Turkey, Russia agree separate grain deal as Black Sea corridor talks stall

Barış Demir

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said on Wednesday that Russia and Turkey had reached an agreement on the supply of 1 million tons of grain. “All agreements in principle have been reached. We expect that in the near future we will enter into working contacts with all parties to work out all the technical aspects of the scheme for such deliveries,” he announced.

Russian Black Sea fleet ships are anchored in one of the bays of Sevastopol, Crimea, March 31, 2014. [AP Photo/AP Photo, File]

The announcement came shortly after the failure of talks on the safe transport of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits amid Washington demands more bloodbaths in Ukraine.

Since the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine erupted in February 2022, parts of the Black Sea were mined by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. The northern parts of the sea are controlled by the Russian navy.

An agreement was reached last year to provide a safe route for Ukrainian grain. The deal between Moscow and Kiev had been brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to ensure grain shipments from Ukraine through the Black Sea to the global market.

Shortly after an attack on the Kerch Bridge in July, however, the Kremlin announced its withdrawal from the deal, on the grounds that the commitments to Russia had not been met. The Kremlin stated that Russia would consider rejoining the deal if these commitments were fulfilled, and financial sanctions on the Russian Agricultural Bank were lifted.

Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s largest agricultural producers, mainly supplying countries in Africa and Asia. Russia places special emphasis on grain exports to these countries as part of its influence in Africa and as a means of breaking its US-led isolation.

Russia announced that it had achieved the largest grain exports in the last seven years after withdrawing from the agreement in July. The Russian Agriculture Ministry said that most of the 7.7 million tons of grain exported in August went to African countries. The grain corridor agreement was one of the main items on the agenda of the Second Summit of the Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum at the end of July, and African countries had expressed their intention to mediate on the issue.

Turkey is already the main mediator in talks on the resumption of the Black Sea grain corridor. On September 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held talks in Sochi, with grain shipments being the main topic of discussion.

After the talks, Putin said that Russia was ready to extend the agreement, but that the NATO powers had not kept their commitments: “The deal was approaching expiration, but not a single obligation to Russia was fulfilled. We were asked to extend our participation in it with the promise of immediate compliance with all previous commitments. We extended it, but nothing happened.”

He linked the issue of the corridor to Ukraine’s growing naval attacks in the Black Sea: “We have always agreed that these corridors intended for food exports should not be used for military purposes. … Just as attempts are being made to attack TurkStream and Blue Stream through which gas is supplied to the Republic of Turkey from Russia. Our ships are guarding these streams, these pipeline systems, and they are constantly being attacked, including with the help of drones sent from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.”

During a joint press conference, Erdoğan said: “We have expressed the points raised by our Russian friends on different occasions. We believe that the initiative should be continued by correcting the shortcomings. I sincerely shared our views on this issue with my dear friend in our bilateral meeting.”

He added: “Russia has two special requests. One is to connect the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT system. Currently, Russian banks are excluded from the SWIFT system due to sanctions. This country exports 120 or 130 million tons of grain annually … Ukraine, of course, needs to soften its approach in order to take joint steps with Russia.”

Erdoğan’s remarks prompted a swift condemnation from the Kiev regime. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said: “Let’s be realistic after all and stop discussing nonexistent options, much less encouraging Russia to commit further crimes.”

Turkey is a critical member of NATO, but since the outbreak of the war it has sought to mediate between the NATO imperialist powers and the Putin regime. It has also abetted the main NATO powers in aggressively pursuing the war with Russia.

While condemning Russia’s invasion and recognizing Crimea as part of Ukrainian territory, Ankara has armed Ukraine with Bayraktar drones. It also ultimately decided not to veto Finland and Sweden joining the NATO military alliance.

Shortly before the NATO war summit in Vilnius, Lithuania on July 11–12, Erdoğan declared that Ukraine “deserves” NATO membership and allowed the return to Ukraine of the Azov commanders who were supposed to remain in Turkey under an agreement with Russia.

However, Turkey has not joined US-led NATO powers’ sanctions against Moscow and has significantly increased its trade with Russia.

Fearing potentially devastating consequences for the Turkish ruling class of an escalation of the NATO war against Russia, with which it has strong trade and military ties, Ankara also faces an ongoing cost-of-living crisis at home and growing working class opposition. The Erdoğan government believes that improved trade with Russia and potential financial aid from Moscow will help contain this domestic crisis.

