NATO-backed anti-Putin oppositionist Navalny sentenced to additional 19 years in prison

Clara Weiss

On Friday, a Russian court extended the nine-year prison sentence for Alexei Navalny, the most prominent NATO-backed critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, by another 19 years. While his earlier sentence had been based on charges of bribery and contempt of court, the latest sentence was based on charges of “extremism”.

Daniel Kholodny, who worked as a technician for Navalny’s YouTube channel, also stood trial alongside Navalny and was sentenced to eight years in prison for organizing an extremist group. Navalny will have to serve the 19-year prison sentence in a maximum-security penal colony, reducing his ability to communicate with the outside world to almost zero. So far, Navalny had been able to continue to post political commentaries on his Telegram channel from prison. The trial proceedings were closed to the public as well as to his family members. 

Earlier last week, another court rejected the appeal of the 25-year prison sentence of Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been sentenced for “treason” and defamation of the Russian armed forces. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza is a central figure in the NATO-backed opposition to the Putin regime and has extensive ties to the ruling elites in Washington.  

The sentencing of Navalny and Kholodny and rejection of the appeal for Kara-Murza come under conditions of a profound crisis of the Putin regime and infighting between warring factions of the state apparatus and ruling class. In late June, Evgeny Prigozhin, a billionaire mercenary-leader and long-time ally of Vladimir Putin, staged a coup attempt with an explicit appeal to the openly pro-NATO faction of the Russian oligarchy. Prigozhin and his Wagner troops have since been given carte blanche and appear to have been reintegrated into the regime. Wagner troops are still active in Africa on behalf of Russia and many of the troops are stationed in Belarus, a close ally of Russia. Prigozhin has been at a recent summit, hosted by the Kremlin with African leaders and diplomats, in St. Petersburg. 

While essentially giving Wagner carte blanche, however, the Kremlin has also begun arresting a series of prominent political figures. Among them was Igor Strel’kov, a former leader of the pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine who has long called upon the Putin regime to impose a general mobilization. The Kremlin has also arrested Boris Kagarlitsky, a well-known leader of the pseudo-left and Stalinist milieu in Russia with long-standing ties to the oligarchy and state apparatus. Like Navalny, Stre’lkov and Kagarlitsky were also charged with “extremism”. 

The US and the EU were quick to denounce the sentencing of Navalny. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement, noting “The United States strongly condemns Russia’s conviction of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny on politically motivated charges. The Kremlin cannot silence the truth. Navalny should be released.” The EU also “strongly” condemned the ruling. The WSWS has noted in the past the nauseating hypocrisy of these denunciations of the Putin regime by the imperialist powers. US and European imperialism are not only responsible for the bombing of multiple countries over the past decades, resulting in the death and maiming of millions. Washington and Brussels have also brutally persecuted and unlawfully imprisoned the Australian journalist Julian Assange, whose conditions of detention amount to systematic physical and psychological torture.

There is no question that the ultimate target of the attacks on democratic rights, now leveraged most publicly against opponents of Putin within the state and oligarchy, will be the working class. In particular, the charges of “extremism” and “treason” that were used most recently against Navalny, Kara-Murza, Strel’kov and Kagarlitsky, are defined so broadly that they could easily be applied to genuinely left-wing and socialist opponents of the regime and the war in Ukraine. 

However, in order to develop their political opposition to the Putin regime from their independent class standpoint, workers and young people must have a clear understanding of the political forces involved in this escalating infighting within the Russian oligarchy.

Contrary to his depiction in the Western media, Navalny is neither a democratic nor a popular critic of the Putin regime. With his base of supporters limited to privileged layers of the upper middle class, Navalny’s political history is marked above all by his association with ultranationalist forces and sections of the ruling elites and state apparatus in both Russia and the US. He belonged to a rapacious and reckless layer of social climbers that tried to benefit from the 1991 destruction of the Soviet Union by the bureaucracy and the restoration of capitalism. He became involved in politics after his endeavors in banking and real estate had largely failed. In an early interview, he gave expression to his Social-Darwinistic views, stating, “I wanted a market economy in the most wicked form—the strongest survive, the rest are simply superfluous.”

Since 2010-2011, Navalny has been built up systematically by the Western media. At the time, he was a co-organizer of the far-right “Russian Marches”, and had released videos denouncing people from the North Caucasus as “cockroaches”. Navalny has also repeatedly called for a redrawing of the borders of Russia, without the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus. As the WSWS has documented, Navalny was built up by Washington and Berlin not despite but because of his ties to the far right.

Much as in Ukraine, where the descendants of the Nazi collaborators of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have played a central role in the 2014 regime-change operation and the current war, the US-backed opposition in Russia has centrally involved far-right forces. They form a central component of the imperialist strategy to foment ethnic and national strife as part of the attempt to not only destabilize but also break up the country.

More recently, neo-Nazi forces with ties to the neofascist scene in Germany, as well as the Ukrainian regime and the NATO-backed opposition in Russia, were involved in incursions on Russian territory. Shortly after leading the most significant incursions to date, the neo-Nazi leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, Denis Nikitin, was interviewed on Navalny’s YouTube channel, with the interviewer being completely uncritical of Nikitin’s well-known and extensive ties in Europe’s neo-Nazi scene. 

In addition to his relations with the far right, Navalny has retained ties to sections of the Russian elites and state apparatus. Among his earliest backers were figures such as the economist Sergei Guriev, a former adviser of ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and the former banker Vladimir Ashurkov, now a leading figure of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, both of whom have long fled the country.

