New US diplomatic provocations fuel tensions with China

Peter Symonds

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken holds a news conference in the Beijing American Center at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Monday, June 19, 2023. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

In the wake of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing last week, the Biden administration, far from seeking to tone down its anti-China rhetoric and stabilise relations between the two countries, has upped the ante with new diplomatic provocations.

Speaking to wealthy donors as part of this 2024 re-election campaign last Tuesday, Biden bluntly defended his decision to shoot down a Chinese balloon that drifted over US airspace in February, and branded Chinese President Xi Jinping as “a dictator” who was embarrassed by the incident. Without offering a shred of evidence, he declared that the “balloon” was loaded with “spy equipment.” Adding fuel to the fire, the US president told his audience not to worry about China because it “has real economic difficulties.”

Biden’s comments came just hours after Blinken told MSNBC that the two countries should call put an end to the controversy over the balloon incident, saying it was a chapter that “should be closed.” Nominally at least, Blinken’s trip to China was aimed at easing the sharp tensions caused by Washington’s escalating confrontation with Beijing.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning declared that Biden’s remarks “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.” The White House, however, made clear that Biden had no intention of retracting his comments.

Moreover, just days before, as he was leaving Beijing, Blinken stirred up further spying allegations against China. Asked during an interview with CBS whether he had raised allegations of Chinese intelligence gathering facilities in Cuba, he declared: “I did. I’m not going to characterise their response, but I told them that this is a serious concern for us.”

Blinken said the US had taken steps in recent years to push back against Chinese spying in Latin America. “This is nothing new, but it is something of real concern. I was very clear about our concerns with China. But regardless of that, we’ve been going around to various places where we see this kind of activity, trying to put a stop to it,” he said.

The previous week, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claimed that China had initiated a “brash new geo-political challenge” to the US by reaching a secret agreement with the Cuban government to build a new electronic surveillance base on the island. It would “allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout southeastern US, where many military bases are located, and monitor US ship traffic.”

The WSJ article, entitled “Cuba to host secret Chinese spy base focusing on US,” has all the hallmarks of a provocative beat-up. None of this well-documented record has been made public, however. Both China and Cuba have declared the allegations to be false.

Furthermore, a White House official effectively dismissed the report, saying: “This is an ongoing issue, and not a new development.” At the same time, however, the official continued to feed the story, declaring: “[China] conducted an upgrade of its intelligence collection facilities in Cuba in 2019. This is well-documented in the intelligence record.”

Whether or not China has or is building a spy base on Cuba, it is hardly news. Most countries engage in spying in one form or another. In 2013, former US National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on a massive scale, not only on US rivals but also on allied governments and on American citizens. NSA servers stored huge amounts of electronic data derived from a range of surveillance programs that was then data-mined to yield intelligence on targeted individuals.

Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal indicated, the US spies on Cuba on a routine basis. As well as maintaining its notorious prison at its military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, “the US has used the base as a signals intelligence station in the past.” In other words, US intelligence agencies used the base to “scoop up electronic communications,” to use the WSJ’s words, throughout Cuba and presumably of foreign embassies based in Havana, such as that of China.

The US has also escalated its provocative naval and air force operations in the South and East China Seas close to the Chinese mainland, including through the narrow Taiwan Strait, under the phony pretext of “freedom of navigation.” Many of these flights and naval movements are undoubtedly to collect intelligence on sensitive Chinese military bases, including its nuclear submarine bases on Hainan Island.

The “revelations” of Chinese spying from Cuba add to the litany of unsubstantiated claims and outright lies that form the basis of Washington’s relentless stream of anti-China propaganda. Moreover, the focus on Cuba and its close proximity to Florida, carries the menacing implication that the US should take action to demand the dismantling of spy facilities on the island, bringing to mind the 1961 Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The Wall Street Journal cited a bipartisan statement issued by top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee which declared that a Chinese intelligence facility in Cuba would pose a “serious threat to our national security and sovereignty” and urged the Biden administration to take action.

As Blinken made clear in his comments to CBS, the Biden administration is not just seeking to push back against China in Cuba but throughout Latin America. While nominally about spying, it is part of Washington’s far broader efforts to undermine China internationally, including economically, as it accelerates its military build-up against Beijing in preparation for war.

Speaking to NPR, Margaret Myers, a program director at the Washington think tank, the Inter-American Dialogue, pointed to the underlying preoccupation in US foreign policy circles. “Certainly, we need to keep an eye on things that are happening in the intelligence gathering space or the security space, but the question is largely an economic one,” she said, adding that economic engagement was critical for the region with implications for “US national security and US involvement in and influence in the region.”

Blinken’s trip to China was purportedly to ease tensions between the two countries. Taken together, however, Biden’s deliberately offensive comments about Xi and the White House allegations of Chinese spying from Cuba make clear that the US has no intention of stabilising relations. Whatever the immediate tactical considerations, the US preparations for conflict with China continue apace.

Ford Australia to axe 400 more jobs as part of global cost-cutting strategy

Paul Bartizan & Martin Scott

Ford announced last week that it plans to slash 400 jobs in Australia over the coming months. Most of these jobs will be eliminated from the company’s Research and Development Centre in Victoria’s second biggest city, Geelong, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have been destroyed over the past two decades.