After the meeting in Sochi, Erdoğan pointed out the growing trade with Russia and the use of Turkish lira and Russian rubles instead of US dollars and euros, stating: “Our bilateral trade volume reached approximately $69 billion last year. We are taking firm steps towards our target of $100 billion. I believe that the fact that our central bank governors are meeting here today and that they will also meet each other is also important in terms of having domestic currencies enter into the bilateral relations between us.”

Following the meeting, it was reported that Ankara and Moscow were close to finalizing negotiations on the construction of a natural gas distribution centre in Turkey. In addition, Russia submitted a proposal for the construction of a second nuclear power plant in the northern city of Sinop. Russia is currently building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Mersin. According to the reports, the first unit of the plant will be commissioned in 2024.

On the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup: Lessons of a revolution betrayed

Tomas Castanheira

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the infamous CIA-backed military coup in Chile led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which established one of the most brutal regimes of the second half of the 20th century.

 In the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the three branches of the Chilean armed forces and the military police issued a radio announcement that they had taken control of the country and demanded the resignation of elected President Salvador Allende of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition government.

Chilean troops burning leftist literature on 9/11/1973 [Photo: CIA/Freedom of Information Act]

The Army and Air Force laid siege to the La Moneda presidential palace, bombarding it with fighter jets and tanks. Cornered and refusing the coup leaders’ demand that he resign, Allende died at La Moneda, according to investigations from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

On the same day, the military rounded up tens of thousands of workers and youth, herding them into concentration camps where they were interrogated, tortured and in many cases murdered. The famous musician Victor Jara described the terror he experienced with thousands of others during his last days in the Estadio Chile, where he was sadistically tortured and murdered on September 16:

How much humanity exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain, moral pressure, terror, insanity?

Six of us were lost as if into starry space.

One dead, another beaten as I never could have believed a human being could be beaten.

The other four wanted to end their terror: one jumped into nothingness,

another beating his head against a wall, but all with the fixed look of death.

What horror the face of Fascism creates!

A vast operation orchestrated by the CIA and US military intelligence was launched to smash all workers and peasant organizations, and to hunt down, detain, torture and kill their leaders and militant rank-and-file workers, who were abandoned by the Allende government, without weapons, training or political leadership to resist.

The Pinochet regime, in the following months and years, sold off nearly two-thirds of Chile’s key copper industry nationalized under Allende and his predecessor, privatized sections of banking, the telephone company, metalworks and other companies placed under state control by Allende, returned factories and land taken by workers to private owners, privatized water, pensions, healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, and other sectors. Taxes and regulations were cut to the bone to turn the country into a playground for the emerging transnational corporations and the local oligarchy. The regime followed the instructions of the “free market” economist Milton Friedman and the so-called “Chicago boys”, Friedman-trained acolytes from the University of Chicago who were sent to Chile to oversee the wave of privatizations and brutal attacks on the conditions of the working class.

The fascist terror in Chile lasted for two long decades. Thousands of political opponents were killed or “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, and around 30,000 tortured, according to official figures. The coup in Chile also had profound consequences for the whole Latin America. 

The Chilean military's rise to power followed a series of coups sponsored by US imperialism, including in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971 and Uruguay earlier in 1973. The Brazilian military regime, recognized by the Nixon administration as an instrument for US operations, worked systematically to prepare the Chilean military to overthrow Allende. 

After the coup in Chile, this counter-revolutionary network coordinated by the CIA in South America was consolidated under what was dubbed Operation Condor. It systematically spread repression, torture and political assassinations across the region and facilitated new coups, most notably the rise of the fascist military regime in Argentina in 1976.

Fifty years after Chile’s horrific September 11, its political relevance is becoming ever more urgent. The specter of dictatorship and military intervention in the politics of Latin America, after a brief cycle of civilian regimes over the last 30 years, haunts the entire region once again.

Prompted by the explosive accumulation of social antagonisms, expressed by the working class in the growing number of struggles, the friends of Pinochet, who were never displaced from power in any of these countries, are once again showing their faces. In Brazil, the Armed Forces endorsed the challenge to the country’s electoral system by the former president Jair Bolsonaro, which culminated in the fascist coup attempt of last January 8 in Brasilia that called for a military dictatorship.

