Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling deal attacks social programs to pay for war

Barry Grey

The debt ceiling agreement announced Saturday night by President Joe Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the outcome of a bipartisan conspiracy, using a manufactured crisis to intensify the assault on social programs and make the working class pay for the war against Russia and war preparations against China.

After nearly three weeks of closed-door talks, Biden and McCarthy hailed an “agreement in principle” that is supposedly the necessary response to the danger of a “catastrophic” default on the national debt that would otherwise take place on June 5.

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California walk down the House steps Friday, March 17, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

The entire crisis over an imminent debt default has a contrived and stage-managed character. This is underscored by the fact that over the past week, the US stock market has registered gains, with the Dow, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 rising sharply on Friday, the price of gold falling, and the US dollar index registering its third straight weekly advance.

The terms of the debt limit deal as outlined by the media completely confirm the analysis presented by the World Socialist Web Site. We wrote on May 16 that “the two big business parties are conspiring to impose a multi-year cap on non-military discretionary spending that will deprive millions of people of health coverage, food assistance, rent support and other necessities.”

The agreement freezes discretionary spending for fiscal year 2024 at current 2023 levels and caps any increase for FY 2025 at 1 percent. It exempts spending for the military and veterans’ benefits. It affirms the 3 percent increase in arms spending proposed by Biden in March as part of a record military budget that will likely surpass $1 trillion, when tens of billions in outlays for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine are included. On May 21, speaking after the G7 summit in Hiroshima at which he announced another $375 million in military aid to Kiev, Biden said his budget proposals in the debt talks would cut non-military discretionary spending by $1 trillion over the next decade.

Since the military is excluded from the spending caps, the impact on social programs will be heightened. Adjusted for inflation, the deal will mean a de facto cut to pre-2023 levels, one of the key demands of the Republicans.

The agreement claws back billions of dollars in unspent COVID relief funds, terminating aid to desperately underfunded education, health care, public transit, nutrition, housing and other social programs.

It shortens the review process for new drilling and energy projects, a boon to the fossil fuel industry.

It imposes new work requirements on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamp) recipients as well as those receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (welfare) benefits. These cuts are deliberately cruel punishments targeting the poor and unemployed. They are nothing new for Biden, who voted for work requirements in the 1996 Clinton administration bill that abolished welfare as a federal entitlement program.

It is estimated that millions of people will lose their benefits as a result of the new work requirements. This comes on top of devastating cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, and food stamps resulting from Biden’s lifting of the national COVID emergency over the past two months. Hundreds of thousands of low-income people have already lost their Medicaid coverage since the COVID-linked ban on states removing people from their Medicaid rolls ended on April 1. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 14 million people will eventually lose Medicaid coverage. These figures include millions of children.

Cuts in food stamp allotments resulting from the end of the official COVID emergency will impact more than 30 million people, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Describing the resulting “hunger cliff,” the Food Research & Action Center warned that people will on average lose $82 of SNAP benefits a month—this under conditions of double-digit food price inflation.

The bipartisan debt deal also excludes any increases in taxes on the wealthy. On the contrary, it rescinds billions of dollars previously allocated to hire more Internal Revenue Service agents to rein in rampant tax evasion by corporations and the rich.

In the flood of reporting and commentary on the debt crisis, nothing is said about the actual sources of the upward spiral of the US national debt. That is because they consist of massive increases in military spending, bank bailouts and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Corporate profits have steadily risen over the past decade, while corporate tax revenues have fallen 60 percent, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Meanwhile, spending on social programs has sharply declined since the Obama-Biden administration imposed a decade of spending caps following the 2008 Wall Street crash and the ensuing multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the financial parasites who caused the crisis.

It must be stressed that the cuts contained in the deal announced by Biden and McCarthy are not one-off measures. Rather, they mark an inflection point in the decades-long attack on the social conditions and living standards of the working class.

Interviewed on the “Fox News Sunday” program, McCarthy touted the deal as “changing the trajectory” of social policy and setting it on “a whole new direction.” While the agreement suspends the debt ceiling for two years—until after the 2024 elections—it includes a provision that automatically imposes an across-the-board 1 percent cut in non-military discretionary spending should Congress fail to pass all 12 federal appropriations bills (an annual occurrence) in any given budget year.

The deal is, moreover, a prelude to attacking the core entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—that remain from the social gains won in the class battles of the 1930s and 1960s. In two editorials published Sunday, the Washington Post drew the connection between the looming assault on these programs and the escalating war in Europe.

The first editorial hailed the debt ceiling deal, but cautioned that non-defense discretionary spending accounts for only 16 percent of government expenditures and “is not a key driver of the nation’s debt problems.” The Post continued:

The refusal of either party to tackle rapidly rising Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs—along with Republicans’ opposition to any tax increases—means the debt limit isn’t forcing the tough choices that are needed.

The second Post editorial laid out the context of protracted and widening war that is driving the ruling class’ intensified assault on social programs. It stated:

That means the burden is on the West to formulate plans for a long-term struggle. Arms supplies, procurement systems and defense budgets will need to reflect that commitment. Kyiv’s forces will need more cruise missiles from its Western allies, more ammunition, more air defense systems, more tanks, more armored vehicles.

