The July 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain. [AP Photo/Jonathan Ernst]
Next week, on July 11-12, NATO will hold a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the military alliance is expected to announce plans to rapidly expand military spending, surge troops to Russia’s borders, and dramatically increase its involvement in the war in Ukraine.
At the last NATO summit in June 2022, the alliance pledged to “deliver the full range of forces” needed “for high-intensity, multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer competitors.”
Under conditions in which the much vaunted counteroffensive by the Ukrainian military has turned into a protracted debacle, NATO is under pressure to directly intervene in the conflict to ensure its goal of, in the words of a former NATO commander, “breaking the back” of Russia.
Against the backdrop of this supercharged climate, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of mining the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) with the aim of blowing it up.
In a video address published Tuesday, Zelensky said that “every day, we are adding content to the NATO summit that will take place in Vilnius next week,” which will ensure “security in Europe,” before turning to the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Zelensky claimed that “Russian troops have placed objects resembling explosives on the roof of several power units of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.” He accused Russia of aiming to “commit new evil” at the plant, adding, “It is the responsibility of everyone in the world to stop it.”
Contrary to Zelensky’s statements, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement that no “visible indications of mines or explosives” have been observed at the plant, which is under monitoring by the organization.
The framing of Zelensky’s comments make clear that they are an effort to use any potential incident or provocation at the plant as a pretext for more direct military involvement by NATO in the conflict.
In an article published last week in Politico, Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO, called for the alliance to respond to any “deliberate nuclear incident” with direct intervention into the conflict.
“In case of any deliberate nuclear incident, the US and key NATO allies need to intervene directly and bring the war to a swift and complete end by helping Ukraine restore control over all its territory,” Daalder wrote.
In an article in February on the revelation by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States and Ukraine had direct involvement in the bombing of the German-Russian Nord Stream pipeline, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the United States could stage a provocation to justify its direct entry into the war:
In 1898, the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor, portrayed as an act of war, was used to launch the Spanish-American War and dispatch troops to Cuba and the Philippines. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted direct US involvement in the Vietnam War was fabricated… There is the precedent of the September 11, 2001 attacks, which were used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and the whole ‘war on terror.’
The WSWS added:
The bigger the escalation, the bigger the lie... the White House has it entirely within its power to stage a provocation, aimed at galvanizing public support for the war, whether by provoking a Russian response or manufacturing an “attack” out of whole cloth.
It is unclear whether any such provocation will take place ahead of the summit. It is clear, however, that the summit will be used for a significant escalation of the US conflict with Russia.
Ahead of the summit, a group of retired generals and foreign policy officials called on the United States to explicitly back the military reconquest of Crimea and do everything necessary to ensure this takes place.
The letter’s signatories included retired generals Philip Breedlove and Wesley Clark, both NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as well as Ben Hodges, former commanding general, US Army Europe, and Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia.
The letter’s signatories also include all of the lead witnesses in the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019, which the Democratic Party deliberately centered on claims that Trump was undermining the war preparations against Russia. Among them are Marie Yovanovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine; Amb. Kurt Volker, former US ambassador to NATO; retired colonel Alexander Vindman; and William B. Taylor, former US ambassador to Ukraine.
Critically, the list also includes Douglas Lute, who in 2022 said the Taliban should be a model for the arming of Ukraine, declaring the US should be “supplying the Ukrainians as Pakistan supplied the Taliban.”
The letter calls on NATO to pledge to “win” the war against Russia and openly assert its effort to militarily reconquer Crimea.
This means taking steps to ensure that Ukraine 1) wins this war and reestablishes full control over its internationally recognized 1991 borders; and 2) is fully anchored in the security and economic arrangements that from 1945 until 2014 made Europe a continent of peace, prosperity and cooperation. The transatlantic community can only be stable and secure if Ukraine is secure. Ukraine’s entry into NATO, fulfilling the promise made at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, would achieve that.
The letter further demands:
In Vilnius, NATO heads of state and government should offer an unequivocal statement of alliance support for Ukraine and for Kyiv’s aim of regaining sovereignty and territorial integrity within its 1991 borders. They should further underscore their readiness to supply Ukraine weapons — including longer-range missiles such as ATACMS, Western fighter planes and tanks — in sufficient quantities to prevail on the battlefield.
Beyond direct intervention in the conflict, NATO is poised to approve plans to massively expand NATO troops on Russia’s borders. Describing these plans, Politico reported earlier this year that “In the coming months, the alliance will accelerate efforts to stockpile equipment along the alliance’s eastern edge and designate tens of thousands of forces that can rush to allies’ aid on short notice… The numbers will be large, with officials floating the idea of up to 300,000 NATO forces.”
In addition, NATO officials have said that the alliance will institute a “floor” for military spending, with 2 percent of GDP being an absolute minimum for members of the alliance.
A major editorial published Wednesday by the New York Times under the headline “America Is Living on Borrowed Money” gives the signal from the leading corporate media organ aligned with the Democratic Party for a full-scale onslaught on social benefits for working people, particularly Social Security and Medicare, the two largest social programs.