In Chile itself, where millions of workers and youth mobilized against social inequality in repeated national strikes in 2019 and 2020, the ruling class is now systematically promoting the most rabid defenders of the Pinochet dictatorship. These elements are currently led by José Antonio Kast, whose fascistic Republican Party won the most votes in last May’s election of a council to draft a new constitution.

US imperialism served as the principal patron of the Latin American dictatorships. It remains a central player in the region. Under conditions in which the US ruling class is hurtling toward a new world war, it is openly fighting to secure its geo-strategic hegemony in 'its own backyard,” cultivating relations with the region’s military commands, independently of its elected governments.

In their tributes to the anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile, the bourgeois nationalist representatives of the “Pink Tide,” such as Chilean President Gabriel Boric, as well as the petty bourgeois pseudo-left, are issuing appeals for new “national pacts” and for the restoration of a popular facade for the region’s bankrupt capitalist regimes. This political path can lead only to a repetition of Pinochet-style coups on an even more horrific scale.

The new generation of workers and youth who are entering the path of revolutionary struggle against capitalism must urgently assimilate the lessons of the Chilean coup that the pseudo-left is working to conceal. 

The violence utilized by the Chilean fascist junta demonstrated the ruthlessness with which the ruling class is prepared to employ to defend its power.

The Chilean revolution betrayed

But what took place in 1973 in Chile was not only a bloody US-backed military coup that overthrew an elected government. 

There was a powerful proletarian revolutionary upsurge under way in Chile, whose defeat under the jackboots of the military was by no means inevitable. The coming to power of a fascist-military junta was the product of the failure of the working class to seize political power when it was able to, as a result of the criminal betrayals of its Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships, with the indispensable aid of the Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism. 

Allende’s UP coalition, formed by the Socialists and Stalinists together with “left” Christian Democrats and Radicals, was elected in 1970 amid a massive upsurge of working class and peasant struggles. Answering the historical conditions of misery and oppression by imperialism and a protracted inflationary crisis, those struggles took radicalized forms such as factory occupations and land expropriations.

As it took office, the UP sought at all costs to discipline the insurrectionary movement of the workers and peasants and subordinate it to the bourgeois state. Calling it the “Chilean road to socialism,” Allende insisted that, based upon its century of “parliamentary democracy”, Chile was an exception to the laws of history established by Marx and Engels and given flesh and blood in the course of the 1917 Revolution in Russia. In Chile, he claimed, the revolutionary process would follow a unique course, growing within the structures of the old state. He insisted that the Armed Forces and the military police in Chile were the “people in uniform” and a “granite foundation of the revolutionary process”, “just as much” as the “workers and their unions”.

While the UP worked to appease the working class by carrying out limited nationalizations and social reforms, the Chilean bourgeoisie and the imperialists gained time to prepare the overthrow of the government and the crushing of the working class. The road to September 11, 1973 was paved with the ceaseless attacks on the working class and several military incursions and direct coup attempts.

In October1972, the ruling class, working in direct collaboration with the Nixon administration and the CIA, attempted to strangle the country economically by promoting a massive employers’ lockout. Workers responded by establishing numerous coordinadores, cordones industriales and other local networks of rank-and-file industrial, neighborhood and self-defense organs to maintain production and distribution of essential goods and oppose fascist provocateurs. Demands to place the whole of the economy and political power directly in workers’ hands became widespread.

In face of the independent development of the workers’ movement, the UP government acted to disarm the working class and secure bourgeois rule in Chile. Allende brought the military into his cabinet, which was also joined by the trade union leaders of the CUT dominated by the Stalinists and Socialists. The government enforced an Arms Control Act to take arms away from workers and peasants, freed fascist agitators, and returned numerous occupied factories to their previous owners.

In June 1973, a rebel wing of the Army made a failed coup attempt by sending a column of tanks against the presidential palace, an episode which became known as the Tanquetazo. The UP’s response was to deepen its concessions, naming Pinochet commander-in-chief of the Army and bringing him into Allende’s cabinet.