Navalny, like Kara-Murza or the ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, thus speak for sections of the state and oligarchy that see in a complete line-up of Moscow behind geopolitical strategy of the US and in the break-up of the Russian Federation, the best means to advance their own economic interests in the exploitation of the raw material and social resources of the country. 

The ever-more draconian prison sentences handed down to prominent representatives of the NATO-backed opposition in the Russian state and oligarchy are indicative of intense conflicts and crises unfolding behind the walls of the Kremlin, as the war in Ukraine is now well into its second year and all previous calculations of the Putin regime to somehow force the imperialist powers to the negotiating table have disastrously backfired.

Yellow freight declares bankruptcy, in the latest assault on workers’ jobs

Alex Findijs

A sign for Yellow Corp. trucking company stands outside its facility on July 31, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. [AP Photo/George Walker IV]

Two weeks after shuttering operations, freight company Yellow officially filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

The closure of Yellow and the elimination of 30,000 jobs is a massive assault on the working class by Wall Street, escalating a wave of layoffs this year. This is the latest in the continuing jobs bloodbath by the corporate oligarchy, which has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the tech industry alone, nearly 225,000 jobs have been slashed so far. In January, Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs from its office staff followed by another 9,000 in March. Microsoft added to the carnage with 10,000 layoffs. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) announced another 10,000, and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts. Dozens of other companies in the tech sector cut large portions of their staff.

The bankruptcy of Yellow is the largest single layoff this year and the largest for industrial workers since 2009, when General Motors laid off 47,000 workers. The bankruptcy filing all but finalizes the firing of 22,000 members of the Teamsters, who had not all been officially laid off by the company when it closed operations. Several workers reported that they had not received any communication from the company, and that without confirmation of their job status they were unable to file for unemployment or find employment elsewhere until the bankruptcy declaration.

Yellow’s collapse will not just affect those workers laid off. Thousands of truckers, warehouse workers, and office staff have just been dumped into the job market. One Yellow worker from Atlanta said dozens of workers showed up to interview for a position at a competitor who was offering 50 percent less than advertised. When workers said it wasn’t enough to live on, they were told if they didn’t take it someone else would.

This is the deliberate purpose of the bankruptcy. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into financial markets to prop up the capitalist economy during the pandemic, and the government regularly spends billions of dollars a week to fund its proxy war in Ukraine. This money is to be extracted from the working class through ever greater levels of exploitation.

The centerpiece of the Biden administration’s domestic policy has been to suppress wage growth through the raising of interest rates, aimed at triggering a surge in unemployment to use as a weapon against the working class. The official policy of the Federal Reserve has been to “get wages down,” in the words of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who lamented last year that “employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years.”

The pandemic had the effect of tightening the labor market and has triggered a massive and growing resurgence of the class struggle, with workers demanding wages that not only match inflation but that recoup the losses from decades of concessions.

In response, Wall Street is demanding a stronger hand in the exploitation of the working class. At workplaces around the country Wall Street will demand similar attacks on the working class, targeting wages, working hours, benefits and working conditions.

Roughly 150,000 auto workers have their contracts expire next month at the Big Three auto companies (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—formerly Chrysler). Management will be demanding concessions as the industry turns to electric vehicle production that requires up to 40 percent less labor than gas-powered cars.

United States Postal Service rural letter carriers have seen their pay slashed by up to $20,000 a year under its new payment scheme. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy intends to eliminate roughly 50,000 jobs at the USPS through his “Delivering for America” restructuring program.

Meanwhile, workers at UPS are rebelling against the sellout contract negotiated by the Teamsters that fails to meet their demands.

In a public statement, Yellow management blamed the Teamsters for “literally driving our company out of business.” The exact opposite is the case. The union bureaucracy, working closely with the White House, has played a critical role in suppressing strikes and enforcing substandard contracts.

At Yellow, the Teamsters used the faltering company as a convenient foil for militant posturing. O’Brien made several public comments declaring that the Teamsters would no longer give concessions to Yellow after giving “billions of dollars” to the company in previous contracts.

But after the company refused to make payments to workers’ benefit plans, the Teamsters called off a strike at the last minute, claiming it had reached a deal to allow the company to make up its missed payment. In reality, this bought time for the company to wind up its operations and prepare for bankruptcy. When Yellow finally announced bankruptcy, General President Sean O’Brien issued a complacent statement calling it “unfortunate.”

The inaction of the Teamsters to intervene and defend the jobs of 22,000 members was a conscious decision. Any strike action by Yellow workers would have emboldened UPS workers, who are currently voting on the sellout contract. The Teamsters have instead allowed 22,000 union and 8,000 nonunion jobs to be sacrificed in order to maintain “labor peace.”

The Teamsters barely communicated with their own members at Yellow. One Yellow truck driver described going to the union office to ask about his job. A union official responded, “Job, what job? Yellow is closed, they just haven’t filled out the paperwork yet.”

Yellow’s collapse will be a feeding frenzy for the vultures of Wall Street. Yellow had over $2.25 billion in assets in December. Billions of dollars in equipment and real estate will be picked for scraps by its creditors, chief among them Apollo Global Management.

Apollo is a major private equity firm with nearly $600 billion in managed assets. It gave Yellow a $500 million loan in 2019, organized for the United States government to give Yellow a $700 million bailout in 2023, and is the leading creditor in Yellow’s debtor-in-possession bankruptcy, which will give the firm first choice when Yellow’s assets are sold.

