Colombia’s President Petro warns of “soft coup” attempt

Andrea Lobo

At a march in Bogotá on June 7, the pseudo-left Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned about a “soft coup” attempt against him, as his administration faces a corruption scandal, a breakdown of the ruling coalition, a drop in popularity and open coup threats by retired military officials and opposition groups.

Petro marches with the military leadership during the inauguration of his MInister of Defense, Ivan Velasquez, August 20, 2022. [Photo: @infopresidencia]

Petro said in his speech that he could face a similar fate as Peruvian President Pedro Castillo, who was overthrown last December in a US-backed parliamentary coup. But he added: “Pedro Castillo was alone, and Petro is not alone: if they dare to destroy democracy, the people will come out of every corner, street and district, out of every rock, to defend with its hands the popular mandate.” He concluded demagogically that his “government is at your service until death” and that he has “introduced the reforms the people want,” and it’s up to Congress to approve them.

After a demonstration by retired troops against Petro last month, the former chairman of the Association of Retired Military Officials (Acore), John Marulanda, declared that reservists would do their best to repeat what took place in Peru and “defenestrate” Petro. 

Then, on June 8, several right-wing opposition groups demanded Petro’s resignation in a demonstration convoked by a fascistic businessman, who called for stopping Colombia “from falling in the hands of the Communists.” 

On June 7, thousands demonstrated across Colombia against these threats and to demand the reforms Petro promised. However, the president’s approval rate has dropped dramatically less than a year into his term, from over 50 percent last November to 26 percent just before the latest scandal.

Moreover, while a slight majority of Colombians views his labor bill positively, over 60 percent oppose his overall reform proposals, according to a May poll by Invamer. 

With the support of the trade unions and pseudo-left, Petro was able to channel a series of mass social explosions and general strikes in 2019, 2020 and 2021 against social inequality, the homicidal “let it rip” response to COVID-19, and the brutal repression which left close to 100 protesters dead, hundreds “disappeared” and many more injured.

But it has not taken long before most of his supporters have concluded that he is not going to significantly impinge on the wealth and properties of the financial, corporate and landowning elites. Simultaneously, a section of the ruling elite has decided that his “left” populism, which rests heavily on identity politics, and his inadequate reform proposals are failing to suppress social opposition and the class struggle, as shown by the collapse in his popularity.

The demonstration on June 7 was convoked by the trade union bureaucracy to protest that legislators are using the corruption scandal to discard Petro’s reform proposals. These consist of: 1) a healthcare bill that promises to expand the network healthcare primary services but will only serve to provide new subsidies for the mostly privatized healthcare providers; 2) a pension bill that would cover the massive deficit of the privatized pension funds with public money while transferring most pensioners to the state pensions and expanding coverage (the campaign promises of handing a meager US$120 per month to all elderly Colombians without a pension and to guarantee a living pension were abandoned), and 3) a labor bill that would enshrine in law the 8-hour day, a night shift differential and wage parity between men and women.

Revelations emerged in the last two weeks that Petro’s chief of staff Laura Sarabia had wiretapped her nanny and that his ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, threatened to disclose illegal campaign financing to Petro’s campaign. Both officials belonged to Petro’s closest circle and have been fired.

The right-wing weekly Semana, which has led the exposures, published a series of audios and text messages between Petro, Sarabia and Benedetti. The former ambassador threatened to disclose the presumably illegal source of $3.5 million in campaign money. “We are going to jail… With all the shit that I know, we’ll all be fucked. If you fuck me, I’ll fuck you,” he said to Sarabia.

In text messages to Petro, Benedetti accused Sarabia of leaking information and slandering Benedetti to the press. After being terminated, Benedetti kept bitterly attacking Sarabia while claiming he has drug problems and acted out of “rage and drinking.” He then decided to cool off by traveling to Istanbul to see the football final of Europe Champions League.

This was a Petro’s official in charge of organizing with the Biden administration a diplomatic rapprochement with the Venezuelan government. In one of the audios to Sarabia, published by Semana, Benedetti boasted of his “excellent relations with the US Department of State, but I can’t tell you about that, but it’s not like I’m becoming a spy…”

In response to the scandal, the US State Department reaffirmed the Biden administration’s “excellent partnership with Colombia under the Petro administration.” 

While the illegal wiretapping so casually employed by the 29-year-old Sarabia has raised suspicions of whether the government is employing such measures more widely, the far-right opposition is using the scandal in the most hypocritical fashion. Their political leader, former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), was found to regularly spy on politicians, activists, journalists, and judges, and the military was exposed for wiretapping politicians, judges and journalists under the Uribista administration of Iván Duque (2018-2022). 

Regarding illegal campaign financing, indictments were filed on Monday against former Uribista presidential candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga and a minister under the Liberal-led administration of Juan Manuel Santos as part of millions of dollars in campaign money and kickbacks from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, in a corruption scandal that has implicated the entire political establishment in Colombia and across Latin America. 

The longstanding ties between Uribe and drug cartels were repeatedly reported in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. These also acknowledged widespread extrajudicial executions by the military, and the collaboration of the armed forces and Uribe directly with fascist paramilitary militias that massacred peasants for land grabs, but Washington continued to send billions in military aid, ostensibly to fight drug trafficking and defend democracy. 

The Sarabia-Benedetti scandal, nonetheless, has offered an excuse for the main forces in Congress, including within Petro’s “Historic Pact” coalition, to put a hold on the reform proposals and describe his government as “illegitimate.” 

Meanwhile, Petro is seeking to exploit the rescue of four indigenous children who survived 40 days alone in the Colombian Amazon after a plane crash to try to boost his image and provide a progressive varnish to the armed forces, whose search teams worked with the indigenous communities. “The joining of forces for a common good: the indigenous guard and the Armed Forces of Colombia… that is the true path to peace,” Petro tweeted after visiting the children at a military hospital.