Only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fought consistently to expose the role played by Allende’s government and his apologists in disarming the working class in the face of the clear danger of a military coup organized by US imperialism.

Drawing the lessons in the days immediately after the coup, the ICFI declared in a statement issued on September 18, 1973:

“Defend your democratic rights not through Popular Fronts and parliament, but through the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of workers’ power. Place no confidence in Stalinism, social democracy, centrism, revisionism or the liberal bourgeoisie, but build a revolutionary party of the Fourth International whose program will be the revolution in permanence.”

While it was the Stalinists and Social Democrats who directly led the Chilean workers to defeat, the Pabloite revisionists played a crucial role in enabling these crisis-ridden bureaucratic leaderships to maintain their domination over the working masses. 

The Chilean Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Workers Revolutionary Party - POR) was among the organizations that betrayed Trotskyism, joining the American Socialist Workers Party in breaking with the ICFI and reuniting with the Pabloites. Praising the middle class forces “liberated by the Cuban Revolution” as “the ones who will unleash the revolution in each country” of Latin America, the POR immediately dissolved itself and joined the Castroites and Maoists to form the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement-MIR) in 1965.

The MIR played a fundamental role in the disruption of the Chilean revolution, standing in the way of the building of a genuine revolutionary party in the working class. As the conflict between the Chilean working class and the UP’s popular front developed, many workers breaking from Social Democracy and Stalinism came to the MIR, only to be reoriented to “putting pressure” on the government to realize their demands.

Over 2,000 people killed as earthquake devastates Morocco

Kumaran Ira

On Friday night, an earthquake in Morocco hit mountainous areas near the city of Marrakesh, killing at least 2,000 people and injuring more than 2,000. Of the wounded, over 1,400 are in critical condition, according to Morocco’s Interior Ministry.

Residents flee their homes after an earthquake in Moulay Brahim village, near the epicenter of the earthquake, outside Marrakesh, Morocco, Saturday, September 9, 2023. A rare, powerful earthquake struck Morocco late Friday night, killing more than 2,000 people and damaging buildings from villages in the Atlas Mountains to the historic city of Marrakesh [AP Photo/Mosa'ab Elshamy]

The death toll is tragically expected to rise, as the worst-affected areas are remote mountain villages which rescue teams are struggling to reach due to poor infrastructure and emergency planning. It remains unclear how many more thousands of people may still be buried under the rubble.

The epicentre of Friday’s earthquake was near Ighil in Al-Haouz Province, roughly 70 kilometres south of Marrakesh, Morocco’s fourth-largest city. The 6.8-magnitude quake shook the High Atlas mountain range at a relatively shallow depth of 18.5 kilometres, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). It was Morocco’s deadliest earthquake since 1960, when a magnitude 5.8 quake struck near Agadir, killing at least 12,000 people.

UN officials estimate 300,000 people have been impacted by the earthquake. The quake was felt across Morocco including the coastal towns of Imsouane and Essaouira, 180 and 200 km west of Marrakesh; in the capital, Rabat, 350 km north of the epicentre; and in Portugal and Algeria.

Most of the deaths were reported in mountainous Al-Haouz and Taroudant provinces. According to the Moroccan Interior Ministry, the death toll reached 1,293 in the Al-Haouz region, 452 in the Taroudant region, 191 in the town of Chichaoua, 41 in the Ouarzazate region, 15 in Marrakesh prefecture, 11 in the Azilal province, 5 in the Agadir Ida-Outanane prefecture, 3 in Casablanca province and 1 in the Youssoufia province. The village of Tafeghaghte, 40 miles southwest of Marrakesh, was almost entirely destroyed.

Hospitals in Marrakesh are seeing a huge influx of injured people, and authorities are calling on residents to donate blood.

The region is located in a well-known earthquake zone and is home to members of Morocco’s Amazigh (or Berber) community. Moroccan King Mohamed VI’s regime has systematically isolated the region to focus on development projects in large cities such as Marrakesh and repressed the region’s inhabitants when they protested against this.

Samia Errazzouki, a research fellow studying Morocco at Stanford University, said: “This region, outside of any natural disaster and on a normal day, is one of the most difficult regions to get to as the infrastructure is so poor. Roads and access to this region are already difficult, before you compound that with difficulties like rubble or problems with the roads. It’s going to take a miracle to get immediate aid there.”