Ford stamping plant at Norlane in Geelong. [Photo by Marcus Wong / CC BY-SA 3.0]

This announcement, on top of 500 job cuts at Geelong and Broadmeadows over the past year, means Ford has slashed close to half of the small product design and development workforce it maintained after shuttering its Australian factories in 2016.

These will deepen the devastation in working-class Geelong, which was heavily impacted by the destruction of the car industry and manufacturing more broadly.

Ford began producing cars in Australia in 1925, creating tens of thousands of jobs for workers, many of them migrants from Europe in the post-World War II period. The Geelong suburbs of Norlane and Corio were built to house factory workers.

Along with the Ford plant, Geelong has lost many other jobs. Historically, Geelong was home to Cresco fertilisers, Pilkington glass, Godfrey Hirst carpets, International Harvester, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, the Shell Oil refinery and the Alcoa aluminium smelter. In the mid-1950s, 46 percent of Geelong workers were employed in manufacturing. Today the sector only employs 8 percent.

These cuts are being imposed despite Ford Australia increasing sales by nearly 30 percent over the past year to over 30,000 vehicles, including 21,000 new model Ranger utilities. Ford says it will continue to develop the Ranger, as well as the Everest SUV, in Australia.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) is working closely with the company to block any opposition by workers to the cuts. State Secretary Tony Mavromatis said, “how to get some training for them and prepare them for the jobs of the future is what we want to consult with Ford about.”

This is the same role that the AMWU played as the enforcers of the “orderly closure” of the entire Australian car manufacturing industry, starting with Mitsubishi in 2008 and culminating with Toyota and General Motors in 2017. Including the flow-on job losses throughout the supply chain, some 150,000 workers were thrown on the scrapheap.

This was the end result of a process set in motion by the Hawke Labor government’s 1984 “Button car plan.” This was aimed at restructuring the nationally regulated car industry in order to integrate it into the increasingly globalised production networks of the auto manufacturers.

The AMWU, in line with all the other unions, told workers they needed to sacrifice to make Australian factories “internationally competitive” as the only means of keeping the car industry afloat. This meant pitting workers against their counterparts abroad, leading to a race to the bottom for wages and conditions on a global scale.

Far from “saving” the Australian car industry, the nationalist program of the unions sealed its demise, with factories closed down and production moved offshore as soon as it became more profitable for the corporations to do so.

The reality is that, then as now, the assault on Ford workers and the entire automotive industry, is a global one.

The destruction of jobs in Australia is in line with sweeping cuts imposed by Ford around the world. In Germany, the company plans to shut down its Saarlouis factory by 2025, at the expense of more than 4,600 jobs. Ford has announced that it will slash almost 5,000 additional jobs across Europe, including 2,300 more in Germany, 1,300 in Britain, 1,144 in Spain and another 200 elsewhere in Europe.

This follows Ford’s announcement in August last year that it would axe around 3,000 jobs in vehicle development in the US, Canada and India.

While Ford claims the destruction of jobs is part of the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), the company has also recently cut jobs in its EV division globally.

A letter to Ford workers co-signed by CEO Jim Farley and Executive Chairman Bill Ford said the transition to electric “means redeploying resources and addressing our cost structure, which is uncompetitive versus traditional and new competitors.” Ford is embarking on ruthless downsizing and $50 billion in new investment by 2026 in an effort to become competitive in the EV market, especially against Chinese rivals.

The collaboration of the trade unions with management is also a global phenomenon. In every country, workers trying to fight the destruction of their livelihoods are coming into conflict, not only with management, but with the union bureaucracies, which are no longer workers’ organisations but serve as an industrial police force for management.

This is sharply expressed in the actions of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) in the US in recent weeks, herding Clarios battery manufacturing workers back on the job after a 40-day strike.

The UAW rammed through a wage-cutting and overtime-slashing agreement at Clarios after carrying out a campaign to systematically crush the strike. While starving workers out with a fraction of their regular wage in strike pay, the UAW apparatus told members they would be replaced by scabs if they refused to accept the contract. The UAW actively supported the company’s strikebreaking operations, ordering workers at companies supplied by Clarios to use batteries produced by scab labour.

In Europe, rather than fighting Ford’s threatened plant closures, the unions in Spain and Germany engaged in a bidding war, competing over who could deliver the biggest profit boosts to the company through the destruction of workers’ wages and conditions.

After failed coup attempt, Kremlin gives Wagner free passage, tries to subordinate paramilitary formations

Clara Weiss

In an indication of the ongoing intense crisis of the Putin regime, in the 24 hours following the failed coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his 25,000 Wagner group mercenaries, the Kremlin has maintained an almost complete silence as to the consequences it would draw from the insurrection by Putin’s former ally. 

Having launched his coup attempt Friday night with an appeal to the pro-NATO section of Russia’s ruling class, Prigozhin announced a retreat Saturday evening just 120 miles away from Moscow. For almost a day, Wagner had been in control of the city of Rostov-on-Don and the headquarters of the Southern Military District, which oversees Russian military operations in the Black Sea region and East Ukraine. 