The editorial is thoroughly dishonest, purporting to be concerned about the rise in interest payments to investors, declaring, “Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy, the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.” It then bemoans the refusal of the Republicans to raise taxes on the wealthy.
But after the populist pretenses, the real point is slipped in at the end:
Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of federal spending growth going forward, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable. That will require painful choices.
There is no doubt that the sole purpose of the editorial is to raise the necessity for what is euphemistically called “entitlement reform” in the think tanks that study the policy options for the US ruling elite. In plain language, this means gutting the two main programs on which tens of millions of elderly and retired people depend for income support and health insurance.
President Joe Biden speaks at the Pentagon, Wednesday, February 10, 2021, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
The reference to Social Security and Medicare as “the major drivers of federal spending growth going forward” is particularly cynical. It amounts to a backhanded admission that these programs are not the cause of the massive ballooning of the federal debt over the past 25 years, while claiming that they will play that role in the future. The editorial never mentions the multiple bailouts of Wall Street and the banking system or the massive expenditures on the wars of the past three decades. It does not refer, in its warning of future deficit growth, to President Biden’s pledge to fund the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”
The editorial thus contradicts an instructive analysis published in the pages of the Times itself only six months ago, when the federal government first exhausted its borrowing authority, leading to the manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling. This study, published January 22 under the headline “How the US Government Amassed $31 Trillion in Debt,” gave a factual accounting of the actual sources of the accumulated deficits.
[Photo: Center for American Progress]
The US federal debt rose from roughly $5 trillion when George W. Bush took office in January 2001 to $31.4 trillion in January 2023, some 22 years later, an average increase of $1.2 trillion a year. The contributors to the rising debt can be summarized briefly:
Wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and other operations linked to the “war on terror” cost $6 trillion. This does not include the costs for the war against Russia in Ukraine, the military buildup against China in the Asia-Pacific, or the ongoing expense of maintaining the vast US military machine worldwide, now running at $1 trillion a year.
Tax cuts, primarily to the wealthy, cost well over $7 trillion. One study found that the Bush tax cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003, cut $5.6 trillion in revenue from 2001 to 2018. They continue in force under a bipartisan deal between the Obama administration and House Republicans in 2012, which preserved most of the original package, so there have been additional losses in revenue. The Trump tax cuts, enacted at the end of 2017, have added another $1.2 trillion and continue in effect under the Biden administration.
Bailouts of Wall Street and the financial system as a whole have cost $5.7 trillion: $800 billion in the 2008 crash, enacted by a Democratic Congress under the Obama administration; $3 trillion in 2020 in the CARES Act passed on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by Trump; and $1.9 trillion in Biden’s American Recovery Act, the second round of bailouts linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Times analysis in January concluded: “The biggest—and often bipartisan—drivers of debt have been the federal responses to two sharp economic downturns: the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic recession.”
But on Wednesday there is no reference by the liars on the Times Editorial Board to the bailouts of the financial aristocracy. Added to this is at least $5 trillion in interest costs over that period, what the Times editorial refers to as “paying the wealthy to borrow their money.”
Social spending, by contrast, was only a marginal contributor to the increase. The Times analysis in January noted that Medicare spending increased by up to $100 billion a year because of Bush’s addition of a prescription drug benefit, while suggesting that Obama’s Affordable Care Act actually reduced Medicare spending compared to previous projections.
As for discretionary social spending (on education, transportation, housing, the environment and similar programs), this is such a small component of the overall budget that the Times analysis did not even mention it. This category of spending has declined substantially under the terms of the 2012 agreement between Obama and the Republicans.
[Photo: Center for American Progress]
The four main drivers of budget deficits—wars, tax cuts, bailouts and interest payments—account for nearly $24 trillion of the $26 trillion rise in the total federal debt since 2000. The ruling class has been running the federal budget for two purposes: to finance imperialist aggression and to stuff its own pockets with untold wealth.
Yet it regards the modest incomes of the retired and disabled as extravagant and insupportable, a sentiment no doubt exacerbated by the significant jump in Social Security payments this year due to the acceleration of inflation. Corporate America, with the collaboration of the unions, has eliminated cost-of-living escalators for most workers, but retirees on Social Security still get a yearly boost that partially offsets rising prices.
The analysis in the Times published six months ago suggests a blueprint for the working class in responding to the moaning about the bankruptcy of the federal government. Workers should reply to the demands for sacrifice by declaring that those who have run the United States into the ground financially should pay the consequences, not working people.
The ruling class parasites should be expropriated, through the nationalization of the banks, the hedge funds and the financial system as a whole, as well as the seizure of the personal fortunes of the billionaires and multi-millionaires. The financial system should be reorganized under the democratic control of the working class, with the books opened to make all its operations transparent and comprehensible, ending the endemic corruption and criminal manipulation by the super-rich.
The Pentagon war machine should be dismantled, along with an end to all US military operations overseas and a halt to US military aid and economic support to dictatorships and right-wing regimes: Ukraine, Israel, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies and the like.