The removal of Russia and China as obstacles to US global hegemony, by force of arms, has been the central concern of the Democratic Party since the Obama administration.

After Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021, Biden appealed for bipartisan unity with his Republican “colleagues,” most of whom had supported the coup, and called for a “strong” Republican Party. This was, and is, seen as necessary to maintaining sufficient internal political stability to pursue US imperialism’s war aims.

The “cordial” talks between Biden and Trump coup supporter McCarthy and the resulting agreement to step up the war on the working class are the inevitable outcome of the Democrats’ defense of the increasingly fascistic GOP. Whatever their differences, the two parties of Wall Street and the military agree on the need to crush the mounting resistance of the working class and impose mass poverty.

Erdoğan wins reelection in Turkish presidential elections

Ulaş Ateşçi

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the second round of presidential election yesterday, finishing nearly four points ahead of his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. He has won another five-year term.

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

Erdoğan, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate, won 52.14 percent of the votes, while Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.86 percent. The difference in votes between the two candidates was nearly 2.3 million. Kılıçdaroğlu and his National Alliance conceded last night to Erdoğan.

Erdoğan increased his votes by about 600,000 compared to the first round, while Kılıçdaroğlu’s votes increased by about 830,000. Voter turnout dropped in 80 out of 81 provinces. However, the most notable drop in Kılıçdaroğlu’s votes occurred in Kurdish provinces, where the Kurdish-nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which supported him in both rounds, is the first party in the region.

Erdoğan was ahead in 52 provinces, while Kılıçdaroğlu, who was ahead in 29 provinces, increased his vote in Turkey’s three largest cities: Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. As in the first round, Kılıçdaroğlu came first in the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts and in most Kurdish-majority provinces in the east and southeast. Erdoğan won elections outside these areas and in all provinces except Ankara, Eskişehir and Tunceli.

As the World Socialist Web Site and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu have explained, these elections saw two pro-imperialist right-wing candidates running. Erdoğan’s reelection does not mean that he is popular, or that his policies have popular approval. In reality, Erdoğan, who ran for president for the third time in violation of the constitution, for the first time in his career failed to win the election in the first round, and won by a small margin in the runoff.

Erdoğan has suffered a significant loss due to the opposition among workers and youth to his deadly responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the earthquake disaster on February 6, as well as the worsening cost-of-living crisis amid NATO’s war against Russia. He resorted to a phony “anti-imperialism” and populism to try to stop this decline, taking advantage of his rival’s open orientation to the widely hated NATO imperialist powers. Kılıçdaroğlu had pledged to bring Turkey even deeper into NATO’s war with Russia.

This election result points more to the political bankruptcy of Kılıçdaroğlu’s campaign and its alliance than to Erdoğan’s slim success. NATO’s war on Russia, which increasingly threatens the world with a nuclear catastrophe, played a central role in the election. Kılıçdaroğlu made no secret of his orientation towards the US-led NATO powers, accusing the Russian government of interfering in the elections before the first round without providing any evidence.

Adopting the TÜSİAD business federation’s economic program, Kılıçdaroğlu pledged to develop ties with financial circles in London and New York and proposed an anti-worker austerity program to address the economic crisis.

After the first round on May 14, Kılıçdaroğlu signed an election protocol with the far-right Victory Party. He built his campaign largely around a platform of deporting millions of innocent refugees and waging a “war on terror” targeting Kurds.

The Kurdish-nationalist People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and numerous pseudo-left parties like the Stalinist Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) hailed Kılıçdaroğlu as a “democratic” alternative to the “authoritarian” Erdoğan. But in reality, Kılıçdaroğlu ran a fascistic campaign against refugees, whom he blamed for all the social problems flowing from the capitalist crisis. Yesterday’s election results show that this reactionary appeal to xenophobia and chauvinism did not find support among broad sections of the population.

Erdoğan gave a victory speech at midnight at the presidential palace in Ankara, continuing the populist rhetoric of his campaign. “The winner is not only us, the winner is Turkey,” he said, adding: “We said that when we win, the only losers will be the owners of dirty scenarios about our country and their apparatuses, terrorist organizations and loan sharks.”

Erdoğan denounced his NATO allies who didn’t hide their preference for Kılıçdaroğlu in the election. “Didn’t German, French and British magazines publish covers to beat Erdoğan? They also lost. You have seen the alliances that have been formed against us for months. You have seen who is with whom. They failed and they will not succeed from now on,” he said.

Kılıçdaroğlu also spoke to rule out his resignation as CHP leader, pledging to maintain his bankrupt and reactionary political line. Once again, Kılıçdaroğlu attacked the most vulnerable sections of the population. He declared that he was against refugees, the overwhelming majority of whom live in deep poverty without basic rights, because they “encroach the rights” of Turkish citizens.

“We have witnessed the most unfair election process in recent years. All the resources of the state were mobilized for one political party and one man,” Kılıçdaroğlu claimed, adding: “The CHP and the Nation Alliance are fighting on all fronts with all its possibilities. We will continue to be at the forefront of this struggle until genuine democracy comes to our country. Our march continues and we are here.”