Servicemen of the Wagner Group military company guard an area at the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023. [AP Photo/Uncredited]

The deal between Prigozhin and Putin was reportedly brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Apart from the safe passage granted to Prigozhin, who is now in Belarus, and the dropping of charges for “armed rebellion” against both him and his mercenaries, no further details about the deal have been revealed. While some reports indicated that the military leadership, including both Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Chief-of-Staff Valery Gerasimov, would step down, no such announcements have been made thus far.  

Unconfirmed reports in the Russian media suggested that at least 13 servicemen died and that the Russian army lost six helicopters, an airplane, and a KAMAZ truck in the fight against Wagner. Officials confirmed that 19 houses in Voronezh were damaged and three civilians injured, and that 10,000 square kilometers of roadway were damaged in the Rostov region. Wagner troops were calmly leaving their positions throughout Sunday, creating miles-long traffic jams. 

In the only brief public statement by Putin on Sunday, he told a reporter that his day “starts and ends with the special military operation” in Ukraine. 

So far, the only clear move by the Kremlin in response to the coup attempt has been the announcement of a law that will bring private military contractors under the control of the Ministry of Defense. 

But even in announcing the bill, the head of the committee for defense in the State Duma (parliament) and former Deputy Defense Minister Andrei Kartapolov struck an extraordinarily conciliatory tone toward Wagner: “They didn’t offend anyone, they didn’t break anything. No one has the slightest complaints about them—not the citizens of Rostov, not the servicemen of the Southern Military District, not the law enforcement agencies. …. Whoever wants to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense will sign it. For those who don’t: everyone is free to choose their fate, they’ll do something else.” 

Kartapolov also opposed a ban of Wagner. He insisted that only Prigozhin should suffer consequences, stating: “children should not be held accountable for their parents.”

Members of the Wagner Group military company load their tank onto a truck on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area at the headquarters of the Southern Military District. [AP Photo/Uncredited]

In addition to Wagner, there are at least a dozen other paramilitary formations that have proliferated over the past 10 years. Many of them play a central role in the war in Ukraine. This includes about 5,000-6,000 forces under the command of the president of the Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, an estimated 17,500 Cossack forces, and two paramilitary formations run by the separatist authorities of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in East Ukraine. Over a dozen Russian regions, including several predominantly Muslim and non-Russian republics, have also announced the formation of volunteer units to fight in the war.

While these structures are largely integrated with the army and receive much of their supplies from the Defense Ministry, they have not been officially subordinated to the latter. However, after the seizure of Bakhmut by Wagner forces in May, the Defense Ministry forced private contractors to accept the command of the army leadership by July 1. The insurrection by Prigozhin, who has openly and aggressively attacked the army leadership for months, began to take shape publicly when he opposed the order by Putin to comply with this demand by the Defense Ministry.

The Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote that the country had been brought to the “brink of civil war” by the coup attempt and evaluated the insurrection by Prigozhin as an alarming sign of the weakness of the government and the state. The paper noted that “in conditions of turmoil and uncertainty, the security and law enforcement agencies tend to dissolve without a trace.”

Criticizing the Kremlin for letting Prigozhin run wild for months, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta called for the “complete disarmament of all armed units that are not formally part of the structures of the national security apparatus—this is demanded both by the law and by political reality. There should be no armed people in Russia that are loyal primarily to their field commander and only secondly to someone else.”

In an underhand acknowledgement that the coup attempt reflected dissatisfaction with the continuation of the war in sections of the oligarchy, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta urged the Putin regime to make maximum concessions to the interests of “private companies and private entrepreneurs” who “by definition” seek greater profits.

Both in Russia and internationally, the coup attempt and the response by the Kremlin to it have been interpreted above all as a sign of extreme weakness by the Putin regime. 

With only two weeks until the NATO summit in Vilnius, the imperialist powers and the Zelensky regime are using the coup attempt to push for a further escalation of the war. After a discussion with US President Joe Biden on Sunday, Zelensky declared, “The world must put pressure on Russia until international order is restored.” The Ukrainian army claims that it is now pressing the counter-offensive, which so far has been an extremely bloody and expensive debacle for NATO.

More information has also emerged indicating that the US and Ukraine were informed about Prigozhin’s coup plans well in advance. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that US intelligence knew about the impending coup as early as mid-June. In a previous interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Washington Post noted that Ukrainian intelligence had been in contact with Prigozhin. A leading adviser to Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, has publicly expressed disappointment for Prigozhin’s “sudden” retreat.

The ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who until 2003 was in control of a large portion of Russia’s oil resources, is now playing a central role in the NATO-backed regime change operation in Russia and has celebrated Prigozhin’s insurrection as a major blow to the Putin regime. Dropping any “democratic” pretenses, Khodorkovsky insisted that the coup attempt proved that Putin could only be overthrown by “armed men” and listed a number of operational and military “conclusions” that had to be drawn from this experience for future attempts to overthrow the Russian government. 

Libuov’ Sobol’, a close ally of the imprisoned US-backed oppositionist Alexei Navalny, called on NATO during the coup to “help Prigozhin” and recognize him as their “partner.”  

As the WSWS noted in its statement on the coup attempt,

That the coup was prepared with some significant level of NATO involvement is clear enough. But to portray the coup as primarily the product of a CIA conspiracy would be to ignore the real divisions that exist in the Russian regime and the social interests that determine its policies.