Yellow’s $1.6 billion in debt is considerable, but its two main investors, Apollo and the US government, have trillions of dollars in resources. Apollo manages assets totaling nearly $600 billion, and the United States spends over 500 times Yellow’s debt on the military each year.

Australian government vows to hold indigenous Voice referendum despite falling support

Mike Head

Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last weekend declared that his government would proceed, sometime later this year, with its referendum to entrench an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body, called the Voice, in the country’s 1901 Constitution.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Garma Festival in Australia, August 5, 2023. [Photo: Tiwtter @AlboMP]

Albanese made his vow in the face of media opinion polls showing collapsing support for the proposal. The latest Newspoll published in the Australian yesterday, indicates that support has dropped to 43 percent, from 54 percent in April, and is now below 50 percent in every state. To pass, the referendum needs a majority nationally and in four of the six states.

The prime minister was speaking at the annual Garma Festival organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, formed by five regional Yolgnu clan groups, held 40 kilometres from the remote Northern Territory township of Nhulunbuy. Albanese rejected calls, including from within the “Yes” camp, to postpone the vote. He stated: “I can promise all of you—and all Australians—there will be no delaying or deferring this referendum.”

Albanese’s stand indicates how much is at stake for his government, as well as for big business, most of which publicly backs the referendum and provides much of the multi-million dollar funding for the official “Yes” campaign.

A wider political crisis is developing. There is growing distrust in the Voice project and the government itself, especially in the working class, amid falling real wages and a worsening cost-of-living and housing crisis, and opposition to the massive spending on AUKUS nuclear submarines and other weaponry for a US-led war on China.

From the day it narrowly won last year’s election, Albanese’s government made the Voice plan a central feature of its entire political agenda. Its primary concern is fashioning and presenting a concocted image of Australian “unity.” At the same time, it is seeking to divide the working class along racial lines, in order to prevent a unified movement against the deepening assault on working-class living standards, including those of the indigenous workers, one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

In his Garma speech, Albanese again made this pitch. “We can vote Yes, in a spirit of unity,” he said. “We can bring our country together.” He emphasised that this unity included “employers and business leaders, who understand the value and power of a Yes vote.”

This appeal is being made for domestic purposes, to divert attention away from the intensifying class divide between the wealthy and the working class, including most indigenous people. It is also for geo-strategic purposes, to portray Australian imperialism as “democratic” and “inclusive.” That is particularly important in the South Pacific, where the Labor government is under intense US pressure to do more to bully countries into line against China.

Albanese once more tried to falsely present the Voice as a means to improve the appalling and still-deteriorating conditions of most indigenous people—seeking to exploit the widespread public concern over these conditions. He cited some of the latest damning statistics, showing the shocking low life expectancy, and high disease and suicide rates, among indigenous people.

“Only four out of 19 Closing the Gap targets on track,” Albanese said, without referring to the fact that the last Labor government, that of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, set up the “Closing the Gap” program more than a decade ago, falsely promising that it would rectify the disaster.

Albanese could not explain how the Voice, a proposed unelected body whose members would be selected mainly by representatives of existing land councils and other government-funded indigenous organisations, would make any difference. For the past five decades, similar consultative bodies have failed to do so, while cultivating a privileged layer of indigenous business owners, media personalities and senior academics.

Nor could Albanese make any mention of the roots of the historic and ongoing social crisis, which lie in the past 235 years of history since British colonisation and the establishment of Australian capitalism. That silence is because the Labor government is totally committed to upholding the corporate profit system that has been responsible for the dispossession, massacres, destruction of communities, forced separations and ongoing trauma inflicted on the indigenous population.

The Voice would only continue that catastrophic record by strengthening the state apparatus of “the parliament and executive government” responsible for it. Members of the Voice and its accompanying staff and agencies would be integrated directly into this system of capitalist rule.

One of the architects of the Voice, right-wing Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson, outlined its pro-business agenda in an interview published by the Australian Financial Review last Friday. Pearson said the Voice would “empower” indigenous communities to help end “passive welfare,” which he blamed for the surging indigenous incarceration rates and over-representation of indigenous children in out of home care, separated from their families.

Pearson, himself an adviser to prime ministers since the 1990s, told the newspaper: “I think for too long, at least for two decades, we’ve been in a world where everything that has gone wrong means the indigenous community can say, ‘it’s the government’s fault.’”

His comments serve to shift the blame away from the successive business-backed governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, that have presided over the oppression, with the assistance of such figures. It also demonstrates what Pearson and other Voice backers mean by “self-empowerment” of indigenous people.

Pearson has long been an advocate of cutting people off welfare payments, which he derides as “sit-down money,” in order to coerce them into what are invariably low-paying jobs. At the same time, he encourages the expansion of the indigenous business elite, often on the back of land claims and deals with mining and pastoral companies.

The Garma Festival itself provided a picture of the pro-corporate agenda behind the Voice scheme. Initially launched in 1999, the festival has become an annual elite gathering of government leaders, capitalist politicians, bureaucrats and corporate chiefs.

Those in attendance this year included what the Australian Financial Review termed “a large corporate delegation.” It featured Business Council of Australia president Tim Read and executives from the country’s largest companies, such as Telstra, Qantas, Woodside, Woolworths, Rio Tinto and the big banks. It said business leaders welcomed the chance to explore commercial opportunities.