The first reactions of the major NATO powers reflected their plans to involve Turkey, a strategic ally in the Black Sea, in their aggressive policy against Kremlin, to escalate the war with Russia. Accordingly, the leaders of France, Germany and the United States issued messages congratulating Erdoğan.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in Turkish and French, stating: “France and Turkey have immense challenges that we must face together. Let us return to peace in Europe, the future of our euro-Atlantic alliance, and the Mediterranean Sea. With President Erdogan, whom I congratulate for his re-election, we will continue to advance.”

German Chancellor Olaf Sholz also emphasized his willingness to work with Erdoğan. He said, “Germany and Turkey are close partners and allies, our peoples and economies are deeply intertwined. I congratulate President Erdoğan. Together we want to advance our common agenda with new momentum!”

Similarly, US President Joseph Biden declared: “Congratulations to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Türkiye on his re-election. I look forward to continuing to work together as NATO Allies on bilateral issues and shared global challenges.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who congratulated Erdoğan before Turkey’s NATO allies did, expressed his hope that Ankara would continue on its current foreign-policy course. Putin said: “We highly appreciate your personal contribution to strengthening friendly Russian-Turkish relations and mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields. I would like to reaffirm our readiness to continue our constructive dialogue on topical issues of bilateral, regional and international agenda.”

Putin is likely relieved that this election result prevented an even more rabidly hostile candidate, Kılıçdaroğlu, from taking office. However, under Erdoğan, the Turkish government has fully supported NATO and Ukraine politically and militarily, even if it did not join the sanctions the NATO powers imposed upon Russia. Indeed, Erdoğan’s support proved critical to allowing Finland to join NATO against Russia.

Moves by NATO powers to arm Ukraine with F-16s and other advanced weaponry against Russia increasingly threaten to widen the war and lead to direct NATO intervention. Last week, 140 kilometers northeast of the Bosporus, a Russian ship guarding the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines between Russia and Turkey was attacked by Ukrainian naval drones.

The outcome of the elections in Turkey will not solve any problems facing working people in Turkey. It will not resolve the NATO-Russia war a few hundred kilometers to the north or the cost of living crisis rooted in a global surge of inflation. Faced with a deepening economic crisis, the Erdoğan government plans to escalate its social onslaught against the working class, which will inevitably lead to bitter class struggles.

27 gold miners perish in Peru

Rafael Azul

A fire in the Esperanza 1 gold mine in the Arequipa region of southwestern Peru on May 6 killed 27 miners 80 meters below ground. The miners were employed by Servigol, a contingent labor contractor. The mine is owned by the Yanaquihua mining company. All 27 miners died from asphyxiation at midnight on May 6. 

Mine inspectors at site of Esperanza disaster [Photo: Sunafil - OCOM]

It is thought that the mine, filled with explosive gases, exploded due to an electrical spark provoked by a short circuit. Following the explosion the mine’s very flammable wooden support beams caught fire, filling the gallery with smoke. The short circuit appears to have taken place near the mine’s entrance. So far there is no explanation about what caused the short-circuit.

Witnessing the explosion were miners who were leaving the mine, or who had yet to enter it. The Esperanza mine is not small; it consists of nine interconnected galleries that reach down to a depth of 100 meters.

While many gold mines in Peru are illegal, often under the control of organized crime, Esperanza 1 had been approved by the local authorities and passed inspection last November. However, there is no indication that there were any emergency exits, proper ventilation systems, or that the workers possessed the necessary safety equipment. The workers had no means of communicating with the outside world. It took an hour and a half for news of the explosion to reach emergency and police personnel in the city of Arequipa.

Interviewed by the Peruvian daily La Republica, family members waiting to receive the dead described the working conditions of their loved ones. Elvis Sanchez, who had worked only five months in the company, would routinely complain to his family about the way he and his comrades were badly treated. Elvis had suffered an injury shortly before the explosion, but was denied adequate time to heal, according to his aunt.

Willian Cuentas Puma had also warned his family about the unsafe conditions in the electric service to the mine. “He would tell us this, just in case something bad happened,” declared his cousin. 

Last year, Adriel Cadena Huachaca told his family that a worker was hit by a falling rock inside the mine. 

Not since the year 2000 have there been as many casualties in a single mine incident in Peru. However, the totals add up. In 2021, 63 miners died, and another 38 died in 2022. So far this year, including the 27 gold miners, there have been 32 casualties. Over the last ten years there have been 456 deaths on the job, nearly 20 percent of all job related deaths in Peru and the number of deaths continues to rise.

According to Sara Rosa Campos, an expert in Labor Relations at Peru’s Catholic University, the increase in deaths and injuries is a consequence of firms, private and public, increasingly ignoring safety regulations. “Companies prioritize payments of social [insurance] benefits, instead of security and health,” she said. “The latter have been pushed aside and there is not investment in the acquisition of personal protective equipment, or in safety education [of employees].”

