalation of the war against Russia, significant factions of the US political establishment are advocating responding to Turkey’s threat to veto Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership by not supplying the Turkish military with F-16s.

At the end of June, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and Erdoğan met, followed by the signing of a memorandum by their foreign ministers.

In exchange for Sweden and Finland’s commitment to fulfill Ankara’s demands, it withdrew its veto on their NATO membership. Ankara demands that Sweden and Finland “stop supporting” the Kurdish nationalist People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), both considered “terrorist groups” by Turkey.

Sweden and Finland pledged to lift the arms embargo on Turkey imposed after its military operation against the YPG in Syria in 2019. They also pledged to process Turkey's “expulsion or extradition requests for terror suspects immediately and in all their dimensions.” Those allegedly include supporters of Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, claimed by Ankara to have led the putschist officers in the failed 2016 coup against the Erdoğan government. However, recent developments led to the breakdown of the trilateral talks.

On January 11, Kurdish nationalist groups in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, hung an effigy of Erdoğan by its feet from a pole in front of the historic city hall. Then on January 21, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant Danish far-right extremist Rasmus Paludan burned a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

After these provocations, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar announced the cancellation of Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson's visit to Turkey. Ankara then announced that the trilateral talks scheduled to be held in Brussels in February had been suspended “indefinitely.”

In part, Erdoğan's government is resorting to populism and nationalism to try to quell social tensions and burnish its support ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections in May.

However, the tensions between Ankara and its NATO allies have far deeper roots than the immediate electoral agenda. Although it is part of the NATO alliance, the Turkish bourgeoisie, which has strong economic and military ties with Russia, believes that the US-NATO goals in the war against Russia will also harm its own interests. In addition, the US alliance with Kurdish nationalist forces in Syria is seen as unacceptable by Ankara.

As Erdoğan has already announced his army’s invasion plans into Syria, Turkey’s attempt to launch a comprehensive ground military operation to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish enclave led by the YPG on Turkey’s southern border carries with it the risk of a confrontation between the two NATO members, the US and Turkey. Moreover, the presence of Russian, Iranian and Syrian forces in the area could turn such a military intervention into a major war.

Other critical geopolitical conflicts related to Ankara’s ties with Russia, as well as to the YPG’s growing power in Syria, erupted in the failed NATO-backed coup attempt against the Erdogan government in 2016. Far from being resolved, these conflicts have only deepened.

The US-NATO war against Russia has further escalated historical conflicts between Greece and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea. NATO’s use and consolidation of Greece as a transshipment hub in the war against Russia is seen as a threat by Ankara.

Turkey’s decision to close the Dardanelles and Istanbul Straits from the Aegean to Black Sea to all warships immediately after the Russian invasion in Ukraine based on the Montreux Convention increased Greece’s logistical and regional importance. Ankara could be forced to make a critical decision if NATO powers want to move their warships into the Black Sea to counter Russia.

“Operation Nightingale”: Fraudulent nursing diploma scandal exposes US health care and education crises

Katy Kinner

Last week, in the final stages of the multiyear federal investigation nicknamed “Operation Nightingale,” 25 people were arrested and charged in connection with the sale of 7,600 fraudulent nursing degrees. 

A nurse administers a COVID-19 test outside the Salt Lake County Health Department, Tuesday, December 20, 2022, in Salt Lake City, Utah. [AP Photo/Rick Bowmer]

The scheme involved the selling of fake nursing diplomas and transcripts obtained from three accredited Florida-based nursing schools—Siena College, Palm Beach School of Nursing and Sacred Heart International Institute—which allowed aspiring Registered Nurses or Licensed Practical Nurses to sit for the board exams and obtain licensure. At this time, it is unclear if there are more people involved in this scandal or if other such fraudulent diploma rings remain to be discovered.

Those charged include administrators of the involved nursing schools and administrators of several test preparation academies across the country that recruited interested parties to purchase the fake diplomas. Charges include wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and the defendants face up to 20 years in prison. 

The allegations reflect a deepening crisis in the health care and education systems that the defendants sought to exploit. The health care system in the US is crumbling amidst continued surges of COVID-19 and the mass exodus of nurses and other health care workers who face unsafe and exhausting working conditions. 

At the same time, the increasing expense of higher education tempted workers who wanted to better themselves and their career prospects to engage in illegal activities rather than face a mountain of student debt in becoming a nurse. While the names of those who purchased the fake diplomas have not been released, it has been reported that many were Haitian immigrants living in South Florida. 

Those who purchased the fake diplomas are not currently being charged and individual state nursing boards have been tasked with finding and annulling the licenses in question.