This followed a trip to Cuba, where he signed a ceasefire with the ELN (National Liberation Army) Colombian guerrilla group as part of Petro’s plan for a “total peace,” even as the military and paramilitary fascist groups keep massacring peasants and disarmed, former guerrilla leaders.  

Petro was a member of the M-19 guerrilla movement, which laid down its weapons in 1990 and became a bourgeois party along with sections of Stalinist guerrillas that formed the Patriotic Union (UP). The Colombian state, working closely with US forces, collaborated with paramilitary forces to kidnap and kill thousands of M-19 and UP rank-and-file and leaders. Just last month, from his prison cell in the US, the paramilitary leader at the time, Salvatore Mancuso, acknowledged that the state intelligence office had given him the order to murder Petro himself, who was elected to Congress in 1991.

One of his main campaign promises last year was a “police reform” to eliminate the Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD) implicated in many killings and transfer the police from the Defense Ministry to the Interior Ministry. But even such window-dressing has been de-prioritized by the administration due to “difficulties” in even presenting it to Congress. 

Instead, the ESMAD was simply renamed to the “Unit for Dialogue and Policing,” and it has kept repressing protests. So far this year, according to official records, it has intervened 2,731 times in demonstrations or gatherings and used force 211 times. As recently as June 8, in response to the injury of an officer during clashes with students protesting at the National University, Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez demanded that the unit “enter and detain these criminals,” which would have been the first police invasion of a campus since 1984. While the request was denied, the incident shows the repressive frenzy building up in the ruling class. 

Petro has also tried to regain popularity by criticizing the economic and anti-immigrant policies of US imperialism, even as he vows to “consolidate” Colombia’s strategic partnership with NATO. 

Along with Lula in Brazil and other so-called “Pink Tide” governments, Petro has promoted the renewal of regional commercial deals like UNASUR that circumvent the dollar, but even during the commodity boom in the early 2000s, the ruling elites failed to establish any real “integration.” Such initiatives are undermined at every turn by competition, nationalist chauvinism, and efforts to attack wages and working conditions locally and offer the most profitable conditions to foreign capital.

Meanwhile, the union bureaucracy and pseudo-left are working to channel opposition behind the government by falsifying its capitalist class character. A particularly criminal role is being played by the Socialist Workers Party (PST), which has claimed to represent “Trotskyism” in Colombia since the 1970s, when it was founded by the renegade Nahuel Moreno.

The Colombian Morenoites have endorsed Petro repeatedly and concluded from the recent social explosions that workers must pressure Petro to “expropriate the expropriators,” suggesting that he could be pressured into leading a socialist revolution. The PST opposed participating in the pro-Petro demonstration last week due to the corruption scandals. Instead, on June 7 it called on Petro to kick out Benedetti and other particularly discredited politicians, while writing: “We demand the government to break with the bourgeoisie and transfer power to the workers to advance toward the fundamental changes required.” 

Strikes and mass protests led by teachers erupt across Argentina

Rafael Azul & Andrea Lobo

In the Argentine province of Salta, on the border with Bolivia and Chile, the local legislature has rammed through a law that criminalizes any form of social protest that may restrict other freedoms, including strikers’ picket lines, roadblocks and mass gatherings. 

The misnamed “Citizen coexistence and conciliation” law is aimed at repressing an ongoing mass upsurge by teachers and healthcare workers in Salta, which has involved six weeks of wildcat strikes, roadblocks across major mining routes, and mass demonstrations.

“Once heroes, now criminals.” Healthcare workers demonstrate in Salta [Photo: @Magnum_Buzz]

Similar bills are being discussed by legislators in neighboring Jujuy, where teachers have been striking for over a week and leading demonstrations that have faced heavy repression.

Even before the law was passed, educators in Salta were repeatedly and brutally attacked by police, while suspected strike leaders were singled out, persecuted and arrested.

On Saturday, a “self-convoked” assembly of workers, organized in defiance of the union bureaucracy that opposes their protest actions, voted to continue the strike and mobilizations and reject an offer made by Salta’s right-wing governor, Gustavo Saenz, which would have raised the starting monthly wage for teachers to 203,000 pesos per month and ignored all other demands.

This is well below the 320,000 pesos (or US$662, according to the more accurate black market “dollar blue”) and automatic cost-of-living adjustments demanded by teachers in accordance with the cost of the basic basket of goods. Strikers have also demanded the revocation of what they’ve called the “anti-picketing law,” the dropping of all charges against the 19 strikers who were arrested and later freed, and major budget increases. 

While teachers across Argentina are being repressed by state and federal authorities even without such legislation, the fast-tracking of the anti-picketing law by Salta authorities in response to demands by business groups represents a warning to workers across the country and internationally. The bill was backed by legislators from both main factions of the political establishment, the coalition of Peronist President Alberto Fernandez and those belonging to the openly right-wing coalition led by former President Mauricio Macri. Governor Saenz has backed both factions.

Forty years after the fall of Argentina’s savage military junta, and in the context of financial demands from the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street, as well as the political demands of US imperialism to align behind its confrontation with Russia and China, the ruling class is once again responding to the growing struggles of the working class with a turn to dictatorship and police-state repression.

Currently, striking teachers are mobilizing in seven of Argentina’s 23 provinces (Jujuy, Salta, Misiones and Formosa in the north; Santa Cruz and Chubut in the south; and Buenos Aires in the center). Protests are taking place independently of and in opposition to the trade unions that claim to “represent” them.

Teachers are raising vital demands over wages and working conditions as Argentina’s chronic inflationary crisis has accelerated and is predicted to reach 150 percent this year, severely impacting poverty rates and teachers’ living standards, even as share prices are skyrocketing on the Merval stock market index.

What is also at stake in these struggles is the defense of public schools and public hospitals, whose services and infrastructure are seeing a rapid deterioration to finance this transfer of wealth to the ruling elite.

Striking Chubut teachers have described deplorable conditions in their Patagonian schools, for example, with classrooms that lack heating and the absence of transportation for students. Teachers also describe being owed months of back pay and not being able to pay their rent and utility bills.