Peru is one of the world’s biggest sources of gold, silver and copper. Prices for all three commodities are rising (gold recently surpassed 2,000 US dollars/oz.), and mining corporations are generating extraordinary profits, while wages and working conditions continue to deteriorate. At the same time that stockholders, corporate managers—and government officials—enrich themselves, government oversight agencies (such as the Arequipa Energy and Mines Commission [FEMA]) face shortages of inspectors and funds. In many cases, government agencies subcontract inspectors from the private sector. Regional agencies are starved for funds.

This is not new. In 2014, a report by a government agency, La Defensoria del Pueblo, exposed the absence of personnel and sufficient budgets to inspect mines across Peru.

In the weeks following the explosion at the Esperanza 1 mine, there has been media silence on this terrible incident. Other than an initial demand for an investigation, the Peruvian trade union federations, and the mining unions, have made no statements, let alone called for solidarity strikes by miners and other workers.

Spanish right sweeps regional elections as Podemos vote collapses

Alejandro López

Yesterday, voters went to the polls to elect the members of 8,131 municipal councils and 17 regional legislatures in Spain. The elections were widely seen as a preview of national elections to be held in December. The right-wing Popular Party (PP) carried the elections amid rising support for the far-right Vox party, while the parties in national government, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the pseudo-left Podemos party, suffered a major defeat.

People wait in line to cast their ballots during local elections in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, May 28, 2023. [AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti]

The PSOE lost 500,000 votes compared to the previous elections, falling from 6.7 million to 6.2 million votes, while the PP rose from 5.1 million to 6.9 million votes. The PP alone or in alliance with Vox won every major city in Spain with the exception of Barcelona. It carried Madrid, Valencia, Seville, Valladolid, Palma, Zaragoza, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva and Jaén.

It was a humiliating rebuke to the PSOE-Podemos government, which has championed ultra-right policies during its three years in office. Championing the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, it slashed pensions and wages, pursued a profits-over-lives policy in the COVID-19 pandemic, and massively hiked the military budget and bailouts for major banks and corporations. It also savagely attacked striking truck drivers and metal workers. The result was a collapse in its support.

The most striking feature of the elections was the complete disintegration of the vote for Podemos and its various regional allies and split-offs. Podemos lost all its councilors in Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Tenerife, Burgos, Valladolid, Vigo and Coruña. In Barcelona, Podemos-backed mayor Ada Colau lost her mayorship after eight years.

A similar picture emerges from the elections to Spain’s highly powerful regions, which control spending in key public services including education, housing and health care. Of the 10 regions ruled by the PSOE which went to the polls on Sunday, it only retained Asturias and Castilla-La Mancha. The PP and Vox won in Valencia region, Aragón, Balearic Islands, Cantabria and La Rioja.

At the regional level, Podemos lost 10 regional lawmakers in the Madrid region, and eight in the Valencian parliament, the two most important at stake. Más Madrid, a split from Podemos with a strong presence in Madrid, also collapsed. It lost seven councilors in Madrid city, falling to 12. In the region of Madrid, while it won four regional lawmakers, gaining from Podemos’ losses, its vote actually nonetheless dropped by around 100,000 votes.

Adelante Andalucía, a group led by the Pabloite Anticapitalistas faction of Podemos lost the mayorship of Cádiz to the PP, collapsing from 13 to six councilors and is left without representation in all the other important cities of Andalusia. The Pabloites played a treacherous role during the repression of the Cádiz metalworkers’ strike in November 2021.

The election campaign was a degraded spectacle, an expression of the relentless move to the right of European bourgeois politics. The PP and the far-right Vox party have mostly absorbed the vote of liberal right-wing Citizens. In 2019, Citizens obtained 1.9 million votes, while yesterday it barely received 300,000. Podemos and its various split-offs avoided any discussion on the war and social inequality, centering their campaign on identity politics and issues promoted by the far-right.

The first week of the two-week campaign was dominated by denunciations of the largely extinct Basque armed group ETA, which ceased to exist 12 years ago. However, EH Bildu, a Basque separatist party, fielded candidates who previously belonged to the petty-bourgeois group. ETA’s terror attacks, and even existence, were used for decades as an opportunity to clamp down on democratic rights.

While the PP and Vox called to outlaw Bildu, the PSOE and Podemos participated in this right-wing charade. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described Bildu’s move as “legal, but not decent” and the deputy of Podemos for Vizcaya, Roberto Uriarte, demanded that those convicted of “blood crimes” be withdrawn.

The second week was dominated by the “squatting problem,” denouncing squatters to cover the real issue of housing affordability and the lack of rental housing. High rents, coupled with poor salaries and job precariousness, prevent many youth from leaving their parents’ homes.

The political periphery of Podemos participated in this debate, calling for police action against squatters. In an interview with right-wing daily El Mundo, Rita Maestre, candidate for mayor to Madrid for a Podemos split-off, More Madrid, said that “squatting is illegal and creates problems for social harmony.” Maestre infamously called it “a pleasure and a pride” for Madrid to host the NATO summit last year, where the main imperialist powers plotted war on Russia and China.

In Barcelona, Podemos-backed mayor Colau endorsed police repression, after a video emerged showing municipal riot police beating two after-school activities educators. Colau, once dubbed a “mayor of change,” is notorious for slashing spending, attacking striking public transport workers and persecuting migrants.