Far from being a grassroots affair, Garma is a ticketed event of 2,500 people, for which you had to register and be accepted. Tickets cost $2,503—far out of reach for most people—while businesses pay up to $5,000 for a corporate ticket. The basic price of $2,503 includes airport transfers, meals, accommodation (tent, air mattress and sleeping bag). Participants could drive, but the festival is about 700 kilometres from the nearest large town, Katherine.

Interviewed by the Australian, Yothu Yindi Foundation chief executive and Garma Festival director Denise Bowden basically echoed Pearson’s perspective. She said: “Across the nation we think people can learn from our strong law and cultural leadership.” She said cultural authorities like the Dilak Council, headed by leaders of Yolngu clans, who own a range of businesses, including a mine, could help the Voice identify government waste and underperformance.

The festival is even run as a business venture. Speaking to the National Indigenous Times, Bowden said the event brought in millions of dollars in tourism revenue and supported 46 local businesses in the Arnhem Land region, as well as another 39 businesses elsewhere in the Northern Territory, while employing 160 Yolngu people.

Among the festival participants were indigenous leaders from 12 ­regions across Australia who represent an alliance called Empowered Communities. It boasts of speaking directly to governments since 2015 and depicts itself as proof that the Voice can work, including by producing substantial government savings.

Cape York representative Fiona Jose told the Australian that the Empowered Communities initiative showed indigenous people were ready and willing to cut waste. “We make tougher decisions with and for our people than government will ever be able to do … It’s possible because we’re doing it,” she said.

This is the true face of the Voice. It is a pro-capitalist operation to promote indigenous business ventures, at the expense of ordinary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and thus perpetuate the economic system responsible for their impoverishment.

From the start, the Voice plan was orchestrated by Pearson and other hand-picked indigenous elite figures, working in partnership with the then Liberal-National government of Tony Abbott in 2015, to head off anger over that government’s wholesale scrapping of indigenous welfare and health services, as part of its brutal austerity measures against the working class as a whole.

Far from being a movement from below, the Voice plan remains a bid to divert the ongoing anger and disaffection among ordinary indigenous people, and the rest of the working class, as workers and their families suffer the greatest cuts to their real wages and living conditions since World War II.

UK government fast-tracks plans to force refugees and asylum seekers onto barges and into tents

Harvey Thompson

UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman is planning to accommodate thousands of migrants in marquees/tents at disused military sites. A source from the Home Office confirmed to Sky News that the tents could be housing refugees and asylum seekers in such detention camps within weeks.

According to the Times, the tents have been procured by the Home Office “to accommodate up to 2,000 migrants on disused military sites by the end of August as part of emergency plans to avoid the expensive process of last-minute hotel bookings.”

Border Force is predicting that the next three months will be the busiest time for migrant crossings of the English Channel. A Home Office source said, “It’s obvious we can’t again be in a position where we’re having to spot-book expensive hotels on the fly for migrants. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of temporary accommodation when needed. Other countries do use it as well.”

Among the “other countries” cited, any reference to Greece was omitted.

In September 2020, a massive fire destroyed the infamous Moria refugee detention camp on the island of Lesbos. In its place the conservative New Democracy Greek government, in alliance with the European Union, set up the temporary Kara Tepe refugee camp on a former military training area adjacent to the sea. Conditions were not only worse than in Moria, but the authorities installed barbed wire fences, exit restrictions and drones to monitor every movement.

Referring to the plan to house refugees in tents in Britain, government sources said a similar proposal was rejected when put forward under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson “because of warnings that it would trigger legal challenges based on inhumane treatment of asylum seekers. It was even compared to concentration camps by some in government”, according to the Times.

The Home Office erected several temporary marquees at the Manston processing centre, a former Royal Air Force base, last autumn to deal with migrant arrivals. But lacking basic hygienic facilities they were not designed to be used for accommodation beyond a few days.

Last October, 700 refugees were evacuated to Manston following an arson attack on Western Jet Foil migrant processing centre in Dover, a direct result of the anti-migrant atmosphere whipped up by the government, the Labour opposition and the media.

Repeating the government propaganda, its media echo chamber never tires of declaring that hotel accommodation is “costing the taxpayer around £6m a day”.

The same argument is being used for the imminent deployment of the Bibby Stockholm barge, which has been likened to a floating prison, in Portland Port, Dorset. The barge is set to stay in the port for at least 18 months. Designed for 222 people, it will house up to 506 asylum seekers, whose claims are already being considered. Awaiting desperate refugees are tiny rooms, with between one and three bunk beds to increase capacity. The two bunk rooms are just 12ft by 12ft.

Bibby Stockholm moored in Hamburg [Photo by GNU Free Documentation License / CC BY-SA 3.0]

That the plan is to deter migrants from coming to Britain and is not simply about costs is confirmed in a report “Bibby Stockholm—At What Cost?” from the NGOs Reclaim the Seas and One Life to Live. It found that using the barge to house asylum seekers will save less than £10 a person a day.

Despite the Bibby Stockholm’s deployment meeting widespread opposition from humanitarian organisations, it left dry-dock in Falmouth and arrived at Portland Port on July 18. According to the Financial Times, the delay was because “the steel hull had decayed to the point where it was dangerously thin, necessitating the replacement of entire sections.”

Reporters allowed onto the vessel highlighted serious safety concerns, including dangers of overcrowding, narrow corridors and no life-jackets. On July 31, the Times reported that the barge could become a potential “floating Grenfell”, referring to the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 which claimed 72 lives.