There is a remarkable similarity between the present bankruptcy of the American government and the crisis of the monarchy in France on the eve of the great Revolution of 1789. King Louis XVI was compelled to summon the Estates-General to obtain additional revenue because his regime had been bankrupted by endless wars and the profligacy and mismanagement of the ruling nobility. He soon lost his head, and the aristocrats lost their estates.
There is a more contemporary point of reference as well. During the heyday of liberal social reformism in the mid-1960s, there was a ferocious debate in the US political establishment over the federal budget. Spending on the Vietnam War was constraining the ability of the Lyndon Johnson administration to finance “Great Society” programs like the newly introduced Medicare and Medicaid programs, along with the whole edifice of Johnson’s supposed “War on Poverty.”
The debate was framed as “guns vs. butter,” and Johnson initially tried to have it both ways, spending ever-increasing sums on the genocidal war against the Vietnamese revolution, while at the same time expanding the welfare state at home. But the contradiction derailed his reformist promises and ultimately his administration as a whole.
Today there is no longer any debate within the ruling elite. It has opted decisively for militarism and war, against Russia in Ukraine, and, looming on the horizon, against China in the vast Indo-Pacific region, home to more than half of humanity. The Times editorial demonstrates that no section of the ruling class can offer a progressive solution to this crisis.
After weeks of delay, the coalition government of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP) agreed the 2024 draft federal budget on Monday. On Wednesday, the cabinet will adopt the harsh austerity budget. At €445.7 billion, total expenditure is €32 billion less than in the current year. In order to comply with the debt brake, new borrowing will be limited to €16.6 billion.
The savings are mainly concentrated in the social sector, while the military budget is exempt from all restrictions. The military budget is designed to reach NATO’s 2 percent of GDP target in 2024. That is over €70 billion, more than twice the figure from 10 years back, when the German military budget amounted to €32.4 billion.
This is the biggest rearmament since Hitler. Last year, with the support of the opposition, the government passed a so-called “special fund for the Bundeswehr” amounting to 100 billion euros.
A Leopard 2 tank is pictured during a demonstration event held for the media by the German Bundeswehr in Munster near Hannover, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011. [AP Photo/Michael Sohn]
Nineteen of the 70 billion euros are to come from the military’s “special fund” in the coming year. In the following years, further increases in arms expenditures will be financed in full from that year’s budget. For 2028, this will mean an additional requirement of at least €25 billion.
In order to transform Germany into the leading military power in Europe, social spending will be slashed and all areas of society will be subordinated to war policy. For example, the federal government’s subsidy of one billion euros for long-term social care insurance will be cut, the federal subsidy for statutory health insurance will be frozen at the 2023 level, and the federal subsidy for pensions insurance and parental allowances will be reduced.
The anti-social thrust of the budget is most evident in the area of basic child support. Only two billion euros are earmarked for this in each of the coming years, instead of the 12 billion estimated by the family ministry. The fight against child poverty is thus falling victim to armaments spending.
The Greens, and to some extent also the SPD, had promoted the basic child allowance as a central social policy project in their election campaign. Above all, the Green candidate for chancellor and current foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, had campaigned for it. The Greens, long since a party of the affluent middle class, thus tried to give themselves a “social” fig leaf.
After 25 years in which the SPD has been in government, with one interruption, more than one-fifth of all children and young people in Germany, a total of 2.8 million, live in income poverty. According to the election promises, the combination into a basic child allowance of all existing family support measures—the child benefit, citizen’s allowance, child supplement and housing benefit—together with additional benefits for poorer families and changes in the application process, would counteract child poverty. In fact, this would have been a drop in the ocean. But now, even this drop is being cut in the interests of rearmament.
The Greens and the SPD are, in fact, at the forefront of the push for Germany’s rearmament. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is among the hawks on the Ukraine war and the confrontation with China.
Even if Family Minister Lisa Paus, a Green, tries to pass the buck to Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP (who is supported by his predecessor at the Finance Ministry, SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz), that will not alter the fact that the Greens never seriously intended to fight child poverty. Nineteen months after the coalition government took office, the Family Ministry has still not presented a concept of what precisely the basic child allowance is supposed to look like. Instead, an inter-ministerial working group (IMA), which meets very infrequently and is itself divided into six sub-groups, is dragging the matter out endlessly. It is obvious that the SPD and the Greens have only been waiting for a favourable opportunity to bury their election promises.
War and rearmament are not compatible with a progressive social policy. The costs of militarism are brutally dumped on the working class. The 2024 federal budget is only the beginning.
Although all ministries together have already cut €20 billion, Finance Minister Lindner is calling for further savings of €14.4 billion for the years 2025 to 2027. Added to this are the effects of inflation, low wage settlements, exploding rents and rising energy prices, which decimate the income of average earners.
When it comes to bailing out the banks and giving money to the rich, on the other hand, there are unlimited sums available. For example, the federal government is subsidising the semiconductor giant Intel with the record sum of €9.9 million to build a chip factory in Magdeburg, which will bring a maximum of 3,000 jobs.