Last year, she met far-right Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klichkó, in Ukraine, committing aid money and fire trucks, while denouncing Putin’s “crimes against humanity” and exclaiming, “Ukraine is Europe.”

Throughout the campaign, Podemos and its new split-off, Sumar, doubled down on identity politics. Yolanda Díaz, deputy prime minister and future candidate for the general elections in December, participated in an election debate on prime-time television. Congratulating herself that only women were attending the debate, she said, “men are bred to fight in wars. They are very warrior-like,” adding that heterosexual men are boring.

Díaz is part of a government that is training and arming Ukrainian soldiers to fight Russia on NATO’s behalf, while doubling the presence of Spanish troops in Eastern Europe.

On COVID-19, Podemos centered its criticism of right-wing regional premier of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, on corruption, rather than the profits-for-lives policy in the region that killed over 11,000 elderly people. They were left to die in the cruelest conceivable way in nursing homes. Podemos was silent on this, however, as it implemented the same policy at the national level, costing 160,000 lives and millions of infections.

The regional elections were widely interpreted as setting the stage for the general election to be held in December. The survival of the PSOE-Podemos government is now highly questionable. There is also the possibility of a far-right coalition of the conservative Popular Party (PP) and the neo-fascist Vox taking power—the first time the far-right would return to power since the collapse of General Franco’s fascist dictatorship in the 1970s.

There is explosive, left-wing opposition in the working class to the policies of the PSOE-Podemos government. However, in the vacuum created to the left of Podemos by pseudo-left parties that support Podemos and work to block the formation of any organization challenging Podemos on its left, the possibility of a right-wing victory is real and growing.

Henry Kissinger and the crimes of American imperialism

Patrick Martin

I met Murder on the way 
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

A commentary in the liberal Jewish publication Forward suggests that these lines from Shelley, directed against Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary British foreign minister of his time, would apply equally well to Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who turned 100 years old on Friday, May 27.

It is a more than justified comparison of two enemies of human freedom and social revolution. Castlereagh defended the British Empire and sought to suppress revolution in its colonies, especially Ireland, and destroy the legacy and influence of the French Revolution.

Kissinger has devoted his long life to the defense of American imperialism and the destruction of the legacy and influence of the Russian Revolution. He may have been born a German Jew and escaped the Holocaust when his family fled to America, but he allied himself with the very forces that had sponsored and cheered on Hitler, and which encouraged Hitler’s imitators in fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world.

As Kissinger once remarked—with the cynicism that became a trademark and passed for “wit” among his admirers in bourgeois political and media circles—“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an anti-Semite.”

At a meeting of top Turkish and US officials in Ankara in 1975, after Kissinger suggested that the Nixon administration could arrange to have allies provide critical military supplies to Turkey after a congressional vote banned US aid, the US ambassador blurted out, “That is illegal.” 

Kissinger replied, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The secret transcript of this meeting was only made available by WikiLeaks in 2011, 36 years later.

Kissinger’s crimes

Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy, as national security adviser and then secretary of state, from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.

At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm, or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against Communism.

The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.

The war crimes in southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.

In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.

In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.

It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”

A tank in support of Augusto Pinochet approaches the government palace during the 1973 coup. [Photo by @goodvibes11111 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.

There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.

Kissinger’s legacy

In world geopolitics, Kissinger is most identified with the policy of taking advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China, both under Stalinist rule, as these bureaucratic police states vied with each other for global influence, a reactionary nationalist conflict that even erupted into military clashes along the border between Chinese Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.

The central thrust of Kissinger’s simultaneous embrace of détente with Moscow and ending the decades-long US policy of non-recognition of Beijing was to enlist the aid of the Stalinists against revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. It is this policy which is the most celebrated in US imperialist circles and accounts for Kissinger’s ability to exert continued influence decades after he left office.

When the Nixon-Ford administration ended its eight years in office, and Democrat Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he publicly pledged to make the defense of “human rights” the basis of US foreign policy. This was aimed at counteracting the stench of Kissinger’s crimes. However, nothing changed but the packaging. The crimes of American imperialism were now embellished with cynical references to the “humanitarian” concerns supposedly determining the actions of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.

In later years, Kissinger’s accomplices in the Nixon-Ford administration constitute a who’s who of American war criminals. While Kissinger was secretary of state, George H. W. Bush, the future president, was CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff and then secretary of defense, returned to the Pentagon in 2001, where he oversaw US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and in 2001 was vice president to George W. Bush and the principal warmonger in that administration.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.

As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”

We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:

Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Today this opprobrium is expressed on the internet, as the Washington Post noted in an article Sunday in its Style section, which cited the widespread social media preparation to celebrate Kissinger’s inevitable death and the overwhelming disgust and hatred for his crimes among millions of young people who were not even born when he headed the State Department.

For the most part, the media has been nervous about commenting on Kissinger’s 100 years, fearing the implications of any, even sanitized, review of his record. In a noteworthy and particularly guilty silence, the New York Times has not yet published an article on the subject.