A few states have already annulled fraudulent licenses, including 26 licenses in Delaware and 22 in Georgia. Seventy-seven licenses are under review in Washington state. It has been left to the discretion of the nursing regulatory bodies in affected states to investigate individual cases and take appropriate action in accordance with their state laws and due process. The scandal also calls into question the practices of state nursing boards, which were unable to detect the fraudulent documents for multiple years. 

Between 2016 and 2021, a total of $114 million changed hands in exchange for the fake degrees with “students” paying between $10,000 and $17,000 for the service and never stepping foot in a classroom or clinical setting. Out of the 7,600 degrees sold, only about 2,400 people eventually passed the licensing exam and were eligible for employment in health care facilities.

It has been reported that the nurses with the fake degrees found employment in various settings, including pediatric home care, assisted living facilities and veterans hospitals in several states, including Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Georgia, Maryland and Texas.

Investigators with the US Department of Health and Human Services–Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) were first tipped off to the fraud in 2019 when the state of Maryland reported two Florida business people, Geralda Adrien and Woosvelt Predestin, and their company PowerfulU Health Care Services LLC, which processed applications for buyers through the aforementioned Florida nursing schools and helped buyers coordinate testing preparation and any other requirements needed to sit for the licensing exam.

Adrien and Woosvelt pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 27 months in prison after cooperating with the HHS-OIG investigators to identify other defendants. There are no court dates set for the 25 defendants currently being charged.

State nursing boards and hospital systems have been slow to respond, leaving upwards of several hundred or more licensed nurses in health care who are working illegally with no formal training. There is also no way at present to trace or understand the damage that has already been done by the rogue health care workers. 

Currently, none of the workers who purchased the fraudulent materials are being criminally charged. Many nurses across social media have taken issue with this, concerned that it is a product of hospitals and nursing regulatory boards seeking to avoid liability. A hospital that investigates and admits to employing fake health care workers would likely face costly lawsuits. 

One nurse spoke to a WSWS reporter on Reddit, stating, “We all know why they aren’t going after them. Once they start pulling on threads it will uncover patient harm and (more importantly to them) liability to their precious hospital systems/top donors.” A similar sentiment was echoed by others on a thread related to the diploma scandal. 

This, of course, contrasts with the criminal prosecution by Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) of RaDonda Vaught in May of last year. Vaught made a medication error that led to the tragic death of one of her patients, Charlene Murphey, in 2017. After first attempting to cover up the incident, VUMC later fired Vaught and took her to court rather than examining the conditions of chronic understaffing and system failures that no doubt led to the incident. 

The case demonstrated the attitude of the health care corporations and the entire capitalist state to health care workers. Charges were brought against Vaught not out of genuine concern for patient safety but rather to protect the reputation and profit interests of the university and medical center.

In the context of the current diploma scandal, hospital systems do not appear to be engaging in a serious investigation or publicly acknowledging the employment of fraudulently licensed nurses. This exposes, yet again, the profit-driven character of the health care system itself, where reputation and finances take top priority over the safety and needs of patients and staff.

Canada’s governments exploit health care crisis of their own making to press for privatization

Dylan Lubao

Governments across Canada are exploiting the collapse of the public health care system to open the floodgates for its privatization. Almost four decades of brutal spending cuts by provincial and federal governments, followed by three years of the disastrous profits-before-lives response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have left Medicare on life support.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shakes hands with Ontario Premier Doug Ford in Toronto, August 30, 2022. [Photo: Doug Ford/@fordnation]

Ontario Tory Premier Doug Ford announced on January 16 that for-profit clinics will permanently be handed 50 percent of surgical procedures. The list will initially include minor surgeries as well as diagnostic procedures, before expanding to knee and hip replacement surgeries by 2024.

Ford claimed that his government was addressing Ontario’s colossal backlog of surgeries, which had ballooned to one million by mid-2022. This backlog has festered for years, but worsened after provincial governments across the country dropped all pandemic health measures last spring in response to the demands of big business and its instrumentalization of the far-right “Freedom” Convoy to batter down public opposition.

Successive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic have combined with other epidemic diseases like respiratory syncytial virus and the flu to create a “tripledemic,” overwhelming hospitals and pushing more and more scheduled procedures onto waiting lists.

Ford did not provide a shred of evidence that for-profit clinics would reverse the decline in public health, because no such evidence exists. A quick glance at the United States, where the private sector plays the dominant role, shows that health care run for profit has been a total catastrophe for the health and lives of ordinary working people.

Provincial and territorial governments from coast to coast are currently developing or discussing similar privatization plans. They cynically claim that public health care systems, which they have intentionally underfunded for many years, simply cannot cope with the present level of illness and death.

In Quebec, the hard-right “Quebec First” Coalition Avenir Québec government announced a health care “reform” last year that will increase the number of surgeries performed in private clinics from 14 to 20 percent.