Workers and youth have all parties represented in the Bundestag as opponents if they want to defend their past social gains, their incomes and their democratic rights. All of these parties—including the Left Party—stand behind the war and austerity policies of the federal government. The same applies to the trade unions, which ensure that no open resistance develops in the factories and conclude wage agreements far below the inflation rate.
Hours after the start of Monday’s criminal attack on Jenin in the northern West Bank, several thousand residents of the city’s densely populated refugee camp were forced to flee their homes, amid Palestinian claims that the military had threatened and forced camp residents to leave.
The offensive by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has killed at least 12 Palestinians, four of whom are children, and injured at least 120, including 20 in serious condition, in Israel’s biggest attack on a West Bank city in years.
Israeli soldiers drive an APC out of the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, during an Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp, July 4, 2023. [AP Photo/Ariel Schalit]
Hundreds of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozers, under cover from aerial strikes from armed drones and helicopters, carried out acts of wanton vandalism. Their aim is to capture the armed groups resisting Israel’s decades-long, illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and their arms caches, make life for the camp’s residents untenable and terrify and intimidate civilians throughout the West Bank.
Their actions are flagrant violations of the international conventions on war and human rights that outlaw military action against civilians.
The IDF flattened homes, residential buildings, medical facilities and mosques and ploughed up most of the streets surrounding the camp, leaving piles of rubble at the side of the roads that are now unusable, making it difficult if not impossible for humanitarian organisations to reach the camp’s remaining residents. Basic infrastructure, water, electricity and telephone networks, are in ruins. The residents, without access to the internet and social media, are cut off from the outside world.
In the evening, the IDF brought in re-enforcements to suppress the Palestinian militias and stationed snipers in the hollowed-out buildings, while its soldiers fired live bullets near a medical centre, injuring three people. More than 1,000 troops carried out searches to arrest members of the resistance groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Lions’ Den, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others that Israel describes as “terrorists.” They have so far arrested 120 “wanted” Palestinians who are being interrogated by the security services.
The refugee camp, where some 14,000 people live in less than half a square kilometre, has been a centre of armed resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation that has attracted growing concern and nervousness among Israel’s Arab neighbours, all of whom are sitting atop social tinder boxes. Netanyahu, speaking at an IDF base commanding the Jenin operation, showered praise on the soldiers, signaled the end of the current operation and promised further attacks. “In these moments we are completing the mission, and I can say that our broad action in Jenin is not a one-time thing. We will continue as much as necessary to cut off terrorism.”
The leaders of Israel’s various opposition parties all voiced their support for the government’s war crimes, indicating how little their policies differed from those of Netanyahu and his fascist ministers.
As the operation in Jenin intensified, Hussein Khalaylah, a 20year old Palestinian from the southern West Bank town of Samua, rammed his car into a group of pedestrians in a residential area of Tel Aviv, before giving chase to passers-by with a knife and leaving seven people injured, three seriously. Hamas, the militant clerical group that controls Gaza, said later Khalaylah was one of its members.
An armed civilian shot and killed Khalaylah, which Israeli security officials chillingly described as “neutering” the assailant. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said that the attack vindicated his legislative drive to enable more Israelis to carry guns.
Yaakov Shabtai, Israel’s police chief, told reporters, “We’ve assessed that because of our activity in Judea and Samaria [the biblical name for the West Bank], the motivation and potential for attacks would rise.” Far from protecting the lives of Jewish Israelis, the IDF’s murderous campaign against the Palestinians has indeed endangered them.
Israel has carried out near-daily military raids in the West Bank, killing 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since Netanyahu took office at the end of last year, announced the construction of 13,000 new homes in the settlements and expanded the settlements deemed illegal under Israeli law. Settlers have been allowed to carry out pogrom-like attacks on Palestinian towns and villages, under the protection of the Israeli army. At the same time, Israel has withheld the taxes and revenues collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA), leaving the PA unable to pay its workforce or provide any assistance and support as social conditions deteriorate.
Netanyahu and his fascist-dominated coalition have deliberately stoked war, targeting the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel’s Arab citizens and neighbouring states, above all, Iran and Syria, in the face of widespread opposition to their plans to assume dictatorial powers by emasculating an already largely compliant judiciary.
Netanyahu’s war plans, irrespective of his conjunctural disagreements with the Biden administration, were greenlighted by Washington. None of Tel Aviv’s war crimes against the Palestinians—the self-same ones that the Washington accuses Russia of having committed in Ukraine—could have been carried out without Biden’s say-so.
Israel has admitted that it informed the US of its intention of carrying out the operation in Jenin and evidently met no opposition to its plans. On Monday, the White House National Security Council stated, “We support Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.”
The previous day, Israel’s Defence Ministry announced it is to buy 25 F-35 aircraft from the US, in a deal that increases Israel’s arsenal of the stealth fighter jets from 50 to 75 by 2026-27. The $3 billion purchase, to be financed through American military aid to Israel and produced by Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney in conjunction with Israeli companies, means that Israel will be the only country in the Middle East to fly the world’s most advanced fighter jet. The F-35’s stealth technology makes it more able to strike targets with impunity throughout the region and outwit Iran’s S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense system, and possibly even the S-400 system.