It is a demonstration of how far to the right American foreign policy has moved that in recent years, Kissinger has been cited occasionally as a “moderate” critic of undue American aggressiveness, particularly in relation to China. (He is a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine). In his 2012 volume, On China, he warned that the US was adopting the same policy towards China as imperial Britain toward rising Germany in the period leading up to World War I, which made open military conflict inevitable.

There is no doubt, however, of the deeply reactionary character of his politics. In 1985, he publicly supported Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Waffen-SS military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where the US president laid a wreath.

In 1973, he made a revealing remark to Richard Nixon, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pressed him on the question of permitting Soviet Jews to leave the USSR (with the hope they would settle in Israel). The tape, made public only in 2010, has Kissinger declaring, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

A much earlier work, Necessity for Choice, published in 1961 when he was an academic “expert” on foreign policy at Harvard, sums up his world view: “No more urgent task confronts the free world than to separate itself from nostalgia from the period of its invulnerability and to face the stark reality of a revolutionary period.”

It is this hatred and fear of revolution and determination to crush it that underlies every crime with which the centenarian Kissinger—and the myriad imperialist politicians who consulted him, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—is identified.

While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.

Pentagon sending troops to train Peruvian coup regime’s killers

Bill Van Auken

The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon’s overseer for Latin America and the Caribbean, will be sending hundreds of Marines and special forces troops to Peru beginning as early as this week, to train military and Peruvian National Police special forces units. These same forces have carried out massacres and extra-judicial executions to suppress the mass protests against the coup regime of Dina Boluarte.

Peru's National Police special forces unit, which has played a major role in the martial law repression. [Photo: @PoliciaPeru]

Peru’s Congress, dominated by the ultra-right Fuerza Popular party and its allies, approved the US deployment by a two-to-one margin earlier this month. Congress has joined with the Boluarte regime and the judiciary in consolidating an authoritarian state to suppress Peru’s restive working class and oppressed masses.

The repression of the mass upheavals that began last December in response to the ouster and arrest of President Pedro Castillo has resulted in an official death toll of nearly 70, many of the victims killed by live fire from the police and the military. Many hundreds more have been grievously wounded.

The dispatch of US troops to Peru, while largely blacked out by both the Peruvian and US media, constitutes an unmistakable demonstration of support on the part of the Biden administration and the Pentagon for this bloody repression. It is also a bid to exploit the crisis gripping the country to further American imperialist dominance in the region, using military means.

Peru’s top prosecutor has summoned Boluarte to testify next week in an inquiry opened at the start of this year into her alleged role in the deaths of protesters killed in clashes with security forces after Castillo’s ouster. She, along with top government ministers, are supposedly being investigated over alleged crimes of “genocide, aggravated homicide and serious injury.”

A report issued last week by Amnesty International, however, strongly suggests that this probe is a sham. It states that Peru’s Attorney General’s office has yet to question a single member of the Peruvian security forces involved in the mass killings, while a “lack of resources, experts and prosecutors allocated to these cases, plus a series of institutional measures taken by the Attorney General ... have undermined investigation and the collection of key evidence.”

The Amnesty report states that the use of live ammunition against unarmed protesters across four separate regions of Peru suggested the “responsibility of the most senior commanders, at least, of the Peruvian Nationalist Party and the Peruvian Army” in a “deliberate and coordinated state response” to drown the social protests in blood. It further charged that Boluarte and her ministers worked to “stigmatize” those being killed. They made “baseless statements that branded protesters as terrorists and praised the actions of the Peruvian security forces.”

In reviewing the casualties in the conflict zones of Andahuaylas, Chincheros, Ayacucho and Juliaca, Amnesty identified a number of those killed as 15- and 16-year-old youth. Hilaria Aime Gutiérrez, mother of Christopher Ramos, killed by the military in Ayacucho, told the human rights group, “How can a 15-year-old child be a terrorist? How can a child who saved money every day to get ahead be a terrorist? (...) You cannot treat an adolescent like this, he was my little one, my beloved child.”

Amnesty International warned that, as a result of recent laws and amendments passed by the right-wing Congress, Peru’s security forces enjoy a level of impunity that allows those “responsible for serious violations of human rights to escape justice.”

This impunity has only been widened with a recent ruling by Peru’s supreme court that there effectively exists no right to protest under Peru’s constitution, which was imposed by the dictatorial regime of Alberto Fujimori in 1993. The ruling was handed down in rejecting an appeal of four people convicted for participation in blocking trucks at the Las Bambas mining project, a common form of protest by peasant communities against the ravaging of their lands by the transnational mining corporations.

The high court found that any protest that “could” infringe upon anyone’s rights or upon the workings of Peru’s capitalist economic system—even if peaceful—constitutes criminal activity.

The Amnesty report follows another issued last month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), of which Peru is a member. It likewise found the Peruvian police and army guilty of “excessive, indiscriminate and lethal use of force” in suppressing protests across the south of the country in December and January, following the ouster of Castillo. It also condemned the Boluarte regime for “the stigmatization” of peasants and indigenous peoples with the false accusations that they were “terrorists”, thereby justifying the massacres.