British Columbia’s supposedly “progressive” New Democratic Party government has handed $393 million worth of contracts to private clinics over the past six years, mainly for less complex and more profitable procedures.

Last spring, Alberta’s former United Conservative Party Premier Jason Kenney announced the Alberta Surgical Initiative, which will double the number of medical procedures done by private clinics, funneling $133 million over three years to for-profit medicine.

Ford and broad sections of the corporate-controlled media are making the absurd claim that his latest proposal does not amount to privatization because the government will continue to fund the health services. Yet it is obvious that the increased use of private clinics will encourage an exodus of personnel to the private sector, enable private clinics to charge hefty ancillary fees, thereby further reducing the available funds for public sector health care, and initiate an ever-expanding role for private providers of health care.

At the federal level, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is promoted in establishment circles as Ford’s “progressive” and more sophisticated counterpart, welcomed the Ford government’s initiative. Refusing to utter a single word of criticism, the Prime Minister applauded the privatization scheme as an “innovation” that would help lessen the strain on an overburdened health care system. What Trudeau did not mention was that his government has done just as much to destroy Medicare as Doug Ford. Since taking office in 2015, the Liberals have kept Canada Health Transfer payments to the provinces far below inflation, population growth, and the needs of an aging society. 

In response to demands by provincial governments for more federal health care funding, Trudeau stated that any money would be contingent on “accountability” and “results.” These are code words for more savage cost-cutting. Trudeau and the premiers are scheduled to meet next month to plan the next steps of their slash and burn campaign. The provincial demands are themselves hypocritical in the extreme, given that governments like Ford’s are on record for withholding billions in COVID-19 emergency funds given to them by the federal government.

For their part, the Liberals have overseen a callous response to the pandemic that prioritized the protection of corporate profits over human lives. Officially, over 50,000 Canadians have needlessly died of COVID-19, but leading epidemiologists estimate the true number of deaths to be closer to 70,000.

The Liberals grudgingly introduced, then promptly withdrew, the measly Canada Emergency Response Benefit, capped at $2,000 per month, that gave workers a temporary financial lifeline. At the same time, they showered the country’s largest businesses with a $650 billion bailout beginning in March 2020.

The NDP is just as committed to the profits of the banks and corporations as the Conservatives and Liberals. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has vowed to keep the minority Liberals in power until 2025 through a confidence and supply agreement, even as the Liberals oversee mass death and the gutting of Medicare. Singh recently demagogically attacked the Liberals for “doing nothing” to stop health care privatization, before making clear that the issue would not result in the confidence-and-supply deal between the NDP and Liberals being broken.

To the billionaires and millionaires who dictate all social and political decisions, the public funds allocated for health care are a drain on their wealth accumulation, which their political lackeys have vastly accelerated by implementing tax cuts and corporate subsidies. Most importantly, they will not tolerate any health measures like a few extra sick days or mandatory isolation protocols that remove workers from the process of generating wealth for these social parasites.

The private sector already gobbles up 30 percent of health care spending in Canada. It delivers a growing number of services, from diagnostics like MRIs and CT scans to minor surgeries, ambulance services, and telehealth. Medicare does not cover dental and prescription eye care, so the vast majority of the population pays for these expenses out of pocket or desperately hopes that their employer-sponsored health insurance provides coverage.

A historic shortage of nurses and other health care workers has forced hospitals to pay hundreds of millions to for-profit agencies, whose nurses, for the time being, earn considerably more than their public sector counterparts. In many cases, agency nurses are filling the same job vacancies in public hospitals that they previously left because of burnout, low pay, and punishing schedules, including forced overtime.

The delivery of public health care falls under provincial jurisdiction. It was established, in practice, through two pieces of federal legislation in 1957 and 1968, but the federal government limited its role to funding the system. Medicare marked the last gasp of liberal social reform, and was only granted in the face of militant struggles of the working class in the post-war era.

From a roughly 50-50 split of federal and provincial funding for Medicare in the 1960s, consecutive federal governments quickly scaled back their contributions. The federal share of Medicare funding today stands at a mere 22 percent. Provincial governments worsened this deficit by slashing health care and other public spending to grant tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.

The rollback of federal funding to public health care was kicked off in 1976 by former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister’s father. Major cuts were carried out by the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, and continued by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

After this decades-long onslaught, the pandemic has compounded the disastrous conditions in Canada’s health care system. Workers are intimately familiar with overcrowded hospital waiting rooms where patients regularly die before even seeing a doctor. Nearly five million Canadians do not have a family doctor. Hundreds of thousands of people languish on years-long waiting lists for routine procedures.