Cabinet Minister Grant Shapps told reporters there was no reason why the barge “wouldn’t be absolutely safe.” Concerns expressed by the assistant general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union Andy Dark that “firefighters believe the Bibby Stockholm to be a potential death trap,” were brushed away by the government as “politically motivated.”

In a report seen by the Independent, a long-serving firefighter called the barge a “major life risk” and warned that most fire engines in the nearby area are “on-call” only slowing response times.

The first 50 refugees are expected to be bundled onto the Bibby Stockholm in the next few days.

Over 170 organisations—including the Refugee Council and law centres—wrote to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April urging him to scrap plans for asylum camps at former military bases at Scampton in Lincolnshire, Wethersfield in Essex and Catterick in North Yorkshire and the site of a former prison in East Sussex, as well as proposals to use ferries and barges.

The letter said the sites were “deeply unsuitable” and the government risks creating an “entirely preventable humanitarian catastrophe.”

The new sites have been announced following the abandonment last year of plans for a site on an ex-RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire, after a campaign by local people and refugee-supporting organisations.

“We believe people should be housed in communities, not camps,” the letter states. “Placing thousands of people in confined sites, in remote locations, will cause significant harm to people fleeing war and persecution and damage community relations.”

Responding to the government’s latest proposal, Tim Nao Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action, said it was “staggering” that the home secretary was proceeding with the plans. “The winners from this cruel plan will be the Home Office’s asylum housing contractors, who trouser tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer-subsidised profits as standards continue to plummet.”

The Labour Party mirrors the government approach. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Times Radio, “The key thing here is there is existing long-standing asylum accommodation across the country that’s been in place for years … What they need is a proper strategy to end hotel use.”

On Sunday, Labour shifted further to right with Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock confirming to Sky News that Labour in office would continue to use the barges to detain asylum seekers. “The reality is, on day one of a Labour government, we have to deal with the infrastructure that we have in the complete, chaotic, shambolic mess that the Conservative government will have left us... We will be left with no choice but to deal with the mess that we inherit.'

Refugees fleeing poverty stricken and war-torn homelands—the result of decades of imperialist violence that UK forces alongside the US and NATO have inflicted—now face being herded onto crowded barges and into tents to face inhumane treatment before being deported back from where they came or to a third country.

The fast-tracking of this brutal campaign follows the Illegal Migration Bill enabling the removal of refugees to a third country becoming an Act of Parliament on July 20. The same day the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill forcing workers to continue working during a strike in “essential services” also became law.

Sunak linked the passage of both laws stating, “We are getting on with the job and today passed new laws which will play an important part in our efforts to stop the boats, support businesses to grow and allow the public to access essential services in the face of disruption.”

Full-scale war threatens Niger and West Africa

Jean Shaoul

Niger faces the threat of a catastrophic war with its neighbours. An ultimatum by the 15-member Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) that Niger’s coup leaders must reinstate deposed President Mohamed Bazoum or face possible military intervention expired Sunday. They would be acting as a proxy force of the major imperialist powers, led by France and the US, with the aim of securing control of the impoverished but resource-rich country.

Bazoum, whose election in 2021 marked the first democratic transition of power in Niger since independence from France in 1960, was ousted by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, head of the presidential guard on July 26.

The defense chiefs from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries excluding Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea and Niger, pose for a group photo during their extraordinary meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, August 4, 2023, to discuss the situation in Niger. [AP Photo/Chinedu Asadu]

Bazoum, under house arrest in the presidential palace, used the Washington Post to call on the US and “entire international community” to help “restore... constitutional order.” He warned of the expansion of military rule in the Sahel region and Russia’s increasing influence if Niger were to follow its neighbours, Mali and Burkina Faso, in expelling French military forces and turning to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group for support.

This has left Niger and Chad as France’s last military bases in the region. The imperialist power’s share of Africa’s international trade has fallen from 10 percent to 5 percent over the last 20 years.

Tchiani and the presidential guard apparently acted on their own initiative in deposing Bazoum. Tchiani feared he was next in line for the sack after Bazoum dismissed the army chief of staff and forced other military chiefs into retirement. But they subsequently won the support of the military and have rallied popular support with appeals to popular anti-colonial opposition to France and its military presence.

The coup leaders have lined up with the military juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso, blaming Paris for the Sahel’s regional conflicts and escalating bloodshed. They have reportedly asked for help from Wagner, sending General Salifou Mody to Mali. Mody, speaking on television in Niger, warned against military intervention, promising Niger would do what it takes not to become “a new Libya.”

The struggle for power and control of vital resources between regional elites acting as proxies for the major powers threatens to destabilise not just Niger but the entire Sahel region: the wide belt from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea that crosses the Sahara and includes Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and Eritrea. Beset by myriad conflicts and social unrest amid poverty, drought and climate change, it has become the arena of a battle for influence and control involving France, the US, Germany and the European Union, the Gulf powers, Turkey, Russia and China—all seeking to profit from vast mineral resources critical for modern industry.

This “Scramble for the Sahel” leaves the region’s economic development—ranking among the lowest on the United Nations Human Development Index—subject to the rapacious demands of the transnational corporations, financial institutions and their local hirelings that whip up ethnic, tribal and religious conflicts to divide and rule.

Waging wars and interventions prosecuted under their professed objective of “fighting Islamist insurgents”, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the imperialist powers omit the fact that Islamist militants wreaking havoc across the Sahel are the product of Washington and its allies’ earlier use of them as a proxy army in the 2011 US/NATO war against Libya. Following the shattering of Libyan society and the assassination of the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi, Islamist fighters scattered across northern Africa and throughout the Sahel.