A similar conclusion was reached by Nyaletsossi Voule, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the rights to peaceful assembly and association in a statement at the end of a recent 10-day official visit to Peru: “Excessive and disproportionate use of force led to the killing and injury of protestors and bystanders during the protests that began in December 2022.” He further insisted that “those responsible for human rights violations during the protests are effectively held to account.” Nothing of the kind, of course, has taken place.

This, then, is the pariah regime and its security forces to which the US military and the Biden administration is preparing to provide “support and assistance.” US troops are to be deployed to some of the same regions where streets were awash with blood and where new strikes and protests are being organized and prepared. They are being sent to help prop up a regime that is overwhelmingly hated by the Peruvian masses. The highest approval rating Boluarte has received in recent polls is 16 percent, while that of Congress is even lower.

Even as troops are being prepared for deployment to Peru, US SOUTHCOM on May 23 announced the appointment of a Peruvian general, Brig. Gen. Marco Marín, as the deputy commanding general-interoperability for US Army South, ensuring the closest collaboration between the Pentagon and Peru’s repressive security forces.

There is no question of mistaken identity involved here. The Boluarte regime was brought to power with the direct connivance of Washington. The US ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna, a CIA veteran and former top aide to Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on the very eve of the parliamentary coup that brought down Castillo, organized a meeting with Peruvian Defense Minister Gustavo Bobbias to ensure that the military would cast its deciding vote in favor of overthrowing the Peruvian president.

US SOUTHCOM’s Peruvian expedition exposes the rank hypocrisy of Washington’s incessant invocation of “human rights” as a cover for the pursuit of its imperialist interests, from Ukraine, to the Pacific and Latin America itself.

In Peru, these interests are obvious. The country is the world’s second-largest producer of copper, expected to mine 2.8 million tons this year. Exploration has begun in the southern region of Puno near the border with Bolivia for lithium deposits. Both metals are of strategic importance in the race for developing electric vehicles and “clean” energy. Peru is also an important producer of gold, zinc, silver and natural gas.

China has eclipsed the US as Peru’s main trading partner, while it has extensive investments in mining as well as in the development of infrastructure, including the only Chinese-run port in Latin America. Beijing and Lima have a free-trade agreement, and Peru has become part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to China’s embassy in Peru, trade between the two countries topped $37 billion in 2021, more than double the amount between Peru and the US. For Latin America as a whole, trade with China has soared from $12 billion in 2000 to $495 billion in 2022.

The support for the coup regime and the deployment of troops in Peru is part of Washington’s strategy in the hemisphere. It is based upon a reliance on militarism and support of the region’s counterrevolutionary oligarchies to offset the dramatic erosion of US economic hegemony—all the while mouthing phrases about “human rights” and “democracy”.

In Peru, where six presidents have been ousted in five years and virtually every major political figure is implicated in corruption scandals, Washington is seeking to build up the military as an instrument for dominating the state and carrying out counterrevolutionary repression, while serving as a US-aligned counterbalance to China’s economic influence.  

US imperialism’s determination to turn Latin America into a battlefield in the drive toward a third world war poses immense dangers to the masses of working people in the region. The US is reviving its well-worn methods of militarism, coups and dictatorship in its attempt to reassert hegemony in a region it long viewed contemptuously as its “own backyard”.

Bitter experience has proven that these threats cannot be countered by reliance on supposedly “left” bourgeois politicians and parties. From Castillo in Peru, to the PT in Brazil, the Boric government in Chile and elsewhere in the region, the so-called “pink tide” governments have only paved the way to the rise of the most right-wing forces and intensified attacks upon the working class.

Taiwan’s Quest to Upgrade Its Battle Readiness Continues to Evolve

John P. Ruehl

Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s growing strength have accelerated Taiwan’s military overhaul. Taipei is exploring multiple ways to enhance its security, but unorthodox methods risk escalation.

In early May 2023, a U.S. delegation consisting of 25 defense contractors arrived in Taiwan for a security summit, aimed to increase interoperability between the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries. It marks the latest step toward Taiwan’s years-long efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities and pose credible deterrence to the Chinese military.

The military relationship between Taiwan and the U.S. expanded significantly during the Trump administration. Washington approved major arms sales, increased cooperation with the Taiwanese military, and conducted more naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait to emphasize the U.S. position on Taiwan. During the Biden administration, it was revealed that dozens of U.S. military personnel were training Taiwanese forces on the island since at least 2020, numbers which have increased since.

And while conscription was previously considered an outdated military policy characteristic of the Cold War, the war in Ukraine has reversed this notion. Taiwan’s attempted transition to Western-style volunteer force in previous years now appears far less credible in being able to realistically oppose the Chinese military, and Taiwan’s government has since reverted to upholding its military reserve system.

But though Taiwan’s 1.7 million reservists appear to form a formidable challenge to China’s roughly 2 million active military personnel, Taiwan’s forces largely exist only on paper. Its military currently only has 169,000 active military members and an estimated 300,000 combat-ready reservists, according to Wang Ting-yu of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

The Taiwanese government was therefore quick to explore increasing training times for reservists after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and in December 2022 lengthened conscription from four months to one year, bringing praise from the U.S. By boosting pay and training, the Taiwanese government hopes to bolster its forces and bring it closer to South Korea’s 18-month compulsory military service.