The privatization of Medicare is a political third rail that every major party knows is impossible to accomplish all at once. Survey after survey shows an overwhelming majority of Canadians oppose privatization. A critical role in preventing this widespread popular sentiment from finding any expression is played by the trade unions in the health sector, which have systematically suppressed all struggles by health care workers for improvements to wages and working conditions for decades. The unions more broadly are a pillar of the anti-worker Liberal/NDP/union alliance, which the ruling elite is using to impose its policies of war abroad, and public spending cuts and attacks on workers’ rights at home. This includes the gutting of public health care.

Calls for privatization are growing as the ruling class intensifies its onslaught on working people. The bill has come due for the massive federal pandemic bailout of the banks and corporations, as well as non-stop financial speculation on Bay Street. The ruling elite is determined to make working people pay for the nine-year, 70 percent hike in military spending the Liberals committed to in 2017, and the $1.1 billion in weaponry they have so far supplied to Ukraine in support of the US-NATO war on Russia.

Indian budget intensifies austerity for working people, hikes military spending

Keith Jones

With its 2023-24 budget, India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is intensifying its class war assault on working people and aggressive pursuit of the great-power ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie.

The 45.03 trillion rupee ($549.5 billion) budget, which was presented to parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, February 1, combines brutal austerity measures for India’s workers and toilers, with massive sops to big business, the rich and superrich.

Military spending is to be increased by a further 13 percent to 5.94 trillion rupees ($72.6 billion) and, when debt payments are discounted, will account for more than 17.5 percent of all Indian government outlays.

Far and away the budget’s biggest spending increase is a 33 percent hike in capital expenditure (CAPEX)—that is, spending on rail, road, seaport, power and other infrastructure projects—to $122.3 billion.

Big business has been pressing for such an increase, as the president of the Confederation of India Industry (CII) observed in gushing press comments. This is because it hopes to profit from a bonanza of government infrastructure building contracts and because development of India’s grossly inadequate transport, power and telecommunications infrastructure will facilitate its efforts to expand cheap labour manufacturing for global markets and attract investments from global capital.

To the delight of Indian’s capitalist elite, the BJP government is also slashing income taxes, as part of a continuing drive to shift more of the taxation burden onto consumption taxes that disproportionately penalize those with low or no income. The budget’s tax cuts are skewed to benefit the better-off but especially those with the biggest incomes. According to a celebratory editorial in the Times of India, they will lower “the effective income tax rate for the rich by almost 4 percentage points.”

A man sleeps on the ground at a wholesale vegetable market in Guwahati, India, Wednesday, February 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Anupam Nath]

This giveaway to the rich is being justified on the grounds that it will stimulate the economy. This under conditions where a recent Oxfam report, Survival of the Richest: The India Story, showed that between 2012 and 2021, 40 percent of all the new wealth created in India went to just the top 1 percent of the population and a mere 3 percent to the bottom 50 percent.

Despite the huge increases in military spending and CAPEX and a slew of tax cuts, including reductions for small and medium business, the budget aims to achieve a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the fiscal deficit to GDP ratio, to 5.9 percent, in the coming April 2023 to March 2024 fiscal year.

This is to be achieved through brutal austerity measures targeting the working class and rural poor.    

They will compound a pandemic of joblessness and hunger that has been developing as India’s growth rate slowed during the last decade but has been enormously exacerbated over the past three years—first by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling class’s ruinous profits-before-lives response and then by the fallout from the US-NATO instigated war with Russia in Ukraine.

Since 2020, tens of millions more have been driven into “absolute poverty,” meaning their daily caloric intake is insufficient to fuel a full day’s work. Inflation has been running at an annual rate of 6 percent or more for almost a year. In December unemployment stood at 8.3 percent, according to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). This in a country where there are no state jobless benefits, and the labor force participation rate at around 40 percent is amongst the lowest in the world.

Yet the government is slashing subsidies for food, fertiliser and petroleum by 28 percent.

The food subsidy which benefits the 800 million poorest Indians is being cut by 1 trillion rupees ($12.1 billion), or 31 percent—an even greater cut in percentage terms than the overall subsidy cuts.

The BJP government is also taking the axe to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (MNREGP), which is meant to provide 100 days of menial, minimum-wage work to one member of every rural household that wants it. Eliminating the MNREGP has long been a BJP government objective, and the program has been systematically deprived of funds. But during the pandemic, if only to avoid famine and food riots, the government grudgingly allowed enrollment in the program—which is habitually oversubscribed—to swell. With two months remaining in the current fiscal year, more than 80 million people have participated in MNREGP projects. However, due to want of funding, just 3 percent of participants were able to complete the 100 days of work they are legally entitled to.