Meanwhile, the military strategy of the Putin regime in Ukraine has been based from the beginning on a self-deluding underestimation, rooted in its class interests and ideological hatred of Marxism, of the predatory character of imperialism. Putin has remained devoted to the fantasy that his “Western partners” can be persuaded to accept the legitimate economic and security interests of the post-Soviet Russian capitalist state. This accounts for Putin’s repeated disavowals of his own “red lines” and infinite patience in the face of innumerable acts of NATO escalation, up to its endorsement of Prigozhin’s coup.

With the Vilnius summit of imperialist powers fast approaching, the continuation of this policy will serve only to convince NATO that it can escalate the war with impunity.

Ruling New Democracy wins Greek elections, far-right make gains as pseudo-left Syriza routed

Robert Stevens

The conservative New Democracy (ND) won Greece’s general election by a landslide on Sunday, with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis remaining in power for a second four-year term.

In a second round of elections, after the first in May, ND won just over 40.5 percent of the vote, finishing almost 23 points ahead of the pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical left—Progressive Alliance). The rout was the largest margin of victory for any party in half a century, since the fall of the fascist regime of the colonels in 1974.

Greece's New Democracy Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, left, takes the oath during a swearing in ceremony at the Presidential palace, in Athens, Greece, June 26, 2023. [Photo: Thanassis Stavrakis/WSWS]

The vote was held under conditions of acute social crisis with millions of Greek workers and youth turning their back on all the parties standing. The first round of the election had to be suspended for a month due to the mass protests and strikes in opposition to the preventable deaths of 57 mainly young people in February’s Tempi valley train crash. The second round was held under the shadow of the June 14 deaths of over 600 refugees who perished in a boat sinking off the cost of Pylos, an event leading to further nationwide protests.

Barely half the 9.9 million registered electorate voted, with turnout just under 53 percent—a record low and 8 percent lower than the 61 percent recorded in the last round. Kathimerini reported, “In the northern constituency of Florina, the abstention rate reached 66.76%, followed by the Ionian island of Kefalonia (62.48%), Evrytania in Central Greece (61.37%) and the Peloponnese constituency of Laconia (61%).” Since May ND lost approximately 330,000 votes; Syriza 270,000; PASOK 70,000 and the KKE 33,000.

This is the case even though voting in elections is compulsory.

Having just failed to secure an overall majority in the May elections, when it finished 20 points ahead of Syriza to take 146 seats, this time ND took 158 seats in the 300-seat parliament in a ballot based on semi-proportional representation. Election legislation determines that the largest party in the second round is awarded a sliding scale bonus of between 20 and 50 seats. As it won more that 40 percent of the vote, New Democracy won all 50 bonus seats available.

As it did in May, ND won 58 out of 59 of Greece's electoral districts. The sole electoral district won by Syriza was the Thracian constituency of Rodopi.

With over 99 percent of votes counted Monday morning, ND had 40.5 percent of the vote (2.1 million), up just under 1 percent on the May vote. Syriza had 17.8 percent (929,355) down over 2 percent, and 48 seats; the social democratic PASOK won 617,300 votes (11.8 percent and 32 seats); the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE) won 400,808 votes (7.6 percent and 20 seats).

Steeped in betrayal during and after its four year in office from 2015-19, when Syriza ditched every pledge to reverse years of savage austerity—and shifting further to the right as the main opposition party over the last four—Alexis Tsipras’s party haemorrhaged support among workers. It won the 2015 election in a landslide, winning over 2.2 million votes and the support of the working class in every major urban centre nationwide.

Four other parties surpassed the three percent barrier required to enter parliament, with the far-right benefitting from the absence of any genuine socialist political alternative for the working class.

The fascist Spartans did not participate in the first round and was only allowed to participate in the second round by Greece’s Supreme Court on June 8. They received over 241,000 votes, taking 4.6 percent and 12 seats, coming fourth overall. The Spartans were founded in 2017 by Vassilis Stigas, who described immigrants as “illegal invaders who have settled in Greece”, responsible for the “ethnic alteration of the population”.

The Spartans have taken on the mantle of the fascist Golden Dawn which was outlawed as a criminal organisation in 2020. With the main far-right National Party-Greeks barred from standing in the May and June 2023 elections, its main figure Ilias Kasidiaris, a former Golden Dawn leader imprisoned for 13 years, announced his “full support” for the Spartans from his jail cell.

The far-right Greek Solution and Niki parties won 4.4 percent and 3.7 percent respectively.

The only nominally left party to enter parliament was Course of Freedom, a splinter of Syriza, which scored 3 percent, up from 2.8 percent in May and took eight seats. The party is the vehicle of former parliamentary speaker, lawyer and Syriza member Zoe Konstantopoulou and was listed on the ballot paper as Course of Freedom—Zoe Konstantopoulou.

Konstantopoulou was first elected to parliament as a Syriza candidate in and re-elected when Syriza won its 2015 landslide. She only broke with Syriza in June 2015, as part of the nationalist, Eurosceptic faction of Syriza to found Popular Unity, when Syriza—after it had already agreed with the European Union, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank troika to continue imposing austeritysigned a formal agreement to carry it out. With Popular Unity’s failure to enter parliament in the September election, Konstantopoulou founded in 2016 what she described as the “neither Left nor Right” Course of Freedom.