These events, replicated dozens of times across Africa and the Middle East, demonstrate the fundamental correctness of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution: that the former colonial peoples cannot achieve any of their most basic needs—freedom from imperialist oppression, land, democratic rights, jobs, and social equality—under the leadership any section of the national bourgeoisie.

In the imperialist epoch, basic democratic and national tasks in the oppressed nations associated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise of the bourgeoisie must be realized in the oppressed former colonial countries by the working-class taking power and as part of a struggle for socialism throughout Africa, only completed on the world arena.

Following Tchiani’s seizure of power, ECOWAS immediately imposed sanctions and a no-fly zone, ordered border closures on the landlocked country, and threatened an intervention if Bazoum were not reinstated by Sunday, although it said military action would be a “last resort.” Nigeria, upon which Niger depends for 70 percent of its power, cut off electricity supply to its neighbour.

France, the European Union, the US, the UN Security Council, with Russian and Chinese support, denounced the coup. International aid programmes to Niger, partly aimed at preventing African migrants using the country as a transit route to Europe, have been suspended. About 10 million of Niger’s 24 million population depend on humanitarian aid, while the government relies on foreign aid for 40 percent of its national budget.

While Russia has condemned the coup, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin supported it, saying that “what happened in Niger is the fight of its people against the colonizers.”

Niger’s putschists rejected ECOWAS’ demands, calling the sanctions imposed “illegal” and “inhumane”. They warned they would respond immediately to any “aggression or attempted aggression.”

Coup supporters have taken to the streets of the capital Niamey, Agadez on the edge of the Sahara, and Filingue, Tchiani’s hometown, shouting, “Down with France” and “Long live Russia, long live [Vladimir] Putin”. Days earlier, thousands of pro-coup demonstrators with Russian flags had marched through the streets of Niamey and attempted to storm the French Embassy. France and other imperialist powers evacuated hundreds of their nationals.

Bazoum’s plea for outside intervention came after the putschists announced that Niger would revoke military cooperation agreements with France signed between 1977 and 2020. It would also recall its ambassadors to France, the US, Nigeria and Togo. Military authorities blocked France 24 and Radio France Internationale.

ECOWAS defence chiefs met in the Nigerian capital Abuja Friday to finalise intervention plans. Its options, a ground invasion or some kind of countercoup to restore Bazoum to power, all presage greater instability, not least within their own countries. Nigeria’s Senate, which must approve a ground invasion, has rejected President Bola Tinubu’s request to send Nigerian troops to Niger, even as an ECOWAS delegation visited Algeria and Libya to drum up support. Instead, its resolution called for further efforts to reach a diplomatic solution.

Senegal said Thursday it would send soldiers to join ECOWAS if it decided to intervene militarily in Niger. Mali and Burkina Faso, now suspended from ECOWAS, said that they would consider any intervention in Niger an act of war.

France has around 1,500 “counter-terrorism” troops, along with an air force base servicing fighter jets and attack drones, stationed in the country. Paris has refused to recognise any authority other than Bazoum and given its backing to ECOWAS.

No civilian government put in place by such forces would be capable of resolving the enormous social and economic problems confronting Nigerien workers and the rural masses. Niger is only the latest front of an unfolding struggle to re-divide the world, its markets and resources—centered at this point on NATO’s de facto war against Russia in Ukraine and generating mounting tensions between the US and China—that threatens to escalate into a global conflict.

New Zealand Defence Policy Review targets China

Tom Peters

Last Friday the Labour-led government in New Zealand released two policy documents from its ongoing Defence Policy Review—the Future Force Design Principles and a Defence Policy Strategy Statement—as well as a new National Security Strategy. Taken together, these signal a significant strengthening of New Zealand’s alignment with the US-led military and intelligence build-up to war against China.

Defence Minister Andrew Little launches the first two documents of the Defence Policy Review and New Zealand’s first National Security Strategy. [Photo: Andrew Little]

At a press conference to launch the documents, Defence Minister Andrew Little was asked: “Are you mentally preparing Kiwis for a war in our region?” He confirmed that this was the case, saying: “No one wants conflict… but while there are threats of conflict we have to be prepared for that as well.”

He said the policy review was aimed at strengthening New Zealand’s military alliance with Australia and ties with “our longstanding Five Eyes intelligence partners,” the United States, Canada, UK and Australia. Minister Little made the usual meaningless references to the military’s supposed role in humanitarian and disaster relief, but he stressed that future investment was primarily needed to have “a combat capable, ready force that protects New Zealand and our interests.”

Spelling out what this means, Little said: “If for example conflict does break out in the South China Sea, where $20 billion of our exports flows through every year, we have a stake in that, and we may be called on to play a role should conflict break out. We need to be equipped for that and prepared for it.”

In other words, the focus of military spending is not about defending New Zealand’s territory, which has never been subject to a foreign military attack. Rather, the armed forces must be “equipped and prepared” because they will be “called on” to fight nearly 9,000 kilometres away in a war between the US and China, two nuclear-armed powers.

The release of the New Zealand strategic documents follows intensified US efforts to provoke a conflict with China, which Washington views as the main obstacle to its imperialist hegemony. Late last month, in the face of strenuous objections by Beijing, the Biden administration announced it will provide $345 million in weapons to Taiwan as the first tranche of an annual $1 billion in military equipment.