Now, as part of its intensified “post-pandemic” austerity push, the government is cutting the MNREGP budget by one-third, from 890 billion rupees ($10.8 billion) to 690 billion rupees ($7.3 billion)

While victimizing the most impoverished sections of Indian society, the BJP government budget continues the decades-long ruling class policy of starving public education and health care of funds.

India has long had a stated objective of boosting government funding for education, which under India’s constitution is a shared central and state government responsibility, to 6 percent of GDP. At present it is barely half that. This week’s budget increased central government education spending by 8 percent or barely more than the inflation rate to 1.1 trillion rupees ($13.4 billion).      

The state of public health care in India is, if anything, an even more unanswerable indictment of the Indian bourgeoisie. The public health care system is in shambles. According to the constitution, every citizen has a right to free health care, but none but the most destitute would turn to a public hospital for care. India’s government spends just $50 billion, or about 1.5 percent of GDP, on providing health care to the country’s 1.4 billion people.

India was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Excess death estimates put the pandemic death toll at more than 5 million, but the government callously clings to the claim that COVID-19 killed “only” 531,000 Indians. In keeping with its prioritization of profits over lives throughout the pandemic, the government is “increasing” health care spending in 2023-24 by just 3.4 percent—a substantial real-terms cut—and slashing the  budget for the Department of Health Research by 6.9 percent.   

Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP: Indian capital’s attack dogs

The Indian ruling class propelled Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP to power in 2014 with the hope and expectation they would run roughshod over popular opposition so as to implement pro-investor “reforms” and more aggressively pursue its predatory ambitions abroad. They have done just that, and at a rapidly accelerating pace since winning re-election in 2019

Over the past three-and-a-half years, the Modi government has dramatically rolled back corporate taxes; initiated a drive to privatize all but a handful of public sector enterprises in “strategic” sectors; launched a scheme to “monetize” public sector infrastructure by hiving off its management and profits to big business; opened the door still wider to contract labour and the casualization of employment; and authored a “labour law reform” that would gut restrictions on plant closures and criminalize most strikes.

This has gone hand in hand with an incessant campaign of communalist incitement aimed at diverting growing social anger against India’s Muslims and other minorities and splitting the working class.

On the world stage, the BJP government, with the enthusiastic support of big business and hardly so much as a peep of criticism from the ostensible opposition has integrated India ever more fully into Washington’s reckless all-rounded diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against China—an offensive the Biden administration has continued to expand even as it and its NATO allies escalate the war with Russia over Ukraine. Over the past two years, India has vastly expanded a web of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-security ties with the US, and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, transforming India into a frontline state in Washington’s confrontation with Beijing.

With the spending increases in the 2023-24 budget, the Modi government will have more than doubled India’s military budget during its nine years in office. Currently, India’s military expenditure is the third largest in the world, although the recent massive armament programs announced by Germany and Japan raise a question mark as to whether this will remain true in coming years.

According to budget documents, the almost $20 billion set aside in the military budget for capital outlays will be used to buy warplanes, warships, missiles, drones, anti-drone systems, combat helicopters, tanks and other weapon systems.

Spending on roads and other infrastructure along India’s northern border with China is also being dramatically increased. This winter for the third year in a row tens of thousands of Indian and Chinese troops, tanks and fighter jets have been forward deployed against each other along the inhospitable Himalayan border, as part of a standoff that began in May 2020 and has flared into violent clashes on several occasions.

Signs of mounting crisis in India’s “world-beating” economy

In delivering the 2023-24 budget, the last full budget before the spring 2024 national election, Finance Minister Sitharaman boasted that India will continue to enjoy, as it did in 2022, the highest growth rate among the world’s largest economies.

There is every reason to believe that the government’s projection that the country’s economy will grow 6.5 percent in the coming year is a gross overestimate—given the imbalances in the world economy, the mountains of state and corporate debt, and the likelihood of a major recession in the US and the other imperialist centres, where central banks have jacked up interest rates to undercut an inflation-driven working class counteroffensive. But even were the growth projection to prove accurate, the BJP’s class war economic policies ensure that social inequality and poverty will continue to grow.

The budget’s massive increase in CAPEX spending itself points to an underlying crisis in the Indian economy. Despite massive tax cuts and other incentives, private capital investment has fallen in recent years, as Indian big business prefers to pay down debt and engage in stock buybacks and other financial manipulations.

Moreover, despite the crowing from the government and corporate elite about the country’s rise, Indian capitalism continues to be outpaced by China. Just the value of China’s annual exports, around $3.5 trillion, is more or less equal to the total GDP of India’s economy. And even as the Modi government has mounted a very public campaign to woo US, Japanese and European firms to relocate from China to India, seeking to exploit the imperialist powers’ push for “friend shoring,” Chinese exports to India have surged.