A recent report from Buenos Aires’ Catholic University (Universidad Católica Argentina, UCA) shows a record number of citizens in poverty, 18 million or 43 percent of the population. Over 3 million, or 8 percent of the population, face food insecurity. These numbers have been increasing since 2010. Government welfare allotments have not kept up with the increasing poverty rates.

Teachers are also demanding more money for in-school nutrition programs that have not kept up with the increasing poverty and hunger that teachers witness among many of their students. Another demand is that child psychologists be hired to meet student needs; teachers report more students with psychological problems, including depression.

The waves of educator protests and strikes, in this nation of 46 million, have been uninterrupted since the reopening of schools in 2021 (after closing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic). This greatly affected teachers and students’ health and lives. In poorer districts, teachers were forced back to work in old, sometimes collapsing schools, in conditions where social distancing is impossible and when many students and teachers had not been vaccinated. These areas also lack sufficient clinics and hospital beds. 

The reopening of schools caused dramatic increases in COVID-19 infections, from 2.3 million in March 2021 to 5.5 million at the end of the school year (December 2021) and 9 million in March 2022.

The provincial and federal governments responded to workers’ demands with the same excuse—“there is no money”— while increasing repression and relying on the betrayals by the corporatist trade union apparatus.

One month ago, teachers in Santa Cruz province mobilized and demanded a national strike. Since then, educators, transit workers and dockworkers have gone into struggle, raising the specter of the Cordobazo of 1969, which triggered one of the biggest popular insurrections in Latin American history. This revolutionary crisis was betrayed by the Peronist trade union bureaucracy and parties and their Stalinist and Morenoite satellites, who channeled opposition behind illusions in the Peronist government and set the stage for the 1976 coup that installed a brutal US-backed military junta.  

On May 30 and 31, following weeks of wildcat strikes, tens of thousands of teachers, healthcare workers, public employees and their supporters carried out mass demonstrations and roadblocks across Salta, called the “21st Century Salteñazo” in the Buenos Aires daily Página 12, alluding to 1969.

As it did 54 years ago, the Peronist trade union bureaucracy is working today to suppress the emerging upsurge across Argentina. Meanwhile, each major pseudo-left party is calling for conferences of their own factions within the teachers’ trade unions for emergency discussions.

Ultimately, each tendency seeks to channel the protests behind their own maneuvers with sections of the ruling class. This was demonstrated by the appeal by the Partido Obrero and the Morenoite Workers Socialist Movement (MST) to “all the left and all involved in struggles” to participate in a “national plenum” in Buenos Aires ahead of the presidential elections this year. While both parties are campaigning for their own slate within the so-called Left Workers Front-Unity (FIT-U) coalition, the event will discuss how to “unite the forces of all popular struggles” and present “an alternative for power.” 

This means that they are escalating their efforts to form a coalition with sections of the Peronist ruling party. This has already involved joint demonstrations under a fraudulent “united front” with the forces around the Peronist presidential candidate Juan Grabois, the government official Emilio Pérsico and the movements they lead. 

In Salta as elsewhere, the Socialist Workers Party (PTS), also part of the FIT-U, is appealing to the Peronist union bureaucracy of the CTA, which supports the Fernandez administration, to call for a general strike. Meanwhile, the Salta Teachers’ Classist Tendency of the pseudo-left party Política Obrera—a faction thrown out of Partido Obrero and led by Jorge Altamira—has been playing a major role in directing the self-convoked workers behind talks with the right-wing Governor Saenz. 

On May 31, after the mass demonstrations, the Tendency wrote in a statement: “Let Saenz himself receive us, recognize our elected and revocable delegates as the exclusive representation of teachers and let him fulfill immediately our list of demands since he has the power to do it.” 

Workers need to oppose these opportunist proposals, which will only lead to new betrayals. There is nothing that will be resolved by personal appeals to Governor Saenz, any other governor or President Fernandez, all of whom have made clear their commitment to further impoverish workers and let social infrastructure and services collapse against the will of the working majority. All of them must be brought down by the working class, organized independently of all Peronist and pseudo-left factions of the union bureaucracy.

EU interior ministers abandon the Geneva Refugee Convention

Martin Kreickenbaum

At their meeting in Luxembourg last week, EU interior ministers effectively abandoned the right of asylum for refugees. According to its member states, refugees are to be interned in detention camps at the EU’s external borders in the future, their asylum applications to be decided in a fast-track procedure and then deported to almost any third country.

The legal foundations for the Asylum Procedure Regulation and the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation negotiated in Luxembourg were drafted under the current Swedish Council Presidency but were essentially pushed forward by the German government.

On Twitter, German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser (Social Democratic Party, SPD), described the agreement reached as a “historic success–for the European Union, for a new immigration policy based on solidarity and for the protection of human rights”. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party), who worked intensively on the drafting of the legislation and now claims that “the status quo will improve for many refugees”, sounded the same note.

The opposite is the case. The agreements reached express the spirit of far-right and racist parties and further expand “Fortress Europe”. Swedish immigration minister Maria Malmer Stenergard is implementing almost word-for-word the anti-refugee demands of the far-right Sweden Democrats, on whose votes Ulf Kristersson’s minority government relies.

The German government has also adopted the demands of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite all the lofty words about human rights. Stirring up anti-refugee sentiments and employing “the boat is full” rhetoric, Berlin refers to empty budgets and overstretched cities and municipalities.

The hypocrisy of the German government in particular is breathtaking. Baerbock declared that the agreement was years overdue, that it prevented “conditions at the EU’s external borders like those in Moria”. The completely overcrowded Moria refugee camp on the Greek Aegean island of Lesbos, where refugees were held for months under appalling conditions, burnt down in 2020 and is a symbol of the European Union’s inhumane refugee policies.

In the future, there will be many Morias at the EU’s external borders. The new Asylum Procedures Regulation stipulates that EU member states must carry out asylum checks at the external borders.