The announcement follows last January’s request for 25 F-15 EX Boeing fighters from the US and November’s agreement to purchase four Boeing KC-46A midair refueling aircraft, both of which would enhance Tel Aviv’s capabilities against Tehran.
The move to expand Israel’s arsenal comes as tensions between Israel and Iran are escalating and is part of US imperialism’s broader preparations for a possible war against Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon. Netanyahu has already used its F-35 jets to shoot down Iranian drones and has threatened to carry out strikes on Iranian nuclear targets.
Israel has assassinated several Iranian nuclear experts, attacked and sabotaged several facilities inside Iran and waged a covert war—aerial and maritime—against Tehran and its allies, striking Syria in almost weekly attacks with the US providing intelligence and military support.
The nuclear issue has long been a smokescreen, with the major powers, the International Atomic Energy Authority and the CIA all admitting that there has been no evidence of Iran having any type of nuclear weapons programme since 2003, as the current CIA Director and former deputy Secretary of State William Burns acknowledged in his autobiography.
The Biden administration had initially hoped to use the renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal as a means of detaching Iran from Russia and China and opening up additional energy supplies to Europe. But under President Ebrahim Raisi, who hails from Iran’s conservative faction opposed to the 2015 deal, Tehran has sought to take advantage of the Russia-Ukraine war and western sanctions on Russia to stress Iran’s importance as a transport hub connecting China and Central Asia with Europe and Russia with India. It has signed several transport projects even as it has opened back-channel talks with Washington to secure some relief from the sanctions that have crippled its economy.
In March, China brokered an agreement between Saudi Arabia, until recently a staunch US ally, and Iran, following years of fierce competition for influence throughout the Middle East. Syria, a key Iranian ally and whose President Bashar al-Assad Riyadh had sought to overthrow by funding and arming Islamist proxies, has been welcomed back into the Arab League.
In May, Tehran and Moscow signed a $1.6 billion railway deal to develop the International North–South Transport Corridor as a rival to the Suez Canal. On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Iran will be admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a full member next month, strengthening Tehran’s links to China and Russia amid international isolation and sanctions.
During the first round of the Guatemalan presidential elections on June 25, no candidate came close to winning the support of one tenth of the electorate, 40 percent of which abstained.
Bernardo Arévalo and Sandra Torres. Photos by Javier Arango and Carlos Sebastián CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The front-runners in the contest were former first lady Sandra Torres of the establishment party National Unity of Hope (UNE) with 15.8 percent of the ballots cast, and the career diplomat Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla Movement with 11.8 percent. The two were supposed to qualify for a runoff in August.
Four right-wing candidates tailed Arévalo, who appeared in sixth place or worse in the polls. Most importantly, nearly one fourth or 1.3 million of the votes were blank or spoiled, nearly as many as those received by Torres and Arévalo combined.
On Saturday July 1, however, the Constitutional Court threatened to invalidate the election by ordering a “new election scrutiny review hearing.” Its five judges, who are all open allies of far-right incumbent President Alejandro Giammattei and his Vamos party, whose candidate came in third, ruled in favor of a lawsuit presented by several right-wing parties. These included Vamos itself and Valor, the party the fascistic candidate Zury Ríos Sosa, daughter of former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for directing the mass murder of Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan peasants. These parties claim that “over one thousand ballot box records” were tampered with but have not presented corroborating evidence.
The entire election was indeed characterized by irregularities, including several top candidates rejected on spurious grounds, reports of violence, vote buying, ballots destroyed, riots, police repression with tear gas at voting places, hospitalized and missing electoral officials. Both right-wing and nominally “left-wing” parties issued challenges, as most irregularities were aimed at favoring the establishment candidates.
However, the move by the courts to invalidate the results has nothing to do with guaranteeing “the purity of the electoral process,” as the ruling claims. Instead, it sets the stage for a fascistic coup attempt to subvert the results.
On Sunday, as a few hundred demonstrators gathered to protest the results, the Electoral Court (TSE) announced that it would suspend any ratification of the vote count, although it had already declared Torres and Arévalo winners by an unbridgeable margin.
Significantly, the organizers of the demonstration at the TSE included the fascist Foundation against Terrorism, which defends war criminals and has joined forces with Giammattei to jail and threaten “anti-corruption” journalists, judges and prosecutors, and a group led by Boris Lemos, a former military official who led an assault by veterans against Congress in October 2021 to demand a massive compensation and carried out protests against measures to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Both groups have opposed from the right the 1996 “peace accords” that formally ended the 36 years of civil war between a handful of weak petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrillas and a series of US-backed dictatorial regimes. The military, trained and armed by the US, oversaw massacres of left-wing intellectuals, workers, and youth, and the genocidal campaign against the Mayan Indians. These fascist groups calling for a return to such operations have little support outside military circles but are being mobilized by the ruling elite to intimidate popular opposition to its intrigues.