But China’s population of 1.4 billion dwarfs Taiwan’s mere 23 million, meaning additional Taiwanese conscription initiatives are futile if China resorts to additional conscription as well. Taiwan’s $19 billion defense budget also pales in comparison to the $230 billion spent by Beijing.

Washington’s hypothetical efforts to resupply the relatively isolated island of Taiwan during a conflict would meanwhile prove far more difficult than the ongoing Western effort to assist Ukraine. While stockpiling weapons could partially negate this issue, a prolonged conflict or blockade of Taiwan by China would steadily diminish Taiwan’s ability to continue fighting.

With the inherent disadvantages of the Taiwanese armed forces and the unwillingness of even the U.S. to officially commit to the island’s defense, Taiwan’s government has explored increasing engagement with the private sphere to ensure its security. The May 2023 U.S. contractors’ visit was just part of Taiwan’s recent efforts to increase engagement with both domestic and foreign private military firms.

Before the breakout of conflict in Ukraine in 2022, Taiwan had taken incremental steps toward greater privatization in its defense sector, such as privatizing the state aircraft manufacturer Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation in 2014.

However, the war in Ukraine completely altered the Taiwanese government’s view of private war. Russian private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been active in Ukraine since 2014, while the Russian PMSC known as Wagner has played an essential part in the war and in Russian propaganda. Various Western and Russian PMSCs are also fighting in Ukraine, while Chinese civilian drones have been used to great effect by both sides.

The Taiwanese government has since taken significant steps in engaging with Taiwan’s private sector to increase drone production. But more notable are the proposed changes to the Private Security Services Act, which regulates PMSCs operating in Taiwan, early into the war. Taipei has various types of private services to consider, such as those providing security, consulting, and training services, intelligence gathering, logistics support, and cyber and maritime security.

Enoch Wu, a politician from Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party and a former special operations soldier, founded the security and civilian defense organization Forward Alliance in 2020. Alongside programs to treat injuries and respond to crises, Forward Alliance’s combat training programs expanded significantly following the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The number of Taiwanese private programs run by various companies “specializing in urban warfare and firearms training” has also increased since the start of the war, according to Voice of America.

In September 2022, Taiwanese entrepreneur Robert Tsao pledged to spend $100 million training 3 million soldiers over three years in the Kuma Academy (also known as the Black Bear Academy). While his claims are ambitious, Russian billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin’s financing of Wagner has already played an integral role in the war in Ukraine, at the same time drastically increasing his stature in Russia and notoriety abroad.

Due to its own limited industry, any Taiwanese effort to promote greater military cooperation with the private sphere would require Western assistance. The U.S. scrapped its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1979 to normalize relations with China but the Taiwan Relations Act enables the U.S. to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, and privatization could make it easier for the West to support the Taiwanese military. Alongside weapons deals, Western PMSCs like G4S have been active in Taiwan for more than two decades and could quickly expand their operations on the island.

Greater cooperation with Western PMSCs may not be able to help Taiwan repel a Chinese assault. But they could complement Taiwanese military efforts to create a volunteer force modeled on Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force and advocated by former Taiwanese defense chief Admiral Lee Hsi-min. The U.S. has explored developing guerilla forces in the Baltic States to harass Russian forces if they were to invade, and growing the multiple private initiatives already underway in Taiwan could form a powerful guerilla network that could remain active even if Taiwan’s military is forced to stand down.

But committing to privatization has its own consequences for Taiwan. The role of Chinese PMSCs abroad has grown significantly over the last few years, with an estimated 20 to 40 Chinese active largely to guard Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure projects. However, China’s 7,000-plus PSMCs operating domestically “suggests ample opportunity for the future growth of internationally active” Chinese firms according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, while Chinese law prohibits them from using force abroad except for defense, Beijing’s assertion that Taiwan is part of China’s territory could erode legal and political barriers to using them.

In recent years, China has also deputized maritime militias of fishing boats to swarm parts of the South China Sea and establish control over certain areas. By collaborating with Chinese PMSCs, these militias could even avoid Taiwan and surround the Kinmen, Matsu, or uninhabited Pratas islands. Although these islands are claimed by Taiwan, they are geographically closer to China. This could be justified on the grounds of economic interests or security concerns. The use of these fishing militias to harass Taiwan could make up for significant underdevelopment in Chinese PMSC capabilities and help China to avoid using its official military forces.

The scale of cooperation between the Taiwanese government and private military actors is so far limited. But Taiwan’s manpower shortages and lack of official military and diplomatic ties have made the prospect of private military assistance far more attractive. The lack of international regulations sustaining Taiwan’s recent increased engagement with the private military sphere, however, will further encourage China to respond in kind.

Ukrainian oligarchs had turned to PMSCs to protect their assets in Ukraine after 2014, while Ukraine has come to heavily lean on foreign PMSCs to supplement the war effort. Wagner and other Russian PMSCs have meanwhile grown in importance to Russian military efforts in Ukraine as well. The growing power of PMSCs in Ukraine, as well as worldwide, suggests further military privatization of the dispute over Taiwan may be inevitable.