The greatest threat to the Indian bourgeoisie comes, however, from the working class. 2022 saw a wave of militant worker struggles, including by Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) and Ford India workers. Many of these struggles erupted outside of the control of the Stalinist-led trade unions and parliamentary parties (the CPM and CPI) that for decades have systematically suppressed the class struggle and tied the working class to the Congress Party and other right-wing capitalist parties in the name of fighting the “fascist BJP.”

The BJP government’s class war budget won ringing endorsements from the corporate media and the representatives of various big business lobby groups. However, India’s stock market did not rally as one would expect in the face of such “good news.”

This is because India’s financial markets have been rocked by the global sell-off of shares of the Adani Group companies. In a little over a week since the US-based investment research firm Hindenburg Research accused the Adani Group of fraud and stock price manipulation, its companies’ valuations have fallen by more than 50 percent, wiping out some $120 billion. On Thursday, Reuters noted, “As tycoon Gautam Adani’s woes mount, foreign investors and Indian regulators are abandoning any pretence that the conglomerate’s troubles are contained and domestic markets will be spared contagion.”

As the Reuters report indicates, there are fears that India’s banks and companies, like the partially privatized Life Insurance Corp. of India which has invested in Adani’s companies or lent them money, will be caught in the vortex of its cascading crisis.

The Modi government is also threatened since Adani, who only a few months ago was being feted as Asia’s wealthiest person, is widely considered to be Modi’s closest big business ally, with an association stretching back decades to their native Gujarat.

In typical Modi style, Adani has responded to the accusations of corporate fraud by declaring them an “attack on India.”

Surging inflation in Japan leads to growth of inequality

Misa Boisseau

Japanese workers are being hit hard by rising inflation. As of December, Japan’s core inflation had risen to 4 percent—double the Bank of Japan’s target rate. In December, the United States’ rate was at 6.5 percent while the European Union’s rate was at 9.2 percent.

However, unlike other leading economies, the wages of workers in Japan have been stagnant for almost three decades. According to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), annual wages in Japan have stagnated at around ¥4.4 million ($US38,000) since 1997. Wages in countries like South Korea and Taiwan have overtaken those in Japan, despite the latter’s position as the third largest economy in the world.

Tokyo residents in front of electronic stock board showing Japan’s Nikkei 225 index on Jan. 24, 2023. [AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko]

The yen has also fallen to a 20-year low against the US dollar. Export-driven companies like Toyota have seen their incomes increase as a result of overseas sales, taking in record net profits of ¥2.85 trillion ($US22.25 billion) in the last fiscal year. Over the same period, 1,323 major companies brought in total net profits of ¥33.5 trillion ($US257.5 billion), another record.

Adding to the crisis workers face, in December the government announced plans to double military spending to two percent of GDP over the next five years as a response to the US war against Russia in Ukraine and preparations for war with China. The bill will make Japan the third largest military spender in the world.

Furthermore, COVID-19 continues to run rampant in Japan, with runaway cases and related deaths. Big business, however, is demanding workers foot the bill for the downturn in the economy with increased production and no wage increases.

The Japanese government and media have attempted to blame China’s previous COVID-19 lockdown strategy for the instability of the global supply chain and rising consumer prices. However, global inflation has been fueled by the orgy of speculation on stock exchanges around the world, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the criminal let-it-rip COVID policies—all of which have been actively support by the Japanese ruling class.

In Japan, Tokyo’s longtime financial policies have been a significant contributing factor. “Abenomics,” named for former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the 2013 quantitative easing policy that provides cheap money for businesses, added to Japan’s massive debt, the highest of any developed nation at ¥1.28 quadrillion ($US9.2 trillion), or 266 percent of GDP.

According to Takeshi Niinami, the CEO of Suntory Holdings, “There’s huge pressure from society and the government to raise wages, but we need to increase productivity.” In other words, big business is demanding the increased exploitation of workers’ labor-power, foisting the crisis of capitalism onto the shoulders of workers.

The lower yen has effectively increased the prices of all kinds of basic consumer products while workers’ real wages fell last year. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, in November, real wages fell 3.8 percent compared to the previous year, the biggest drop since May 2014. For workers in rural Japan, who endure even lower wages than those in metropolitan prefectures, the rising cost of oil and gas has especially been a burden.

According to Teikoku Databank, companies raised the prices on more than 20,000 food products in 2022 by an average of more than 13 percent. This trend shows no sign of reversing, in fact, it is predicted to intensify. In a December survey of 46 of the largest consumer product companies in Japan, 59 percent stated they intend to hike prices this year.