“These regions have historically been hit with earthquakes, but they have also been marginalised. In moments when people requested, demanded aid, infrastructure and development like in the Hirak movement in 2016, those who do so are thrown in jail,” she added. “On a good day, this region is difficult to access and deprived of basic infrastructure. The hospital system there is abysmal.”

Anger is mounting over the monarchy’s slow response to the disaster and the inaction of King Mohammed VI, who was at a residence in France when the quake hit. The Guardian noted, “Despite him returning to chair the emergency response meeting, some said vital hours may have been lost due to a need for the palace’s approval and control.”

As the rescue operation is delayed, residents in many villages are using homemade tools or their bare hands to dig the dead from the rubble. The destruction caused by the quake has left many survivors homeless, shortage of water and food, and other necessary aid as many prepare to spend a third night without shelter.

From the village of Ait Yahya in Taroudant province, Al Jazeera’s Ayman Al Zubair reported: “There is an air of sorrow among the people, and they expressed fear [about] when aid will arrive for them. … They received some aid in terms of food, but their main demand is a place to stay. The area is also experiencing a shortage of water, and there are dead animals that have not been cremated yet so there are concerns diseases could emerge.”

A resident from Amizmiz, 55 km south of Marrakesh, told Al Jazeera that all of its inhabitants lost their homes, and that each family is grieving loved ones who died in the quake.

“We are living in a crisis situation,” another Amizmiz resident told Al Jazeera. “We ask that King Mohamed VI intervene and send us some help because we are living through a traumatic situation,” he said, adding the village lacks electricity, food and other necessary aid.

A resident of the village of Moulay Brahim, 36-year-old Yassin Noumghar, said: “We lost our houses, we lost people also, and we have slept two days outside. No food. No water. We lost also electricity. We want just for our government to help us.”

As in the massive February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the horrific death toll in the Morocco quake is not primarily a natural disaster, but above all a social disaster rooted in the grotesque social inequality of the capitalist system. With proper, safe building infrastructure, cities can survive even more powerful quakes than the one that struck Morocco on Friday. Only four people died from earthquake damage from the 7.4-magnitude quake in Fukushima in Japan in 2022.

Over 50,000 died in Turkey and Syria, and thousands more have now died in Morocco, because state authorities ignore basic safety guidelines, and safe housing and infrastructure is not built.

In Morocco, despite recent earthquakes, many buildings and especially rural homes in earthquake zones are not built to withstand such tremors. This was further underscored when hotel managers in Marrakesh, desperate to reassure tourists coming to the city, spoke of the vast difference between the relatively limited quake damage in Marrakesh itself compared to the devastation in nearby villages.

Samuel Roure, who presides over the association of guest houses in Marrakesh, told Le Monde: “[W]hen I see the images of the earthquake and read about Marrakesh in the media, I don’t feel like I’m living in the same country. … I’ve been touring the medina since 7:30 a.m. and, of the 10,000 riads (homes and guest rooms) in the city, barely 50 have collapsed.” He added that in Marrakesh, unlike the hard-hit surrounding villages, “the infrastructure is intact, the airport is up and running, and so are the telecommunications, water and electricity networks.”

Congress reconvenes amid budget crisis as US federal deficit doubles

Patrick Martin

Members of the US House of Representatives return to Washington on Tuesday with only three weeks, including 12 days of scheduled legislative sessions, before the end of the 2023 fiscal year on September 30. At that point, unless a new budget is passed, or a “continuing resolution” to authorize further government spending, the federal government will begin a partial shutdown.

The stage has been set for yet another round of political theater over the budget deficit, in which the Republicans will posture as the defenders of “fiscal responsibility” (which never includes cuts in the bloated Pentagon budget), while Democrats posture as advocates of “fairness” and “compassion” (knowing that any proposed tax increases on the wealthy or social spending for the poor can never be enacted because of Republican opposition).

This degraded process will end, as it always does, with further cuts in social spending, while the military and the super-rich, the two principal clients of both capitalist parties, go entirely unscathed.