These were the seventh elections since the 1996 “peace accords,” through which US imperialism and its local partners hoped to place a thin “democratic” veil on its ruthless and corrupt vassal state as they continued their onslaught of privatizations, austerity and other policies to favor investors. The remnants of the crushed guerrillas agreed to play their part in this scheme by becoming bourgeois parties tasked with creating illusions in reforming the capitalist state.
Today, amid a worsening crisis of global capitalism, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of the war in Ukraine, growing resistance from below against unprecedented levels of inequality and geopolitical and economic pressures from US imperialism from above, the process that began in 1996 has reached a dead end.
In response to the elections, which were an unmistakable sign of generalized disaffection and social anger by the impoverished working class, the local elite under Giammattei is moving headlong to remove these “democratic trappings” to defend its privileges.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the court ruling questioning the elections as a “grave threat to democracy with far reaching implications” and defended the statements of the Organizations of American States and the European Union validating the results.
Giammattei, who is constitutionally banned from running for re-election, and his fascist allies have responded by telling their puppet masters in Washington “don’t intervene.” This follows a visit by Giammattei to Taiwan and the launch last month of a pilot facility in Tegucigalpa where migrants will be forced to request asylum to the US. These were clear gestures to ingratiate himself with US imperialism.
But the response by the Biden administration goes beyond a hypocritical appeal to maintain a democratic veneer that can facilitate the imperialist oppression of Guatemala. The Semilla Movement and Bernardo Arévalo, who are expected to win the runoff, are being enthusiastically promoted by the New York Times, the Associated Press, Foreign Policy and other US corporate outlets. Such positive coverage is limited to politicians that promise to do the bidding of US imperialism.
Semilla was launched in 2014 as a lobbyist group composed of officials of former administrations, bureaucrats at international cooperation agencies and academics. Its two main founders were late Edelberto Torres Rivas, who was a leader of the Stalinist Guatemalan Workers Party (PGT) before becoming a consultant and UN official, and Juan Alberto Fuentes Knight, who was finance minister in the administration of Sandra Torres’s corrupt late husband, Álvaro Colom.
Arévalo himself rose through the diplomatic ranks up to vice-minister under the dictatorial regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. He has claimed to represent the legacy of his father, Juan José Arévalo, who as Guatemala’s first popularly elected President (1945-1951) began a series of bourgeois capitalist reforms, including a limited land reform and the development of social security, public education and labor regulations. His successor, Jacobo Árbenz, who continued these reforms and appointed Arévalo as a traveling ambassador, was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated military coup in 1954.
Semilla became a political party explicitly to support the efforts of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and its corruption investigation of then President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti, which had triggered mass demonstrations in 2015 and the resignation of Pérez Molina. The CICIG was created by the UN in 2006 following the instructions of Washington, which financed its activities and used select cases to keep the local ruling elite aligned with the interests of US imperialism. This has included countering growing Chinese influence and attacking migrants attempting to reach the US-Mexico border.
In 2019, the CICIG, which was investigating then President Jimmy Morales, Giammattei and numerous politicians and business figures, was driven out of the country by the oligarchy with the acquiescence of the Trump administration.
Arévalo based his campaign on promises to fight corruption, while also proposing limited increases in social spending and the buildup of the police. However, he has also sought to reassure the local elite and said that he will not bring the CICIG back to the country.
“When we have met with business figures that have some doubts, after speaking very frankly they tell us, ‘well, we feel very comfortable with your proposals,’” he said in an interview with AP last week.
Moreover, Semilla has aggressively advanced Washington’s demands that the Giammattei administration support sanctions against the Putin government over the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens to trigger a Third World War between nuclear powers.
US imperialism has been and remains the main sponsor of fascism and dictatorial forms of rule in Guatemala and Latin America as a whole. As a result of the decline of its relative economic dominance, Washington relies more today than at any other moment on the military elites whose patronage it has long cultivated to secure its hegemony in the region. As some of its most loyal representatives, Semilla and Arévalo don’t pose any alternative to imperialist oppression and the turn toward dictatorship.
On July 1, 2023, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) situation report noted there were 51 new fires and 552 active fires burning across approximately 34,000 square miles of the country, exceeding the record set in 1995 when more than 27,400 square miles were razed. Continuing the current pace, the season would end with 123,550 square miles burned out, an area 20 percent larger than California.
Estimated cumulative hectares burned in wildfires from satellite-detected hotspots. [Photo: Canadian Wildland Fire Information System.]
For the year to date, a total of 3,154 fires have been tallied. More than half of the current fires (281) are raging out of control across the country while the rest are either being held at bay or brought under control. An international cadre of wildfire fighters—from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Costa Rica—as well as fire experts, have been assembled to provide Canadian authorities assistance with the efforts to bring these fires to an end.
The Canadian wildfires began much earlier this year than the usual historic trends in which the fire season begins in July. The present fires started in March and have only gained in intensity throughout June. By official accounts, the 2023 wildfire season has been the worst in North American history and shows no signs of abating. A combined 11 of 13 Canadian provinces and territories have been impacted, with the largest blazes in Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec.
The primary wildfires that started in central and western Canada in May were triggered by lightning. But once ablaze, they tore across the country at full tilt due to arid conditions created by an early heatwave which had approached record highs and that still continues.