Following Syriza’s defeat, Tsipras indicated, after overseeing two general election defeats that he would have to stand down as party leader in the coming weeks, saying, “I will be judged by the members of the party.” He added, “Syriza assumes the responsibilities assigned to it by the popular vote, starting today,” stating that the party “will initiate procedures for the final decision… A big and creative historic cycle has come to a close for Syriza”.

The other major architect of the devastating situation facing the working class is Yanis Varoufakis, Tsipras’s former finance minister, who also stood down in July 2015, as Syriza signed its austerity agreement with the troika. But this was only after he played a key role in Syriza agreeing to continue to impose austerity. Varoufakis stressed that he wanted only a slightly modified version of austerity based on “standard Thatcherite or Reaganesque economic policies”.

Varoufakis went on to found MeRA25 (European Realistic Disobedience Front), which won nine seats in the 2019 general election. But with workers viewing him as equally toxic as Tsipras, MeRa25 was unable to pass the 3 percent threshold in May or Sunday’s second round based on its narrow base of support in the upper middle class.

Medicine Residue Is Everywhere in Our Rivers and Lakes—and Fish Are Behaving Strangely

Daniel Ross

For all the well-documented sources of environmental pollution—think chemical manufacturers, energy plants, mining operations, and agricultural processes—there’s another major source of contamination that continues to get short shrift by those charged with protecting the nation’s waterways and the public’s health: Pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

“Across the board, we don’t have our heads around this problem,” said Emma Rosi, senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. And considering America’s voracious appetite for pharmaceuticals—there were 3.7 billion drugs ordered or provided through physician visits alone in 2015—the scope of the problem is unsurprisingly staggering.

Chemical compounds found in pharmaceutical and personal care products are showing up ubiquitously in the nation’s rivers, lakes, groundwater, and drinking water—even remote regions of national parks. Up to 80 percent of streams in the U.S. alone are contaminated with chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). What’s more, the sheer volume of different persistent compounds found in the environment vastly complicates the regulation and remediation of them.

“These are potent compounds, that’s why we use them,” Rosi added. “But if they don’t get broken down and they enter the environment, they are just as potent to the organisms there.”

How Are These Chemicals Entering the Nation’s Waterways?

The primary culprit is human waste—urine and feces—that makes its way to wastewater treatment plants unequipped to filter out all the various contaminants in the water. But it’s not just human waste that’s a problem.

In 2018, scientists at the USGS conducted a study of 20 wastewater treatment plants across the nation. They found that levels of certain pharmaceuticals were “substantially higher” in plants that received wastewater from drug manufacturing facilities compared to those that didn’t. The study—which looked at 120 different drugs and pharmaceutical degrades—concluded that these facilities are an “important, national-scale source of pharmaceuticals to the environment.”

Some unwanted drugs are flushed down the toilet or tossed into the trash. Hospital waste is another avenue. But while we know how and where pharmaceutical wastes are getting into the environment, we don’t yet know the full extent of the problem in terms of their myriad impacts on delicate ecosystems.

“There’s insignificant research to understand the scope of this issue,” said Rosi. “And I would argue that there’s not enough research funding for scientists to really understand the influence of these compounds.”

Even so, what we know is that some of these chemical compounds can profoundly affect aquatic life. Rosi breaks it down three ways—the first is related to their endocrine-disrupting properties.

In 2016, a team of scientists from the USGS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted a study of fish at 19 different National Wildlife Refuges. They found that between 60 to 100 percent of the fish studied were intersex, meaning they had female egg cells growing on their testes. The scientists linked this phenomenon to elevated levels of estrogen in the water. But estrogen-like chemicals aren’t the only culprit.

A 2015 study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee suggests that higher levels of metformin—a commonly prescribed diabetes drug—cause the development of intersex testes in male fathead minnows, reduce their size, and affect their ability to reproduce.

Pharmaceuticals are also a driver of environmental change, said Rosi. The presence of antidepressants in the nation’s waterways, for example, can disrupt and alter fish behavior, including breeding patterns. The presence of cimetidine, a commonly used antacid, and antihistamine, has the potential to negatively impact the health of freshwater invertebrates and bacterial biofilm, another study suggests. Levels of cimetidine are on the rise in the nation’s streams and rivers.

The third way pertains to their potential impact on human health. “There’s a lot of concern about antibiotic resistance,” said Tia-Marie Scott, a physical scientist with the USGS.

More than 250 million antibiotic prescriptions are written in the U.S. each year. But because the human body cannot metabolize antibiotics fully, and because wastewater treatments plants don’t filter them out, experts fear that the release of these drugs into the environment is contributing to the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is estimated to be responsible for at least 23,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. And it’s not just human waste that’s a problem; agriculture is another major contributor to antibiotic releases.

“This is a whole can of worms that we’re only just able to start getting an understanding of,” Scott said.

Just How Big Is the Problem?

Studies conducted in the U.S. illustrate how pharmaceutical compounds and chemicals found in personal care products are present throughout the nation’s rivers, lakes, groundwater, and drinking water at alarming rates.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about their impacts on drinking water comprises a number of studies, including one by the USGS that found 53 of 74 testing locations had one or more pharmaceuticals in the water. In 2010, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-funded analysis of 48 research publications found 54 active pharmaceutical ingredients and 10 metabolites that have been detected in treated drinking water.