The political conflict over the budget has been exacerbated by two reports released on September 6 indicating that the federal deficit for the current fiscal year will double, from $1 trillion in fiscal 2022 (October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022) to $2 trillion in fiscal 2023.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the US Treasury had already borrowed $1.6 trillion in the current fiscal year, with nearly two months to go. The CBO projected a full-year deficit of $1.7 trillion, with spending up 10 percent over fiscal 2022 and revenues down 10 percent.

The same day, the right-wing think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that it was projecting a $2 trillion deficit by September 30. The group said that by its calculations, federal spending was up 16 percent compared to a year ago, while revenues were down 7 percent.

The CBO estimated that individual income and payroll taxes would drop by $313 billion this year, largely due to the decline in the stock market last year, which slashed capital gains taxes and reduced taxable income for corporations. At the same time, remittances from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury—effectively, profits from its lending to banks—fell by $98 billion. This is largely due to the effect of higher interest rates on the home mortgage market.

The main components of the increase in spending from FY 2022 to FY 2023 included:

$244 billion from a 12 percent rise in the total cost of the three main entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This had two main contributing factors: continued high rates of retirement among the “baby boom” generation, and a continuing pandemic-related ban on states removing Medicaid recipients from the rolls—a prohibition that the Biden administration allowed to expire in May.

$146 billion from a 34 percent increase in interest payments on federal debt, largely due to the extremely rapid rise in interest rates. The CBO now estimates that the federal government will pay $10 trillion in interest over the next ten years, a staggering sum that will go largely to wealthy investors and big banks.

$100 billion or more in military spending. There is an increase of $67 billion for the regular Pentagon budget. A further sum, not yet estimated but perhaps as large, is due to increased military and financial aid to Ukraine and other fiscal consequences of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia.

$91 billion from a one-time increase in spending by the Department of Education. This is a budget anomaly, as the Biden administration chose to record the entire long-term cost of its reduction in student loan debt in the month of July. This sum amounts to just over 5 percent of the $1.7 trillion in total student loan debt.

The latest figures have fueled demands from the Republican Party and the corporate media—including publications closely aligned with the Democratic Party—for urgent action to slash the deficit through major cuts in domestic social spending, particularly in the entitlement programs that constitute the major social support for the elderly, disabled and sick.

There are few calls within the capitalist political establishment for cuts in military spending, and none at all for cuts in interest payments, although these constitute a form of tribute paid by the federal government to the billionaires. In effect, after repeatedly slashing taxes for the wealthy, most recently in the 2017 Trump tax cut, the federal government is now compelled to borrow from the super-rich to make up the lost revenue, and pay them billions in interest.

On August 31, the Biden administration threw its support behind an effort to pass a continuing resolution, after concluding that it would be impossible for both houses of Congress to approve 12 separate budget bills, one for each major department or group of departments, by September 30.

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

Budget Director Shalanda Young indicated that there had to be some spending increases within the framework of a continuing resolution to avoid the crippling of several key programs, including $1.4 billion for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, whose budget has been depleted by record high food prices. She warned that without new funding, WIC would have to cut benefits and implement waiting lists in October.

The House Freedom Caucus, the fascistic wing of the House Republicans, is spearheading the demands for massive spending cuts. The group recently demanded that the discretionary spending level set last May in the debt ceiling deal between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy be lowered from $1.59 trillion to $1.47 trillion, a cut of $120 billion, or about 8 percent.

Members of the caucus declared that they would vote against any budget or continuing resolution unless it included a series of ultra-right proposals, including billions in funding to resume building Trump’s wall on the US-Mexico border, the restoration of Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy toward asylum seekers, and a measure to address “the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI”—effectively a demand for the dropping of federal charges against ex-president Trump.

Last week, fascist Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene added a new demand: “I’ve already decided I will not vote to fund the government unless we have passed an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden.”

Such demands might appear delusional for a group that controls fewer than 10 percent of the seats in one house of Congress, but in capitalist politics, it is the fascist tail that wags the legislative dog. Any member of the Freedom Caucus can force a new election for House speaker, under the procedure that McCarthy was compelled to accept in January as a condition for a handful of ultra-right members dropping their blockade of his election.

McCarthy is now faced with the threat that unless he embraces the Freedom Caucus demands, he could lose his post. He has already voiced support for the spending cuts called for by the Freedom Caucus, claiming that the debt ceiling deal only set a ceiling on spending, not a floor. “We can always go lower,” he said.