Boreal forests occur in the more southern parts of the taiga ecoregion that spread across the northern parts of the world. [Photo by Mark Baldwin-Smith. / CC BY-SA 3.0]
Many of the fires are burning near the Arctic Circle in the Canadian boreal peatland forests—stretching from Labrador in the far northeast, to northeastern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory—which is a biome characterized by coniferous forests. These are one the world’s largest biogeographical units, having formed some 12,000 years ago following the last glacial period.
Peatlands—a buffer against climate change
Peatlands act like natural sinks for carbon dioxide, promoting a cooling effect on the global climate. The lands are dominated by small “ancient land plants” known as bryophytes or “peat moss” that are difficult to decompose and produce substances that slow the microbial activities involved in generating methane and carbon dioxide gases. These regions are some of the most critical ecosystems that help limit the impact of greenhouse gases on climate.
The boreal forests are tens of thousands of years old and covered by deep layers of decayed plants and organic materials. It has been estimated that the global peatland may contain more than 550 gigatonnes (550 billion tons) of carbon. If all this carbon were to be released, the current CO2 levels in the atmosphere would double to over 800 parts per million.
Decades of industrial exploitation—logging, oil, and gas drilling—of these regions has already laid waste to 15 percent of global peatlands, which have been drained and repurposed for economic pursuits leading to 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions entering the atmosphere, contributing to the global warming trends that are reaching critical levels. These have only made wildfire seasons longer and more intense, threatening these regions and their ability to store greenhouse gases.
A report published in 2019 by scientists Ellen Whitman and colleagues showed that short-interval wildfires and drought are overwhelming the boreal forest resilience and altering the ecosystems of the North American forests. Whitman told CBC News, “When you’ve had a severe disturbance or a repeated burning on top of burning or a real severe drought in the year after a fire, we might kind of start to see these patches changing to be more southern-like in their ecosystem structure. Almost like a savannah in some cases.”
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published a report on February 23, 2022, which stated, “Climate change and land-use change are projected to make wildfires more frequent and intense, with a global increase of extreme fires of up to 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by the end of 2050 and 50 percent by the end of the century.”
The UNEP even warned that the Arctic regions, where warming is occurring nearly four times faster than the rest of the world in the last four decades, are no longer immune to wildfires. Annual mean temperatures across the Canadian forests were 1.6 degrees Celsius above norms in 2017.
Smoke plumes spread across the United States
The toxic smoke from the current wildfires has poured across the border into the midwestern and northeastern states in the US, leaving more than a third of the country’s population under air quality alerts. The plumes containing soot, brown carbon and other pollutants have risen kilometers into the stratosphere and traversed the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the British Isles and even southwestern Europe.
The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reported that the fire radiative power for Canada in the first three weeks of June was significantly higher than ever seen in the last two decades. Carbon emissions for the month have been estimated at over 100 billion kilograms. A persistent smell of ash and even plastic is everywhere. Horizons and city skylines are, at times, barely discernible through the thick orange-gray haze. In many of these regions, the air quality index has far exceeded the WHO thresholds for a hospitable climate.
Quebec Canada wildfire smoke covers New Jersey and New York City, June 7, 2023. [Photo by Anthony Quintano]
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen warned, “Current government responses to wildfires are often putting money in the wrong place. Those emergency service workers and firefighters on the frontlines who are risking their lives to fight forest wildfires need to be supported. We have to minimize the risk of extreme wildfires by being better prepared: invest more in fire risk reduction, work with local communities, and strengthen global commitment to fight climate change.”
The UNEP report continued: “Wildfires disproportionately affect the world’s poorest nations. With an impact that extends for days, weeks and even years after the flames subside, they impede progress towards the UN Sustainable Developmental Goals and deepen social inequalities.” The destruction of these forests not only leaves behind highly contaminated regions that are uninhabitable, but also triggers a vicious cycle, or negative feedback loop, exacerbating the factors that have created these devastating conditions in the first place.
The trend in global wildfires over the last two decades has worsened considerably. Fire seasons are beginning sooner and lasting longer than ever before. They are burning twice as much tree cover, amounting to three million more hectares of tree cover loss per year compared to 2001, according to a University of Maryland study published in 2021. That year approximately 9.3 million hectares of tree cover were lost globally.
The effects of air pollution, especially small particles
The health impact of air on billions of people who lack access to technologies that could protect them can not be understated. Wildfires release enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, black and brown carbon, ozone precursors, and volatile and semi-volatile organic materials and nitrogen oxides that form ozone. Even more dangerous is the organic particulate matter known as PM2.5, fine particles that are equal to or less than 2.5 microns, smaller than the size of SARS-CoV-2 aerosols, which can bypass all the respiratory mechanisms that would prevent their entry deep into the lungs and circulatory system. The primary mechanism of injury is thought to be from the free radicals, metal and organic compounds in these fine particulates, that lead to formation of hydroxyl radicals which cause damage to the lung cells’ DNA, contributing to various pathologies including lung cancers.