For working people who have been used to stable prices for three decades, sharp rises have produced public concern and anger. The BBC cited one example: “When the price of Japan’s everyday snack—umaibo—which was always priced at 10 yen since its creation 43 years ago—went up by 20 percent, it sent a shockwave through the nation.”

The government has responded by advancing a ¥39 trillion ($US 264 billion) economic stimulus package in October 2022. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan, approved by Japan’s corporate elite and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), supposedly assists workers struggling with their household bills. However, most of the money went to subsidies for energy companies and incentives for businesses.

This has not stopped Japan’s electricity companies from planned price increases this spring. Seven of the ten largest energy companies in the country have recently applied to the industry ministry to raise the energy bill for households by 30 to 40 percent over the next fiscal year.

One couple interviewed by NHK in Tokyo explained that their electricity bill for December was already 50 percent higher than the year before, while their gas bill was 20 percent higher. Combined with increased prices for gasoline and groceries, which have each grown by ¥20,000 ($US156), the parents fear they will no longer be able to pay educational expenses for their young daughter.

Japanese workers have voiced their opposition and anger towards these conditions on Twitter. Many were concerned for how the dramatic increase will affect their health in the freezing winter months and the incredible heat of the summer.

“Now electricity bill is gonna increase about 30%? MY GOD how are we supposed to live? It’s not like our paycheck is also gonna increase. Is government telling us we should all die? Are they insane? Like [people] will actually die from this!” writes Chinatsu, an office worker and mother.

Michael, an English teacher and father from Iwate prefecture, wrote, “Got the same news. It’s so friggin immoral to mess with people’s lives like this. And I’m betting the electricity is just the start. Just waiting on gas to come out of their hole too. Soon I'll be paying more than half my rent again in utilities. No more snacks for the kids.” In another tweet, he shared a photo of the letter he received from his regional power company warning of a 32.9 percent increase.

The latest round of record-breaking inflation and price hikes only widens the deep social inequality that exists in Japan. Based on 2020 data, Japan’s poverty rate is the second highest among G7 nations and the 9th highest among OECD countries, according to an OECD survey.

Washington announces basing of US troops in the Philippines

John Malvar

On February 1-2, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited the Philippines where he met with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and announced that Washington would be expanding its military presence in the country under the terms of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) and resuming joint military exercises in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin walks past military guards at the Department of National Defense in Camp Aguinaldo military camp in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines on Thursday February 2, 2023. [AP Photo/Rolex Dela Pena/Pool Photo via AP]

While Washington is waging a war with Russia in Ukraine, most recently announcing the deployment of M1 Abrams battle tanks, it is at the same time preparing for and provoking war with China. Austin’s Asian tour of the past week demonstrated how far advanced these preparations have developed. Prior to his arrival in the Philippines, Austin met with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol who recently publicly spoke of the possible deployment of US nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.

In Manila, Austin declared that China’s “threat to international order” was “unprecedented.” This claim stands reality on its head. It is Washington, not Beijing, that is rapidly ramping up preparations for war in the Pacific. The Biden administration is deploying more fighter jets and bombers to South Korea, shifting US troop deployments in Japan to a more immediate war footing, and restoring military bases in the Philippines, all the while openly targeting China. In the process the White House is deliberately resurrecting Japanese militarism, pushing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to scrap the country’s constitutional limits on armed forces and expand its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. In December 2022, Japan became the third largest military spender in the world.

Washington’s preparations for war with China, are focused above all on Taiwan. The Philippines, immediately to Taiwan’s south, is critical to these plans.

The United States suffered a serious blow to its military presence in the region in 2016, when then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, looking to improve economic ties with China, announced shortly after taking office that he was ending joint military patrols in the disputed South China Sea and putting all implementation of basing arrangements for US forces on hold.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who took office last year, had campaigned claiming that he would continue Duterte’s orientation to China. Within months it was clear that a reorientation back toward Washington was underway. There is profound concern throughout the region that the tensions over Taiwan, stoked by the Biden administration, will erupt into war. The Philippines would inevitably be directly caught up in this conflict. Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Romualdez expressed Manila’s dilemma when he recently told the Associated Press, “We’re in a Catch-22 situation. If China makes a move on Taiwan militarily, we’ll be affected—and all ASEAN region, but mostly us, Japan and South Korea.”

As he had in South Korea, Austin declared to the Philippine press that the US had an “ironclad commitment” to the country. Washington’s expanded military presence, he asserted, “makes both of our democracies more secure.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Washington’s only ironclad commitment is to protect its own imperialist interests. Its military presence destabilizes the region and undermines democracy. The basing of US troops in the country is a direct violation of the Philippine constitution.

The stationing of US forces in the Philippines is already underway. Austin visited Camp Navarro on the southern island of Mindanao, where a US Joint Special Operations Task Force is currently deployed.