Meanwhile, senators in both parties are seeking to add several special appropriations to any continuing resolution or budget bill, including $24 billion more for the war in Ukraine, and $16 billion for states like Hawaii and Florida that have been devastated by fires, heat waves, hurricanes or floods. McCarthy suggested he would back the disaster aid, but not the additional money for Ukraine, which led to a public rebuke by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, an all-out supporter of the war with Russia.

In the increasingly likely event of a deadlock on the budget, the federal government would begin a partial shutdown on October 1. Many federal workers would be furloughed or instructed to come to work without paychecks if they are deemed “essential.” There would be no immediate effect on the military or paramilitary police forces like the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but most civilian Pentagon workers would be sent home.

Sri Lankan government moves to impose draconian media laws and Anti-Terrorism Bill

Pani Wijesiriwardena

Last week, President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s cabinet approved two draft bills that will brutally suppress democratic rights of the people. The first, which is known as the Bill on Security of Online Methods (BSOM), was presented by the Ministry of Public Security; the second measure was the defence ministry’s slightly modified new Anti-Terrorism Bill.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, accompanied by heads of the armed forces, at 75th Independence Day ceremony in Colombo on February 4, 2023. [Photo: Sri Lanka president’s media division]

On September 4, Cabinet Minister spokesman Bandula Gunawardena told the media that both bills will be published in the government gazette and subsequently submitted to parliament for approval. When enacted, the measures will give the Wickremesinghe administration dictatorial powers to suppress all anti-government opposition, with the working class its main target.

The new bills are a response to growing popular opposition from workers and the poor against the Wickremesinghe government’s International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity policies. The measures include the restructuring/privatisation of 430 state enterprises and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs. The government has already enacted drastic funding cuts to public health and education, raised water and electricity charges to unaffordable levels, and imposed huge tax burdens on wage earners.

The government fears that these brutal social attacks will produce a mass anti-government explosion like last year’s April–July popular uprising that ousted then President Gotabhaya Rajapakse.

During last year’s uprising, millions of people shared their views and organised themselves against Rajapakse and his government through social media. This movement, however, was betrayed by the trade union bureaucracies, backed by various pseudo-left groups.

While the trade union bureaucracy continues suppressing workers’ opposition to the government attacks, Wickremesinghe knows he cannot rely solely on this industrial police force, and is determined to arm the state with more dictatorial powers.

The government falsely claims that the purpose of the BSOM is to “prevent harm to the general public from false information spread over the Internet.” Its real aim is to censor all criticism of the government, pro-government elements and the Buddhist religious establishment, and prevent any organised struggle against these entities.

According to information provided to the media, the new bill contains a new range of offences. These include:

• Communication of false statements on incidents within Sri Lanka 
• False defamatory statements
• Paving the way for riots by provocation without reason
• Disturbing a religious assembly through false statements
• Communication of false statements with the sole intention of hurting religious emotions
• Intentionally defaming by a false statement with the objective of arousing violations of the peace
• Circulation of false statements with the intention of causing a riot or an offence against the government
• Communication of statements on incidents to cause harassment
• Child abuse, fraud and production of bots, or modifying them, to cause an offence.  

These vague and broadly defined offences will criminalise the sharing or publication of any criticism of the government and anyone who organises protests, demonstrations, strikes or any other actions on social media. Punishments for these “offences” will be available when the bill is gazetted.

In January, President Wickremesinghe announced that his government was preparing new laws to regulate social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. These would be modelled on Singapore’s Social Media Regulation Act, he said. Singapore, a police state, has a range of draconian laws to gag the media with harsh punishments, including jail and fines up to $US715,000.

Security forces assembled near Colombo Campus on March 7, 2023, in response to student protest against government’s austerity and attacks on democratic rights.

The “offences” related to religion listed in the BSOM are not to create religious and communal harmony, as claimed by the government, but to further consolidate the Sinhalese-Buddhist hegemony which has been used for decades by Colombo’s ruling elite to divide the working class.

Sri Lankan governments are notorious for their censorious attacks on artists accused of insulting Buddhism. In early 2019, award-winning author Shakthika Sathkumara was arrested and detained for 18 months on bogus claims that one of his short stories, which was published on his Facebook page, had insulted Buddhism.