Illustration compares a fine particle in wildfire smoke to a human hair. [Photo: US Environmental Protection Agency]
Economist Arden Pope, a researcher at Brigham Young University on health effects of air pollution, told ChemicalandEngineeringNews, that regardless of the source of the air pollution, “what we can say for sure is that breathing combustion-related particles leads to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, adverse birth outcomes, and diabetes.” And the smaller the particulates, the more harmful they are. “Particles that are larger than 2.5 µm [microns] in diameter don’t seem to have as big a health impact because they’re larger and so they don’t penetrate as far into the lungs.” Wildfire smoke is predominately composed of these smaller particles, PM2.5.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), outdoor air pollution in urban and rural areas led to the premature death of 4.2 million people in 2019 and is one of the leading causes of deaths annually. In the US, that premature death figure has been estimated at around 200,000 per year. The WHO wrote, “Some 37 percent of outdoor air pollution-related premature deaths were due to ischemic heart disease and stroke, 18 and 23 percent of deaths were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and acute lower respiratory infections respectively, and 11 percent of deaths were due to cancer within the respiratory tract.” Those living in low- and middle-income nations faced the lion’s share of these deaths, accounting for 89 percent.
The long-term health risks of wildfire smoke were exemplified by the 1997 Indonesian forest fires. Ten years after, people exposed to the smoke suffered worse lung capacity, general health and physical capacity than those not exposed. The elderly with chronic health disease, pregnant women and young children with less mature respiratory and immune systems are particularly affected. Also, workers who must labor outdoors fall into the high-risk category.
Astonishingly, more than 90 percent of the global population live in areas where ambient PM2.5 concentrations rise above the 10 micrograms/m3 threshold set by the WHO in 2005. The worst affected regions were Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Currently, the level of these fine particulates being emitted by the wildfires in and around Ottawa, Ontario, is equivalent to smoking more than a half a pack of cigarettes a day. In Ottawa, for the last week in June, weekly average exposure to PM2.5 had reached 80 micrograms/m3 with a one-hour spike to an average of 240 micrograms/m3 on June 25, 2023. This compares to the WHO guidelines, recently lowered to 5 micrograms/m3.
WHO recommended guidelines for exposure to fine particles. [Photo: World Health Organization]
According to the WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines, “To date, strong evidence shows causal relationships between PM2.5 air pollution exposure and all-cause mortality, as well as acute lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, lung cancer and stroke. A growing body of evidence also suggests causal relationships for type II diabetes and impacts on neonatal mortality from low birth weight and short gestation. Air pollution exposure may increase the incidence of and mortality from a larger number of diseases than those currently considered, such as Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases. The burden of disease attributable to air pollution is now estimated to be competing with other major global health risks such as unhealthy diet and tobacco smoking, and was in the top five out of 87 risk factors in the global assessment.”
In a report published in Lancet: Planetary Health in 2021, the authors found that for every increase in 10 micrograms/m3 in a three-day moving average of wildfire-related PM2.5 there was a relative 1.7 to 1.9 percent increase in all-cause mortality, cardiovascular deaths and respiratory deaths. In concrete terms, 0.62 percent of all-cause deaths annually are attributable to these fine particulates.
The authors explained, “Wildfire-related PM2.5 undergoes long-range transport and continues to contribute to poor air quality even after fire seasons. Therefore, evaluating health effects of wildfires should not be restricted to areas and time periods where and when wildfires occur.”
Worse, these particles released from the burning of the vegetation in forest fires become more toxic over time, according to atmospheric chemist Professor Athanasios Nenes of the Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences in Patras, Greece. He is the principal investigator of the PyroTRACH project, which aims to study the impact of emissions from wildfires and biomass burning on the Earth’s atmosphere and, by extension, on human health and climate.
The project found in 2017 that smoke lingering in the atmosphere for several weeks undergoes a chemical reaction known as oxidation as it spreads, being converted into highly reactive compounds known as free radicals that are highly injurious to cells and tissue. Nenes noted, “We know that breathing in smoke when you are close to a fire is not good, but we have seen that over time it gets worse—up to four times more toxic a day down the road. This means that even if you are far away from a fire, if the smoke is being blown towards you, it can have significant impact on health. People might not even be aware they are breathing in the fumes from a faraway forest fire, but it will be affecting their health.”
In the callous terms of capitalist immediate short-term reasoning, the World Bank estimated in 2013 that exposure to these fine particulates cost $143 billion in lost labor income and $3.55 trillion in welfare costs. The economic consequences have been estimated to cost 1 percent of global GDP annually as a result of sick days and medical bills incurred, and declining agricultural outputs it causes.
As this scientific review demonstrates, the issues of wildfires, climate change and air pollution are among the most serious for humanity. The COVID pandemic has already brought to the fore the international character of any serious response to a global threat to public health. Whether it be a pathogen that jumps into the human population through a zoonotic transfer from animals, or fires that rage hotter and longer, producing toxic chemicals affecting everyone. Bringing such catastrophes to an end and preventing future eruptions requires the collaboration of every scientific and public health discipline across national borders.