The Japanese government, meanwhile, released a defence white paper describing China as the “greatest strategic challenge” and calling for a massive military build-up and closer alliance with the US. Australia has been fully integrated into US war plans, including through the AUKUS military pact, with basing arrangements for US troops, warplanes and warships, and a deal to supply Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines.

The US and Australia have pressured New Zealand to drop its pretence of not taking sides, maintained by successive governments nervous about antagonising China, which takes roughly 30 percent of all New Zealand exports.

As a minor imperialist power in the Pacific, New Zealand’s ruling class has, since World War II, depended on a close alliance with the US to defend its own neo-colonial interests in the region and more broadly. Successive Labour and National Party governments have sent troops to the illegal US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have killed over a million people. At present, New Zealand soldiers are in Britain helping to train Ukrainian conscripts, who are being used as cannon fodder in the US-NATO proxy war against Russia.

The Defence Policy Strategy Statement marks a definite shift. In belligerent language, it portrays China as “the major driver for the new era of strategic competition among states.”

The document declares: “Beijing continues to invest heavily in growing and modernising its military, and is increasingly able to project military and paramilitary force beyond its immediate region, including across the wider Indo-Pacific.” It denounces Beijing for seeking “to grow its political, economic, and security influence in the Pacific at the expense of more traditional partners such as New Zealand and Australia.”

The statement continues: “Activities that would be of significant concern include: the establishment of a persistent military presence by a state that does not share New Zealand’s Pacific security interests and values; military or para-military-backed resource exploitation (particularly fisheries); or even military confrontation or conflict.”

All of this is profoundly hypocritical and misleading. Unlike the United States, China has no military bases in the Pacific. This has not stopped Washington, Canberra and Wellington from whipping up hysteria over the prospect of deepening “security” arrangements between Beijing and the Solomon Islands and other small Pacific states.

New Zealand’s defence strategy calls for ramping up its military presence in the Pacific. The country already has close ties with the armed forces of Tonga, Samoa and other countries, including regular joint military exercises and exchanges of personnel.

In addition to strengthening military and intelligence “interoperability” with the other Five Eyes countries (US, Australia, UK and Canada), the strategy calls for stronger ties with “Singapore, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, in particular, as well as India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia” as well as “NATO and the European Union.”

The document states that joining Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement “may present an opportunity for New Zealand to cooperate with close security partners on emerging technologies.”

A Labour Party social media election campaign ad [Photo: New Zealand Labour Party]

Minister Little made clear that there will be a further increase in military spending, currently about 1.4 percent of GDP. This is below Australia and other US allies, which spend 2 percent or more. He did not give any specifics, but indicated that there would be more upgrades to the navy and a stepped-up recruitment drive, aimed at countering recent attrition.

Spending on the armed forces is at the direct expense of vital services such as health and education, which are facing a worsening crisis of understaffing and lack of resources.

In the face of soaring living costs and social inequality, the government is increasingly concerned about rising anti-capitalist and deeply entrenched anti-war sentiments in New Zealand. The new National Security Strategy document—prepared in consultation with pro-US academic Anne-Marie Brady, among others—warns of “growing feelings of distrust and disenfranchisement, rooted in rising economic inequality and discontent.” It asserts that these trends are exacerbated by “disinformation and foreign interference” from Russia and China.

In fact, any opposition to US imperialism is now denounced as disinformation. The state and corporate media have, over the past several weeks, engaged in a campaign attacking Radio NZ journalist Michael Hall for spreading “Russian propaganda” because he pointed to the real origins of the Ukraine war in the US-backed 2014 coup. Hall also highlighted the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s military. The references have since been scrubbed by Radio NZ from its online articles.

There are divisions in New Zealand’s political establishment over the open and unambiguous alignment with Washington. Former Labour Party Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote on Twitter that the new Defence documents “suggest that NZ is abandoning its capacity to think for itself & instead is cutting & pasting from 5 Eyes’ partners.” She criticised the suggestion that New Zealand could join AUKUS.

Clark’s government signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008. Like her successor, National Party prime minister John Key, she represents a faction that strengthened business ties with China, while at the same time boosting New Zealand’s US ties and supporting imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This balancing act has become untenable for the ruling elite, with the position of Key and Clark finding no echo in the leadership of Labour or National.

Labour’s ally, the Green Party, sought to verbally distance itself from the new policy statements. MP Golriz Ghahraman told the New Zealand Herald: “It’s a very outdated response in the modern context, to think that falling into old defence allegiances and a defence prism to look at global affairs is still valid.”

This is completely hollow and hypocritical; the Greens have fully supported Labour’s repeated increases in military spending, along with its contribution to the US-NATO war in Ukraine.

As New Zealand approaches an election on October 14, it is clear that which ever party leads the next government will continue to deepen the country’s alignment with US imperialism.

UK Prime Minister Sunak announces fossil fuel bonanza for corporations, with his own family to reap rewards

Robert Stevens

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has torn up any restrictions on the extraction of new fossil fuels by granting hundreds of new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.