Only refugees from countries with a recognition rate of at least 20 percent throughout the EU will be given the chance of lodging a claim under regular asylum procedures. For all others, there will be fast-track procedures that are to be completed within twelve weeks. During this time, refugees will be interned in detention camps. Even families with children will not be spared internment; only unaccompanied minors seeking protection are exempt.

The refugee organisation Pro Asyl rightly points out that this will massively extend the detention period of refugees at the EU external border, which could last up to four months. Moreover, there will be no fair asylum process. Since refugees in detention centres at the external borders are legally considered as “not having entered” the EU, standards that have applied so far no longer apply. In addition, access for refugee aid workers and lawyers in the detention camps will be severely restricted.

The EU wants to set up at least 30,000 detention places at the external borders, so that with a procedure lasting four months, up to 120,000 refugees per year could be turned away in a fast-track process. These people would then be threatened with up to 18 months’ detention pending deportation, so that they could be interned for up to two years simply because they fled wars, misery and hardship out of desperation.

Countries of origin with a recognition rate below 20 per cent already include Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh and others. And even refugees from Syria and Afghanistan are threatened with fast-track procedures, for example, if they arrive without a valid passport and are accused of deliberately throwing it away.

On the other hand, the Mediterranean states of Greece, Italy and Spain have had it written into their regulations that refugees who enter via so-called “safe third countries” will also be transferred onto the fast-track procedures. In the case of Greece, this applies to all refugees, as the Greek government has designated Turkey as a safe third country.

Since the deportation of rejected refugees does not seem effective enough to the European governments, the standards of protection will also be massively lowered. According to the EU interior ministers, agreements are to be concluded soon with third countries that undertake to take in refugees who are not welcome in the EU.

To this end, the definition of “safe third countries” will be expanded enormously. In future, it should also suffice for a deportation if only parts of a state are designated as safe. It will also include states that have not ratified the Geneva Refugee Convention.

The only condition for deportation to these third countries is that the refugees must have a “connection” to that state. What is so deceitful about this is that each EU member state conducting the asylum procedure can decide for itself which “connection” is considered sufficient. Even a transit on the escape route can be defined as a “connection”. This opens the door to arbitrary deportations from Greece to Turkey, from Spain to Morocco or from Italy to Tunisia.

The regulation on asylum and migration management also facilitates such arbitrary deportations. It is to the detriment of the refugees. The agreement reached is intended to replace the Dublin Regulation, which has failed in practice, and to tighten it massively.

According to the Dublin Regulation, the member state in which first entry occurred is responsible for conducting the asylum process and accommodation of refugees. However, the repatriation of asylum seekers to countries of first entry has regularly failed because they refused to take them back or the courts prohibited repatriations because the asylum seekers were threatened with inhumane living conditions in countries like Greece and Bulgaria. Unaccompanied minors are also excluded from the Dublin Regulation.

Therefore, there will now be compulsory readmission, repatriation will also be extended to minors and legal protections—i.e., the possibility to have a deportation reviewed in court—will be drastically restricted. This will also massively increase the pressure on the EU border states to get rid of refugees as quickly as possible, using any means.

The newly introduced “solidarity mechanism” leaves the possibility open for EU member states to buy their way out of taking in refugees. The interior ministers have cynically set the price per refugee at 20,000 euros. This sum can be offset against border security measures. The cost of Polish or German border police officers deployed for the EU refugee agency Frontex in Bulgaria can be claimed here, as can financial aid for the erection of walls and fences and payments to third countries that support the EU in warding off refugees.

Refugees who are to be distributed throughout the EU via the solidarity mechanism can also be offset against people who are to be returned to the country of first entry. In this way, instead of taking refugees from Greece, the German government can forego an equal number of transfers back to that country.

The Luxembourg interior ministers’ conference passed its resolutions with a qualified majority. Opposition came only from the right. Poland and Hungary voted against; Malta, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic abstained. Polish Interior Minister Bartosz Grodecki declared that his country would not abide by “absurd regulations”. The Czech government also made it clear after the meeting that it did not want to participate in the negotiated solidarity mechanism.

Nevertheless, the EU Commissioner for Migration and Asylum, Ylva Johansson, declared the agreement a “historic event”. In fact, it is historic only in the sense that the European Union is abandoning the Geneva Refugee Convention and significantly increasing the misery of refugees at the EU’s external borders and on the escape routes.

In future, there will be many Morias, with the difference being that the refugees will be forcibly interned in slum camps and even children will not be spared. The conditions in these camps can already be seen in the so-called “Closed Controlled Access Centres” on the Greek Aegean islands. With EU funds, the Greek government has built high-security prisons for refugees there, without access to adequate medical care or legal counselling.

The supply of food is often completely inadequate.

The deputy chairperson of Médecins Sans Frontières in Germany, Parnian Parvanta, said the decision of the EU interior ministers would have “catastrophic consequences for people in need of protection. Prison-like camps as on the Greek islands will become the standard on European soil.”

There will also be more brutal pushbacks, i.e., the forcible rejection of refugees without an asylum hearing. To escape the fast-track procedures in detention camps, refugees will be forced to undertake riskier and more expensive escape routes.

With the ink not yet dry on the decisions of the interior ministers, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was already putting them into practice. Together with the neofascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Dutch Premier Mark Rutte, she travelled to Tunisia on Sunday to pay her respects to President Kaïs Saïed.

The EU Parliament had recently reprimanded Saïed for his authoritarian style of government. He has ruled by presidential decrees since his coup in July 2021, and more than 20 politicians and journalists are in prison. Now the delegation offered him over a billion euros to block refugees from leaving the country and, if they make it anyway, to take them back and imprison them.

Brussels wants to transfer €100 million to him for sealing off the borders and repatriating migrants. €150 million is to flow to Tunis as budget support and another €900 million euros as a macroeconomic financial injection. Italy wants to add another €700 million if Tunisia reaches an agreement with the IMF.