The Great Lakes have come under scrutiny, too. In a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study of Lake Michigan, 32 pharmaceuticals and personal care products were detected in the water, and another 30 were detected in the lake’s sediment. But it’s not just waterways situated near more urbanized areas that are vulnerable to contamination. Pharmaceutical compounds have even made it to isolated regions of the U.S.—including a number of National Parks in Northern Colorado, for example.

“That really gets at how we’re seeing concentrations that are detectable at our most pristine environments,” said Scott. Nor is this a problem confined to the continental U.S. Europe has been researching the problem in its waterways for quite a number of years, while the Alaskan Department of Environmental Conservation’s Fish Monitoring Program keeps tabs on the presence of pharmaceuticals in the state’s fish populations. “This problem occurs pretty much everywhere,” Scott said.

How to Tackle the Problem

The decades-old National Environmental Policy Act gives Food and Drug Administration (FDA) administrators “mechanisms” to stop persistent pharmaceutical compounds from entering the environment, said Scott Graham, director of the Public Engagement and Science Communication Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The problem, said Graham, is that the FDA relies on pharmaceutical companies to conduct their own research into the environmental toll of their products, and this research is then presented to “environmental safety teams” at the agency—teams that are often overworked and understaffed. This leads to evaluations being conducted by FDA personnel who are “ill-qualified to make accurate judgements” on the drug’s potential environmental impact, he added.

“[Drugs] end up getting approved because we have the pharmaceutical companies doing the wrong kind of science which is then being evaluated by the wrong kind of evaluator,” Graham said, who calls 2016 FDA environmental guidelines regarding drugs with estrogenic, androgenic, or thyroid activity a “weak” step forward.

The sheer scope of the problem is too vast for one agency to tackle alone. Rather, Graham advocates for a multi-pronged approach between different federal agencies. But with that in mind, EPA officials also admit in the 2011 GAO report that there is “no formal mechanism, such as a long-term strategy or formal agreement, to manage and sustain these collaborative efforts.”

Just take the staggering amount of waste produced in the U.S. Some 32 billion gallons of wastewater flows through 700,000 miles of underground pipes daily. But wastewater treatment plants don’t have the technology to remove all pharmaceuticals during the treatment process—nor are they mandated to. That, and the nation’s sewage infrastructure is old and deteriorating. So much so, it’s estimated that 900 billion gallons of sewage are released each year into waterways through infrastructure leaks and sewage overflows.

According to the USGS’s Tia-Marie Scott, while some wastewater treatment plants are stepping up to the plate, there are no affordable “one size fits all engineering solutions” to tackle the vast variety of different compounds in the environment. Which leads to the EPA’s stance on this issue. No pharmaceuticals are currently under the EPA’s Primary Drinking Water Regulations.

“And I’m not even sure that’s a practical approach, because there are tens of thousands of emerging contaminants we’re identifying in our wastewater that could be of concern,” said Scott. “And the way our regulations are updated to accommodate new compounds, it doesn’t happen in a fast enough manner to deal with how many different chemicals are being used year after year, even day after day.”

There is a “green pharmacy” movement, pushing for the design of new drugs that biodegrade easily into the environment. But experts caution that the reason pharmaceuticals are so effective is that they’re designed to break down under particular conditions. That’s why some argue that there also needs to be a cultural shift in the way Americans consume pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

“There are lots of things that we use in our everyday lives that we can reduce a little bit,” said Rosi. “Because if people understand that what they’re using and washing down their drains are ending up at their local rivers, streams, lakes, they might think twice. It doesn’t just go away.”

More UK universities deduct academic workers’ pay as marking boycott continues

Ioan Petrescu

Staff at 145 higher education (HE) institutions in the UK are continuing with a marking boycott (MAB) after voting to reject the latest proposal on pay and conditions from their employers, which would have included wage “rises” of between 5 and 8 percent—well below inflation.

The University and College Union (UCU) has organised the boycott having sat on an 85.6 percent majority strike mandate since early April. The last national strikes were held over six days from March 15-22.

The picket line at Manchester Metropolitan University, February 16, 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

Through the MAB, the UCU is attempting to demobilise and divide its members. Not only are they not on strike, but out of the 120,000-strong membership of the UCU (which includes academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, managers, administrators, computer staff, librarians, technicians, professional staff, and postgraduates) only part of it is involved in marking and can participate in the boycott. The rest are frozen out of fighting and are being told to passively “support” the action.

Despite the limited nature of the action, it has the potential to have a significant financial impact on the universities, opening them up to students seeking compensation for the disruption of their degrees. Several employers have retaliated fiercely by deducting staff wages.

Sheffield Hallam University is deducting 100 percent of the pay of staff taking part in the MAB, despite staff continuing to teach lecture and support students as normal. In response, union members have taken seven days of strikes so far.

The University of Winchester has also announced that they will make wage deductions of 100 percent for staff taking part in the boycott. The local UCU branch took six days of strike action through May and June.

The University of Cardiff is withholding 50 percent of the pay of staff participating in the boycott. It is planning on using administrative staff and external markers to mark exams, while at the same time removing second marker moderation (an important quality control mechanism) to speed up the process. This prompted the local UCU spokesperson to accuse the university of giving out “bargain basement degrees”. In response, staff will be picketing graduation ceremonies and have announced 15 days of strike action in July and August.