Speaking in Britain’s oil capital of Aberdeen, Scotland on Monday—after stepping off the private jet he routinely uses to travel across Britain’s tiny landmass—Sunak pledged to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves. Drilling will be approved at the UK’s largest untapped reserves in the Rosebank field—bringing an estimated 300 to 500 million barrels of oil to the surface.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, accompanied by the Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack, visits the Shell St Fergus Gas Plant near Aberdeen, Scotland [Photo by Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

This ecological arson was justified with the flat out lie that allowing the extraction of every last drop of North Sea oil is “consistent with our ambitions” for the UK to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

In fact, the United Nations, the International Energy Agency and climate scientists around the world are clear that net-zero by 2050 means no new oil and gas infrastructure expansion anywhere on the planet. Only weeks before Sunak’s announcement, the Climate Change Committee, Britain’s official watchdog, warned that his government was already off track in meeting the target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The world has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels and a 2021 study published in Nature, “Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world”, explained that 60 percent of known oil and gas reserves must remain in the ground if there is to be any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. By the most conservative plans, oil and gas production must peak immediately and fall by 3 percent each year to mid-century.

Handing out billions of pounds’ worth of oil and gas contracts amid a climate catastrophe is literally fiddling while Rome burns. Sunak announced his plan in the same week that the United Nations confirmed that July 2023 is set to be the hottest month in human history and the world had entered a phase of “global boiling”. Deadly heatwaves and wildfires have swept Southern Europe and North Africa, cutting predicted cereal production in Southern Europe by 60 percent on last year and—in Greece alone—burning through enough forest to release carbon equivalent to 5.5 percent of the country’s annual total.

None of this matters to Sunak because he is perhaps the most unalloyed representative of the financial oligarchy to head a government anywhere in the world. It is not his class that will suffer the consequences.

Indeed, the policy announced by Sunak, under conditions in which the major oil companies are announcing vast profits, was worked out in their boardrooms. On Tuesday, BP celebrated the upcoming North Sea bonanza and reported profits of around £2 billion in the three months to the end of June.

Sunak is married to Akshata Murthy, heiress of her billionaire father NR Narayana Murthy, who founded the India-based IT conglomerate Infosys. By last year she held an estimated £690 million in shares. So rich are the pair that their joint wealth—then valued at £730 million—saw them enter last year's Sunday Times Rich List. Moreover, at this stage, Murthy only has a reported 0.93 percent stake in Infosys—still enough to garner her over £40 million in dividends since the start of 2020, according to an Evening Standard analysis.

Sunak, who held the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in Boris Johnson’s cabinet, was already a multimillionaire in his mid-twenties. He worked for Goldman Sachs bank and a hedge fund run by British billionaire Sir Chris Hohn before entering parliament in 2015. 

Infosys recorded US$19 billion in revenue in 2023, and a growing portion of this comes from its connection with Sunak. It has been handed UK government contracts worth £172 million, the first handed over in 2015—the year Sunak became an MP.

The company has since won multi-million pound contracts with the Care Quality Commission, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, East Sussex County Council, Westminster Council, and the London Borough of Merton. The Evening Standard adds that, as of this April, “when the most recent contract was awarded, the firm was tasked with providing £1,760,500 worth of ‘consulting, software development, internet and support’ to Transport for London.”

Nowhere is the destructive impact of the multi-billioned oligarchy’s profiteering clearer than in the fossil fuel industry. And here too, the Sunak family is at the heart of it. On August 1, the London Economic online newspaper published, “Sunak’s family firm signed a billion-dollar deal with BP before PM opened new North Sea licences”.

The piece noted, “A firm founded by Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law signed a billion-dollar deal [$1.5 billion] with BP two months before the prime minister opened hundreds of new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.

“In May, the Times of India reported that Infosys bagged a huge deal from the global energy company which is thought to be the second-largest in the history of the firm.”

The London Economic notes that “one of Infosys’ other major clients is Shell, whose CEO [Wael Sawan] joined Rishi Sunak’s new business council two weeks ago and promised a ‘candid collaboration’ with his government.”

This is not only a case of personal corruption. Sunak embodies the interests of the capitalist class and its intimate connections with supposedly democratic governments.

Timed to coincide with the prime minister’s North Sea announcement, the Global Witness organisation—which works “to hold companies and governments to account for their destruction of the environment, their disregard for the planet and their failure to protect human rights”—revealed: “Between January and March of this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and climate and energy ministers met with fossil fuel companies 54 times, on average more than once every two days… This amounts to around 20 per cent of all lobbying meetings they held in that period.”

The oligarchy personified by Sunak and his wife is accountable to no-one and flaunts that fact. The prime minister has insisted that his wife’s connections to Infosys and their enrichment from it is of “no legitimate public interest”. This was said even as it was revealed that, while he was in office as chancellor, Sunak’ wife, an Indian national, had non-domiciled status in the UK. This allowed her to avoid paying tax on her foreign earnings. It is estimated that this saved her around £20 million in taxes on dividends from her Infosys shares.

That this did not lead to Sunak being automatically excluded from ever holding public office again, let alone from taking up the post of prime minister soon afterwards, speaks to the domination of official politics by a criminal financial oligarchy. Sunak was appointed prime minister as one of their own, trusted to wage the necessary war on the working class which his predecessor Liz Truss was considered too incompetent to see through.

That war is being carried out on all fronts, against living standards and social services—to pay for the upkeep of the billionaires and the NATO war against Russia—and against the basic conditions of life on Earth, to satisfy super rich investors in the fossil fuel economy.

Sunak is correct in claiming his North Sea fossil fuel extractions will not make a difference to the government’s climate commitments—because everyone knows they are not worth the paper they are written on. What counts is profits and nothing else.

As Global Witness noted, “Over the next 10 years, fossil fuels companies are estimated to produce 2.3 billion barrels of oil and 253 billion cubic meters of gas from the North Sea… When burned, this could produce 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon, more than Germany, Italy, and France together produce each year.”