Saïed, who provoked violent riots against refugees with a racist diatribe in February and fueled the wave of refugees—53,800 migrants coming from Tunisia have already been registered in Italy this year—is now being paid to take back and imprison people who fled his dictatorship and racism.

From Tunisia, von der Leyen, Meloni and Rutte travelled on to civil war-beset Libya to make a similar deal with Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who is accused of vote buying and money laundering and controls only part of the country.

NATO launches massive war game targeting Russia

Andre Damon

U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft fly in formation behind a KC-135 Stratotanker during Exercise Air Defender. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Lauren Kmiec)

On Monday, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launched the largest airborne war game in the alliance’s history, with hundreds of aircraft fighting a simulated war with Russia.

As war in Ukraine is spilling over the borders of Russia, prompting evacuations of border towns amid daily shelling and drone strikes, the NATO war games are intended as a threatening provocation, involving the possibility that the training exercise could at any point turn into an armed clash between NATO and Russian forces.

The New York Times, referring to comments made by Douglas Barrie of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote that the games are aimed at “letting Mr. Putin know just what NATO is capable of launching against Russia, if needed.”

The two-week war game, known as Air Defender 2023, involves over 250 aircraft and 10,000 personnel. It is based in Germany and led by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).

In the hypothetical scenario envisioned in the exercise, a Russian invasion of the German port of Rostock triggers NATO Article 5 and a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. The war game will involve the recapture of the port, followed by what the Wall Street Journal called “offensive operations.”

In its official statement, NATO said, “The exercise … is based on a collective defence scenario also known as Article 5 scenario in which Allies deploy their air forces to Germany to fight against hybrid occupation forces.” NATO wrote, “In coordinated combined operations, the Allied air forces demonstrate they are capable of defending NATO territory with swift decisive action.”

The massive exercise will involve the closure of airspace over Germany to civilian flights and sorties into the airspace of NATO members near the Russian border, including Lithuania, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic.

NATO said in a statement that the missions will take place over the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and southern Germany. They will “include supporting ground troops and evacuation missions.”

While the exercise is officially led by Germany, the US Air Force dominated the first day of the event, flying approximately 100 National Guard and Navy aircraft to Germany for the drills.

The exercise includes participants from 24 NATO member states, as well as military observers from Japan. Finland, the newest member of NATO, will participate, as will Sweden, which is actively moving to join the alliance.

NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu made clear that the exercise was targeting not a hypothetical adversary, but Russia. “Air Defender sends a clear message that NATO is ready to defend every inch of Allied territory,” she said. “As we face the biggest security crisis in a generation, we stand united to keep our countries and our people safe.”

Major Adam Casey, an American A-10 attack aircraft pilot who participated in the exercise, told the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, “In the next conflict, where we may be called upon to defend NATO, it’s not going to get a practice round. As an A-10 pilot, I don’t want to be the first time I check in on station with a German JTAC [Air controller] to be when enemy tanks are crossing into NATO.”

Monday’s exercise involved massive formations of fighters, bombers and cargo planes flying at multiple altitudes.

Participants in the massive war game called it unprecedented. “I’ve never done anything quite like today,” Flt. Lt. Mark Jenkins of the British Royal Air Force told the New York Times. “Having so many other aircraft working together is really unusual.”

The massive war games come amid ever more aggressive calls for military escalation by the US and NATO powers in the war with Russia over Ukraine.

On Friday, the American Enterprise Institute published an op-ed by one of its senior fellows, Michael Rubin, advocating the deployment of US nuclear weapons to Ukraine. It is titled, “Can Biden Deter a Russia Nuclear Attack on Ukraine? Yes, If He Gives Ukraine Tactical Nukes.”

Rubin noted the series of escalatory steps already taken by the Biden administration, including the sending of the “HIMARS [long-range missile system], Abrams tanks and F-16 [fighter jets].”

Rubin hails and endorses terrorist attacks carried out by Ukrainian forces, even those that the US had previously strenuously denied Ukraine was responsible for. He writes:

The war is now at the tipping point. First, there was Ukraine’s destruction of the causeway linking Russian-occupied Crimea to Russia proper. Intelligence leaks suggest Ukraine might have been behind the attack on the Nord Stream-2 pipeline. Anti-Putin Russian insurgents later raided the Russian city of Belgorod from Ukraine, and Ukrainian Special Forces were likely responsible for the brazen drone attack on the Kremlin.

Calling on the White House to threaten to provide Ukraine with nuclear weapons “without any controls on where and how Ukraine might use them,” Rubin declared that the “United States maintains nuclear weapons because they are an effective deterrent against other nuclear states. Ukraine should have the same right.”

The open advocacy of the deployment of nuclear weapons to Ukraine comes amid a massive, years-long buildup of US nuclear forces.

On Monday, the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reported that the United States spent $43.7 billion on modernizing its nuclear arsenal last year, more than every country in the world combined.

The report noted that “Russia spent 22% of what the US did, at $9.6 billion, and China spent just over a quarter of the US total, at $11.7 billion.” The US spent $83,143 every single minute on nuclear weapons modernization last year, ICAN said.

The Mineral Rush

John Feffer

Entrepreneurs and adventurers have long traveled the world in search of gold. European empires looted Latin America for its silver and tin. Diamonds attracted the rapacious to Africa. Oil has built enormous empires of wealth in the Gulf states.

Today, an entirely different scramble for natural resources is taking place. These “critical raw materials” play an increasingly important role in the transition away from fossil fuels that virtually every country in the world is now prioritizing. Such minerals include the lithium that’s essential to the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, the cobalt that’s part of the magnets used for wind turbines, and the rare earth elements that play a key role in solar panels.

South Korea is heavily dependent on these raw materials for its burgeoning electric car production, its semiconductors, its solar panels and wind turbines. In Pohang, once known primarily for its steel, the Korean government is building a “battery city” that will put South Korea at the very center of the clean energy transition. But to make these batteries—at least the current lithium-ion type—will require even greater inputs of lithium.