Nearly 2,000 UCU members at the University of Leeds are taking part in indefinite strike action that began on June 15th, scheduled to continue until management stops its 100 percent deductions.

Workers are reporting on Twitter that SOAS University London has also started deducting up to 100 percent of wages. The local union began industrial action for 18 days, starting on May 22.

UCU branches at the Universities of Dundee, Strathclyde, Edinburgh, and Durham have reported 100 percent deductions and are organising strike actions, though in most cases it will take place at the start of next semester. Other universities that are striking this month include Keele, Liverpool Hope, Bristol, Leicester.

The UCU at the Universities of Manchester (50-100 percent pay deduction), York (100 percent), Aberystwyth (50 percent), Swansea (100 percent) and Essex (80 percent) have not acted despite deductions being confirmed.

At Further Education colleges in Northern Ireland, MAB action was called off by the UCU in exchange for a promised £3,000 lump sum payment this month. This has not been forthcoming, with the employers saying the Department for Economy will not approve the payment without agreement on the national pay deal.

What was a national dispute of 50,000 workers at 150 universities has been splintered by the UCU bureaucracy into several smaller, isolated strikes. Most will take place in June-July when their impact will be seriously limited given it is then near the end of university term. The UCU is also not providing any strike pay at all, with virtually all local branches relying instead on “hardship” funds, paid into by staff and supporters, to provide a pittance to their members.

While many employers turn the screws, others are striking a more conciliatory pose to push for a final sellout agreement, urging the UCEA (Universities and Colleges Employers Association) to restart negotiations on pay and conditions to stop the MABknowing that the UCU will do its best to impose a rotten deal on its membership.

It is increasingly clear to the UCU’s membership that its leaders are leading them up a blind alley. There has been widespread opposition on social media to the newly negotiated pensions deal, presented by the union as a “victory” which would “restore” pensions. Protests were held outside the union’s London headquarters against the calling off of national strikes.

At the UCU’s Congress this year, a motion to censure general secretary Jo Grady passed by 155 delegate votes to 117. But after a subsequent motion of no confidence was rejected, Grady and her allies have been able to continue their betrayal of the dispute.

A key role in defending the bureaucracy is played by the UCU Left, a faction controlled by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which directs opposition into safe channels.

It passed a motion at the UCU Congress supporting the establishment of “strike committees” at UCU branches in support of the ongoing dispute to “ensure that control of industrial action is the hands of the rank-and-file UCU members”. However, in reality, these strikes committees would only have an advisory role to the National Executive Committee of the union and would have to bow to its decisions, making them an ineffectual left cover for the union apparatus.

After women’s prison massacre, Honduran president places military in charge

Andrea Lobo

At least 46 inmates were killed at the main women’s prison in Honduras on Tuesday in a massacre that has horrified millions worldwide. 

According to survivors and relatives of the victims, in the early morning, members of the Barrio 18 gang were allowed by guards—all of whom were unharmed—to enter another wing presumably inhabited by rivals.

Xiomara Castro (center) marches with the military leadership during the 197th anniversary of the Honduran armed forces, December 9, 2022. [Photo: @poderpopular022]

Death threats escalated over several weeks, as the perpetrators managed to make careful preparations and smuggle in a significant arsenal, including 18 pistols, an AR-15 rifle, two Uzi submachine guns, two grenades, machetes and flammable liquid, found at the scene. 

The attackers reportedly shot and hacked at inmates to force them into a cell, which they proceeded to shut with new locks and burn down. Piles of burned bodies, some of which could take months to identify, were found in the bathroom as women sought refuge from the flames but were entirely trapped. Most victims were burned to death.

The gruesome details are only as stunning as the frequency with which such incidents take place, with at least a dozen killings in Honduran prisons yearly for the past six years. The world’s deadliest prison disaster took place in 2012 at the Comayagua prison in Honduras, where over 360 men died.

Despite self-contradictory attempts by officials to point to “human failures” or guards being “overrun,” the incident at the women’s prison could not have happened without the criminal involvement of the security apparatus. 

President Xiomara Castro was compelled to acknowledge that the attack was “planned by gangs in plain sight and with the acquiescence of the security forces.” 

The following day, however, she announced 10 measures to allow the same security apparatus to respond with an “iron fist.” Experts and rights advocates have responded with sharp warnings. After citing the well-known complicity of the police and military with organized crime, Valencia University researcher Joaquín Mejía Rivera tweeted: “it is a collapse before the military power, which has controlled the prisons during the last decade and is directly responsible for their current crisis.”

The measures include indefinitely placing the military in control of security across the entire country. Castro will also renew and expand nationally a state of exception she launched last December that suspended democratic rights and sanctioned mass warrantless detentions ostensibly to combat organized crime.

Leaders of criminal organizations will be sent to a prison in the Cisne Isles in the Caribbean, while a vague request was made to the courts to find alternatives for women currently jailed without being convicted. A significant majority of women and men in Honduran prisons have never been convicted of any crime. 

She named the chief of National Police, Gustavo Sánchez, a US-trained career policeman, as security minister.

Just like her predecessors, Castro will also hand over control of all prisons to the military, specifically the Military Police (PMOP), and charge it with training at least 2,000 new guards. 