Austin announced that the Marcos government was adding four new locations for the forward deployment of US troops and military supplies in addition to an existing five. While the precise locations have not yet been specified, then Philippine Military Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Bartolome Bacarro, told the press in November 2022 that Washington had requested two locations on the Luzon strait, the portion of the country closest to Taiwan.

Austin also stated that the US and Philippine militaries would be resuming the joint military exercises in the disputed South China Sea, which Duterte had ended in 2016. These war games directly target China in waters claimed by Beijing and are very provocative.

While Austin presented the war preparations of Washington as serving some commitment to the defense of “democracy,” he said not a word on human rights or the bloody legacy of the Marcos dictatorship, which is being rehabilitated by Marcos Jr.

With the full backing of Washington, Ferdinand Marcos Sr imposed martial law on the country in 1972 and used its draconian powers to oversee the brutal apparatus of military repression. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Marcos dictatorship, while the United States increased its military aid to his regime and declared its support for his—in the words of then Vice President George H. W. Bush—“adherence to democratic principles.” The paramount concern for Washington was the preservation of its vast military complexes at Clark Airbase and Subic Naval Base.

Marcos Jr has declared that the martial law rule of his father was a “golden age” in Philippine history. Under the current presidency, activists and political dissidents are routinely arrested as “terrorists.” The day before Austin’s arrival in the country, the government’s Anti-Terrorism Council issued a public declaration that a community doctor working with a deeply impoverished indigenous community was a “communist” and a “terrorist,” charges which could likely result in her death in a state-backed extrajudicial assassination. Washington had nothing to say about any of this.

Prior to his election, Marcos Jr faced subpoena and arrest in the United States for contempt of court in a case involving his family’s gross violations of human rights. The Biden White House arranged for Marcos Jr’s safe travel to the United States where the US president held a friendly meeting with him in New York. Washington sheds tears for human rights only when it serves its war aims and imperialist ambitions.

As under the Marcos dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, Washington’s concern in the Philippines is not democracy or human rights but establishing and maintaining a military presence to advance its war plans.

The US bases in the country were a flagrant violation of Philippine sovereignty, a military extension of its neo-colonial rule. The US exercised direct rule over these bases and the millions of US troops stationed on or cycled through them were not subject to Philippine jurisdiction. Scores of Filipinos were killed by US serviceman, thousands raised accusations of rape, but not a single American was prosecuted under Philippine law. A vast network of prostitution and vice grew up around the bases, with the direct support of the US military brass. Washington staged the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from its bases in the Philippines.

In 1991, the Philippine Senate voted to end the lease of the US military bases and the future establishment of foreign military bases in the country was barred by the constitution without the approval of a two-thirds majority of the Senate. It is for this reason that the New York Times wrote that Austin’s announcement would mark “the first time in 30 years that the United States will have such a large military presence in the country.” For 30 years, the basing of US troops in the country has been banned. The Biden and Marcos Jr administrations are poised to reverse that.

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which Austin and Marcos now invoke, is an executive agreement signed by the defense secretary of the Aquino administration and the ambassador of the Obama administration in 2014. It was an end run around the constitution, presenting the basing of US troops as a “rotational presence,” which did not require legislative ratification. In early 2016, the pliant Philippine Supreme Court, duly chastened by corruption charges, ruled that EDCA was constitutional. Washington rapidly moved to deploy troops but Duterte was elected four months later and relations soured. After six long years, with the newly elected Marcos, the United States is moving again to establish bases.

Austin told the press that the EDCA arrangement is not about “permanent basing, but it is a big deal. It’s a really big deal.” The denial that this is permanent basing is a necessary subterfuge to enable the “big deal,” the United States is re-establishing its military bases, critical to its war aims in the Asia Pacific region, in its former colony, the Philippines.

The ten pages of EDCA authorize the deployment of unlimited numbers of US troops and supplies to a set of “agreed locations.” These locations will be governed by the United States. Filipinos will not be allowed to enter any US-controlled location. Only one Filipino military representative will be allowed access, and only with permission secured in advance from the US commander.

US forces are also guaranteed access to all “public land and facilities (including roads, ports, and airfields), including those owned or controlled by local government” as needed. US troops and civilian contractors are subject to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the US government. Should they be accused of a crime, the Philippine legal system will have no jurisdiction over them.

The US will pay no rent for the use of these facilities and if they choose to vacate a facility, the Philippine government is obligated to reimburse the US military for any “improvements.”

These are military bases. No euphemism about “indefinite rotational presence” can disguise this reality. The terms of EDCA smack of a restored colonial presence. Washington is reenacting historic crimes and dredging up the reactionary filth of the past in pursuit of its war ambitions against China.