To date, South Korea has depended on China for 58 percent of its lithium (as well as 64 percent of its cobalt and 90 percent of its rare earth elements). But sourcing from China comes with a special complication. U.S. buyers of electric cars will only get a tax rebate if they buy cars made in the United States with components sourced domestically or from its allies with free trade agreements. Well, South Korea has a free trade agreement with the United States, so what’s the problem? A recent “guidance” from the Treasury Department that clarifies provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act requires the allied country to source at least 40 percent of the minerals for its batteries from outside non-U.S. allies like China (rising to 80 percent in 2027).

If Hyundai or Kia wants its U.S.-manufactured EVs to be competitive in the U.S. market, they will have to reduce their dependency on China for the lithium in the batteries. If the companies in Pohang want to sell their batteries to U.S.-made EVs, they too will have to find new sources for the mineral components.

That explains why the Korean government dispatched a delegation to Latin America last month, specifically Chile and Argentina where a large amount of lithium is mined. Until someone comes up with a commercially viable alternative to the lithium-ion battery—and there are several options on the horizon—every major country that wants their “clean energy” products to compete in the U.S. and global markets is lining up to get a cut of Latin American lithium.

The European Union is currently debating a critical raw materials act that tries to reduce mineral dependency on China. Like South Korea, the EU is boosting efforts at “urban mining,” which means extracting minerals from used batteries and the like. It is also trying to expand mining on its own territory. But it is also aggressively courting mineral-rich countries in the Global South.

The United States is attempting to do the same. It, too, is pouring billions of dollars into new battery production and new sourcing for mineral components. It has also restarted what had once been the largest rare earths mine in the world at Mountain Pass in a remote part of California and is exploring other new mines elsewhere in the country.

There are several major problems associated with this new rush to acquire critical raw materials. First of all, there’s just not enough to go around. The earth doesn’t contain enough lithium that we can access for all combustion vehicles to switch to battery-powered ones. Nor is there enough rare earth elements indium and neodymium to build all the solar panels and wind turbines that would be needed to replace oil and natural gas.

This relative scarcity is fueling the desperation in industrial countries. Whoever can secure the greatest access to these raw materials will be the country best poised to profit from the switch away from fossil fuels. It also means that Global South countries in theory hold the some very good cards in this global poker game. But these countries haven’t yet figured out a way to leverage those riches—safely, sustainably—to improve their position in the global economic pecking order (as South Korea has done).

A second problem is environmental. The mining of these minerals causes considerable damage to the environment. The mining and processing of lithium, for instance, draws heavily on water resources in dry areas like the “lithium triangle” where Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile all converge. Rare earth minerals contain radioactive materials that pose a risk to workers and surrounding communities.

A third problem is the neo-colonial nature of the relationship between northern manufacturers and southern suppliers of raw materials. In the colonial era, Japan basically plundered Korea for its rice and iron. Today, industrialized countries are trying to extract lithium and other critical raw materials at the lowest possible prices through concessions built into free trade deals that eliminate or lower tariffs. These trade agreements are also designed to make it more difficult for Global South countries to pursue industrial policies that could build strong next-generation industries to compete with those in the Global North. In other words, the Global North is kicking away the ladder that South Korea used to climb to prosperity.

What are the alternatives to this new hyper-market in critical raw materials?

One thing that South Korea is doing right is prioritizing the recycling of materials and investments in research into alternatives that don’t rely on expensive and rare minerals.

But South Korea and other countries in the Global North face a more basic problem. Rich countries—and the richest inhabitants of those countries—are consuming beyond the means of the planet. The “clean energy transition” is just a band-aid on the deeper problem of resource depletion and biodiversity loss. Richer countries have to learn not just how to use less oil, natural gas, and coal, they have to learn how to use less energy over all.

Climate change is an emergency. There is no question that the world must reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible. But this decarbonization must be done equitably and with a minimum of additional planetary pollution. The latest mineral rush can indeed be an opportunity to redress historic wrongs and reexamine the economic growth model that got us into this emergency in the first place.

Boris Johnson resigns from parliament after being found to have lied about COVID pandemic parties

Chris Marsden

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation from parliament on June 9 is a milestone in the vicious factional warfare within a hated Conservative government.

The immediate cause of Johnson’s resignation was the conclusion reached by an investigation of the seven-MP parliamentary privileges committee into the holding of illegal social events in parliament, and, as the scandal developed, also at Johnson’s country residence, Chequers, during COVID lockdowns.

Boris Johnson leaves his house in London, Wednesday, March 22, 2023. Britain's former prime minister was questioned on Wednesday by a committee of lawmakers over whether he misled Parliament about rule-breaking parties in government buildings during the coronavirus pandemic. [AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali]

The committee, led by Labour’s Harriet Harman but with a majority of four Tory MPs, concluded that Johnson had made recklessly inaccurate statements and deliberately lied to MPs during the “Partygate” scandal, compounded by inaccurate claims made under oath when questioned by the committee. Deliberate contempt of parliament meant the committee would recommend more than the 10 days suspension required for a recall vote in Johnson’s marginal seat that could force a by-election.

Johnson was given advance access to the report through his lawyers Thursday. He was told separately that the government would not whip Tory MPs to vote down the committee’s recommended sanctions. Johnson had also assumed an agreement with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to nod through his resignation honours list, rewarding allies in the Partygate scandal and more than 40 of his closest aides.

The list included peerages elevating MPs Nadine Dorries, Alok Sharma and Nigel Adams to the House of Lords. But when Johnson saw the list on Friday, the three peerages and awards for Tory donors David Ross and Stuart Marks were not on it, adding to his personal bitterness. Dorries resigned her seat immediately prior to Johnson. Adams did so Saturday—leaving Sunak to fight three-by elections.