The current head of the PMOP, Ramiro Fernando Muñoz, was charged in 2020 by relatives of inmates at one of the three military prisons and the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) with abusing, torturing and refusing to provide prescribed medicines to prisoners. One inmate, Angelo López, was allegedly threatened with death and beaten unconscious by three officials, including Muñoz, who bit the man’s ears.

And finally, in a point largely unreported by the media, she cancelled ceremonies to commemorate the military coup of June 28, 2009. That day, 200 armed troops with masks kidnapped President Manuel Zelaya—Castro’s husband—and sent him in his pajamas on a military plane to Costa Rica. The coup was overseen by the Obama-Biden administration and was aided by US military officials. 

Castro remained in the US embassy during the coup and subsequently gained popularity for convoking and participating in several anti-coup demonstrations and denouncing the regime. In May 2011, Zelaya himself helped re-legitimize the coup regime by signing a “National Reconciliation Agreement,” which allowed him to return to the country to tend to his significant land and business interests. Washington had opposed Zelaya for aligning with President Hugo Chávez, who offered Honduras cheap Venezuelan oil.

One of Castro’s most popular campaign promises was to send the military back to the barracks. She also suggested dissolving the PMOP. In 2015, she said the unit was created “to terrorize the people and persecute oppositionists.” 

At the same time, she made constant reassurances to the local oligarchy and US imperialism. Washington celebrated her election and then requested the extradition of her opponent and incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez to face charges for working for the Sinaloa Cartel in exchange for millions of dollars. 

The drug trafficker Hernandez, who was installed by the same coup regime in fraudulent elections, did not only create the PMOP and several other special units, but much of the current military and police leadership was promoted under his two terms in power. 

The ties of the Honduran state and the local business elite to the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels were drastically strengthened as the United States used trafficking routes and resources to smuggle weapons and train the fascist Contra militias in their dirty war against the petty-bourgeois nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. 

During that period, the CIA also trained and sponsored death squads formed by Honduran police and soldiers to kidnap, torture and kill left-wing workers, students and activists. Many of these death squads were organized under Battalion 3-16, which “disappeared” at least 184 people. 

Zelaya had named several Battalion 3-16 veterans to top posts, including the retired general Álvaro Romero as his security minister and Billy Joya as a security adviser, with the latter playing a prominent role in the 2009 coup. 

Similarly, Castro has maintained Jackeline Foglia Sandoval, a West Point graduate who also belonged to Battalion 3-16, as head of the National Council of Investments, an influential liaison of the government with the private sector. Roland Valenzuela, a minister under Zelaya, accused Foglia as the “person in charge of coordinating and operating the coup” in 2009.

The main purpose of the interventions of US imperialism in Honduras has been to safeguard corporate interests in the region while crushing opposition from below against rampant poverty and social inequality.

US imperialism and its partners in the local oligarchy have created a hell for the vast majority of Hondurans.

Today’s main gangs in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18—were founded in Los Angeles. They spread and thrived in the dire conditions of Central America as a result of mass deportations targeting gang members under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. 

According to the National Statistics Institute, 73 percent of Hondurans live under official poverty and a majority under extreme poverty. Reaching a quarter of the country’s GDP, remittances sent by migrant workers have become a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of households, but the waves of deportations under Obama, Trump and Biden—700,000 of the 1 million Honduran migrants in the last decade have been deported—have had a devastating effect. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has partnered with Castro to deploy troops with US advisers to contain migration and turn the country into an open-air prison. 

Pro-corporate policies have created a situation, according to the UN, where 72 percent of families with children lack access to social assistance and less than one in 10 of the elderly receive a pension. 

In 2019, Puerto Rico, Honduras and Myanmar were declared by the Global Climate Risk Index as the most affected countries by climate change, which is driven by the greenhouse gas emissions of the largest corporations and militaries globally. This classification was made even before the back-to-back Hurricanes Eta (Category 4) and Iota (Category 5) that caused billions of dollars in damage across Nicaragua and Honduras. 

Droughts worsened by global warming and El Niño in 2015–16 sent hundreds of thousands fleeing the country as crops failed, while another Super El Niño is expected to wreak havoc in 2023–24 given that emissions and warming have continued to accelerate. 

As the coup regime launched a wave of privatizations, regulatory cuts and social austerity, the security forces killed at least 20 demonstrators and participated in the selective murder of anti-coup activists like environmentalist Berta Cáceres in 2016. 

After its creation in 2013, the PMOP crushed demonstrations against Hernandez’ second electoral fraud in 2017, killing 23 people, and it has used lethal force against demonstrators repeatedly since. 

In 2019, mass strikes and revolts against layoffs and a privatization of healthcare and education were brutally crushed, leaving at least six dead. On June 24 of that year, the PMOP invaded the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) and sprayed a crowd of students with live ammunition. Then, in 2020, as the poorest Hondurans blocked streets across the country to demand economic assistance to shelter from COVID-19, the government again responded with brutal repression and the premature reopening of workplaces.

In these conditions of military dictatorship and economic and social devastation, US imperialism and the ruling elite advanced Xiomara Castro to provide a democratic and “left” fig leaf as they continue to plunder the country and prepare to crack down on future social explosions.