In his resignation statement, Johnson accused Sunak and his supporters of working with Labour and others to remove him in order to thwart Brexit, and of betraying Tory values. He described the privileges committee as a kangaroo court, “determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament,” without “a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.”

“It was expected that the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party [SNP] would do whatever they can to remove me from parliament,” he wrote, but “there are currently some Tory MPs” who wanted “to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about.”

Sunak was not “making the most of Brexit”, including cutting “business and personal taxes” and was “passively” abandoning “the prospect of a free trade deal with the US”, forcing Johnson’s resignation “at least for now”.

Speculation within Tory circles is swinging towards the conclusion that this may be the high point of any revolt by Johnson loyalists, despite initial predictions of a half dozen other resignations. The Sunday Times wrote of the rebellion having “fizzled out”, as had happened with his earlier threatened revolt in March seeking to block Sunak’s Windsor framework agreement on Northern Ireland, which only mobilised 21 MPs.

Others predicted that Johnson had no stomach for a speedy fight to return to Westminster, not by standing for Dorries’ safe Mid-Bedfordshire seat or even at the next general election. The Guardian cited a close friend of Johnson saying, “He is making lots of money. He needs money. He likes money.”

But this will do nothing to resolve the crisis facing the government. As the WSWS explained on Johnson’s resignation as prime minister in July last year, “The British bourgeoisie is in the throes of a political crisis rooted in a global capitalist breakdown, a still raging pandemic, a worldwide inflationary spiral, trade war, the eruption of war and, above all, the resurgence of the class struggle” in Britain and internationally.

The aim of Tory central office, ever since the palace coup beginning with mass resignations by 58 MPs that succeeded in removing Johnson as prime minister, has been to distance the party from a deeply divisive figure that threatened their ability to wage war against the working class and against Russia in Ukraine.

Johnson became the first leader of a major imperialist country to fall from power during NATO’s war against Russia, because, as the WSWS explained, “despite his pledges to impose ‘Red Meat’ Thatcherite economic and social policies, and his insistence that he must not be removed at a time of war,” many Tory MPs and prominent figures within Washington “saw him as a liability, unable to deliver either.”

This immediately went badly wrong when the hardline Brexiteers within the party membership chose the walking disaster Liz Truss as his replacement, before she was driven from office and replaced by Sunak for trying to hand billions to the super-rich without first imposing the savage cuts demanded by global investors.

Johnson’s belated departure from parliament as he moves onto the lecture circuit and possibly into television only leaves behind a festering political sore as far as millions of workers are concerned.

No one believes that he was alone in imposing a murderous COVID policy that claimed more than 200,000 lives and left hundreds of thousands more bereaved or suffering long-term illness. Moreover, his initial downfall came as mass opposition in the working class to decades of austerity was precipitating a strike wave that has involved rail workers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, ambulance personnel, educators, local authority workers and civil servants and which was only deepened by Sunak’s attacks.

This developed under conditions where millions of workers internationally were also coming into struggle, including the protests in France against the Macron government’s pension reform that saw the largest mobilisation of the working class since the May-June general strike in 1968.

The most crucial factor in ensuring that there will be no return to political stability is the escalation in NATO’s undeclared war against Russia. The Sunak government is marching in lockstep with the Biden administration in preparing the way for a direct confrontation between NATO forces and Russia, for which Ukraine’s counter-offensive including direct attacks on Russian territory and in the Black Sea—is an anticipation.

Divisions within the ruling elite are inevitable under these conditions.

Johnson’s resignation came on the same day former US President Donald Trump was indicted for retaining top secret military documents for personal use, including high-level discussions on war. Sunday saw the arrest and subsequent release without charge—pending further investigation—of former SNP leader and Scottish First Minister Nicola Surgeon, amid an internal factional struggle centred on the party’s finances.

Such divisions are only the harbinger and an accelerant of the more fundamental conflict between the working class and capitalist regimes promoting austerity and war internationally.

The Tories have only been able to remain in office because the working class was systematically demobilised and prevented from intervening. Jeremy Corbyn used his leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019 to oppose any struggle against the party’s right-wing or against Tory governments led by David Cameron, Theresa May and then Johnson.

His successor Sir Keir Starmer’s belated tweet at 10.15pm Saturday, demanding Sunak “finally find a backbone” and “call an election”, is made by someone who has spent three years preparing Labour as a replacement party of austerity and war for the likelihood of a Tory defeat.

Behind the sharp rise in US resident physicians organizing into unions

Benjamin Mateus

There is a growing movement among resident physicians in the United States to fight against inadequate pay, under conditions of financial stresses caused by massive debts, as well as impossible, long hours of demanding work in under-resourced health care systems. 

While this takes initial expression in unionization efforts across numerous hospitals, resident physicians are quickly finding themselves confronting the reality of union bureaucracies beholden to the demands of a health care industry itself under the chokehold of the financial markets. A similar experience with the pro capitalist, burueacratized unions faces every other sector of the working class.

The tensions among physicians in training, who typically work 80 hours a week and earn as little as $15 or less per hour, have only been aggravated by the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on health care and the overall state of the global economy more generally, that has seen crushing levels of inflation.

Striking resident physicians at Elmhurst Medical Center in Queens, New York [Photo: WSWS]

The recent strike by 165 resident physicians at New York City’s Elmhurst Hospital Center in May was the city’s first strike by doctors since 1990, according to the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) local of the Service Employees International Union, their bargaining agent. The doctors in training who perform the brunt of the difficult work in evaluating and treating patients in every aspect of their care are employed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

After only three days, their union abruptly ended the strike, announcing that a tentative agreement had been reached. This came on the heels of scheduled strikes being called off at two hospitals in Jamaica and Flushing in Queens. The deliberate intervention on the part of CIR to separate these disputes is part and parcel of the union bureaucracy’s modus operandi—divide and conquer.

The striking Elmhurst physicians, who were forced to return to their grueling work schedule, had no realistic chance to review the agreement before ratification. Clearly, the decision by the union to abruptly call off the strike was not dictated by the interests of the residents, but the needs of hospital management, which is totally reliant on residents to keep the hospital functioning

The strike demonstrated the role of CIR as a pro-management labor police force. The terms of the agreement fail to close the financial gap between residents’ pay and the high cost of living in New York City. In fact, none of the fundamental issues raised by residents were addressed. Meanwhile, the CIR isolated residents at Elmhurst from other disputes by resident physicians and even from other health care workers at the same facility. 

Meanwhile, on June 7, the CIR announced that just 30 miles away, across the Hudson River, 1,100 Rutgers resident physicians, who have been bargaining for a year, were to hold an informational picket at the University Hospital in Newark. As Dr. Elena Wickstrom, a Rutgers resident, noted, “We are passionate about doing whatever it takes to deliver great care to our patients—that’s why we became doctors. But no one should have to sacrifice this much—our well-being, delaying life goals—just to finish their medical training.”

And then on June 8, in Massachusetts, medical residents and fellows (physicians in training for subspecialties, which extends their training period from between three to seven years beyond the typical four-year residency) at multiple Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB) hospitals voted 1,215 to 412 to join CIR. Formal recognition is pending the certification of the results by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) next week.

Once certified, with more than 2,500 eligible members, the union created at MGB would become one of the largest of the kind in the country. Since 2021, amid the ongoing pandemic, membership in CIR-SEIU has nearly increased two-fold from 17,000 to 30,000. This figure includes members from such health systems as Stanford Health Care, the University of California systems, San Francisco Medical Center, Montefiore Medical Center in New York and Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C.

In response to the drive to unionize, there has been intense pushback from hospital leadership. In a statement issued to the press by Dr. Paul Anderson, interim chief academic officer at MGB, he wrote, “As an organization dedicated to training the next generation of caregivers, we are proud of the education that we provide to our residents and fellows, and we recognize the vital importance of the unique partnership between faculty and trainees in our institution. While we are disappointed with the outcome, this election is part of a continuing national trend among medical trainees seeking collective bargaining through union representation.”

Indeed, residents play a critical part in health delivery, a fact not overlooked by the health systems who are utterly reliant on them to provide the brunt of hospital-based health care to patients. In an important report last year, titled, “How much are resident physicians worth?,” the author highlighted the withdrawal of accreditation of the University of New Mexico’s (UNM) neurosurgery program in August 2019.

As a result of the loss of accreditation, eight neurosurgery residents at the facility had to leave and seek other accredited training programs. To fill in for the residents, UNM had to hire 23 advanced practice providers to replace them, a ratio of one resident for three advanced practitioners. Given these new staff were paid $115,000 per year, twice the salary of the residents, it meant the cost to the hospital to treat patients rose six-fold. And this doesn’t take into account that neurosurgery specialists now have to perform more of the tasks usually assigned to residents, taking away from their attending to patients in the operating room, where they can be more productive in terms of the overall functioning of the health system.

As the report notes, “Having residents doesn’t just increase attending billing —it also increases the hospital’s ability to bill for its services. A financially happy hospital is one where the ICUs are full, there’s rapid bed turnover in the ED and on the wards, and the lab and radiology departments are abuzz with the latest diagnostics. Residents are invaluable in keeping up that pace. Moreover, having residents allows a hospital to care for higher-acuity patients. It’s difficult to provide, say, high-level oncology or cardiovascular care without having residents and fellows to share the intense clinical workload.”

Besides the massive workload burden they carry, resident physicians face significant financial debts that further contribute to the high levels of burn-out that have been registered by numerous surveys.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a graduating medical student in 2021 faces a median debt of $200,000, which does not include what they might owe from their undergraduate degrees. The average in-state tuition for medical school at a public institution is nearly $39,000 per year. This only includes tuition, fees and health insurance. For those attending private institutions, this increases to over $61,000. In both these figures rent, food, transportation and cost of living are not included.

In a survey by the AAMC, 14 percent said their debt was over $300,000. When they attend residency, earning minimum wage, these debts are deferred. Although graduating physicians can expect a considerable wage increase when they begin practicing, they face crushing debt, and they will also most likely join a health system as an employee because of the astronomical costs of forming a private practice and hiring staff and property to build a clinic.

Since the pandemic, there has been an acceleration nationwide of health system acquisition of physician practices. According to a study conducted by the physicians Advocacy Institute, since 2019, 108,700 additional physicians became employees of hospitals or other corporate entities, of which 83,000 occurred after the onset of the pandemic. This accounts for a near 20 percent increase over a three-year period.

Meanwhile, hospital and corporate entities acquired 36,200 additional physician practices, resulting in a 38 percent increase in the same period. In all, 74 percent of all physicians (484,100) are now employed by a health system or corporate entity, representing a 13 to 24 percent increase. The implication here is that with the ownership of the productive capacity of physicians by giant health conglomerates, the exploitation of medical school graduates will increase and extend beyond their residency years.

The proletarianization of physicians employed by health systems as wage laborers is bringing this previously relatively privileged social layer into the class struggle. With the soaring costs of health care and declining rate of profits, the need by Wall Street to extract ever greater amounts of surplus value impacts every aspect of the class struggle. This includes social layers that in the past may not have considered themselves part of the working class.

For the ruling elites, the additional profits squeezed from residents are just new subheadings in their account ledgers. For training physicians, workers at health systems and patients that access them, these are a matter of life and death. 

Physicians have far more in common with every other worker in the health care sector and other sections of industry compared with the financial parasites that exploit them. Like other sections of workers, physicians face conditions of intensified exploitation policed by union bureaucrats beholden to the demands of finance capital. 

In a rationally functioning society workers would not be classified in a socially stratified ranking that pits each against the other. Under capitalism health care is provided or withheld based on the profit motive, and not determined by societal needs or as a social right. The disastrous short-term and longer-term social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was not inevitable, but took place because of the subordination of public health, like every other aspect of economic and social life, to the profit interests of big business.