In late May this year, stand-up comic Natasha Edirisooriya was arrested and detained for over one month on similar false charges. Wickremesinghe’s proposed online security measures will expand these anti-democratic attacks on freedom of expression, taking them to even more vicious levels.

The government’s Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB), which was first announced in March, was widely condemned in Sri Lanka and internationally, forcing its temporary withdrawal.

Last week, the defence ministry declared that it had modified the Bill after considering a “wide range of opinion.” Fearing mass opposition, the ministry has not yet revealed the new content of the proposed law and what will be a few cosmetic changes.

The new Bill, which is being presented as a replacement to the current Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), is not to eradicate terrorism as claimed by the government but to witch-hunt the anti-government fighters and opposition politicians as “terrorists.” And like the online security bill, its prime target will be the working class and its organisations.

The PTA was enacted in 1979 by the then United National Party government in preparation for the anti-Tamil war which it began in 1983. The measure was used to suppress workers and youth across the entire country.

According to the ATB, as presented in March, “terrorism” is defined as:

• Causing serious damage to any place of public use, a state or governmental facility, any public or private transportation system or any infrastructure facility or environment
• Causing serious obstruction or damage to or interference with essential services or supplies or with any critical infrastructure or logistic facility associated with any essential service or supply
• Causing serious risk to the health and safety of the public or a section thereof; being a member of an unlawful assembly for the commission of any act or illegal omission set out in paragraphs above.

The ATB also contained additional regulations to suppress freedom of expression. It declared that anyone “who publishes or causes to be published a statement, or speaks any word or words, or makes signs or visible representations which is likely to be understood by some or all of the members of the public as a direct or indirect encouragement or inducement for them to commit, prepare or instigate the offence of terrorism” could be prosecuted for terrorism.

Those prosecuted could face capital punishment.

Wickremesinghe’s anti-democratic laws and his rapid bolstering of the state apparatus are in line with the actions of the capitalist ruling elites internationally. Confronted with rising working-class opposition to the attacks on jobs, living conditions and democratic rights, the ruling classes everywhere are moving towards authoritarian forms of rule.

Zelensky government cracks down on conscription loopholes

Jason Melanovski

Members of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People political party have introduced a draft law intended to crack down on Ukrainian men avoiding conscription into the country’s armed forces through the use of student waivers.

As the Kyiv Post reported, men between the ages of 18 and 60 are currently exempt from mobilization if they are enrolled in a higher education course.

The proposed law would limit the exemption to men under the age of 30 in order to increase the number of troops available for the armed forces.

The authors of the draft law admitted that support for conscription is far from universal throughout the country and that “a significant number of individuals of conscription age” exploited the current law to evade conscription during mobilization.

In their words “the practice of evading conscription for military service during mobilization negatively impacts Ukraine’s national security and defense. It also affects the morale and psychological well-being of military personnel who defend Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity with arms in hand.”

Since the beginning of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, the number of men aged 30 and over enrolled in higher education skyrocketed as tens of thousands sought to avoid conscription in the NATO-provoked slaughter that has already killed between 350,000 and 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

According to the Kyiv Post, “From 2019 to 2021, around 40,000 male students in Ukraine were aged over 25. After February 2022, this number jumped to 106,000.”

Such figures clearly contradict the endless pro-war propaganda in the Western press that Ukrainians are united in their support for the war and ready to surrender their lives to retake “Ukrainian lands” in the east.

The introduction of the draft law is also a clear signal by the Zelensky government that it is determined to continue the war, even as its counteroffensive has failed, with over 40,000 lives sacrificed in just a few months.

Apart from planning to conscript students over aged 30, the Zelensky government is busy introducing a range of measures to expand its pool of reserves to send to the front. This includes growing demands that those eligible abroad be forced to return to the country.

In late August, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced changes to the types of permitted medical exemptions in order to force more sick and disabled men into the armed forces. Under the new regulations, people with “clinically cured tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, slowly progressing blood diseases, thyroid gland diseases with minor functional disorders, and those who are HIV-positive but without symptoms” are now fit for military service.

The expansion of potential recruits comes on the heels of the dismissal of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov and his replacement with Rustem Umerov, an investment banker of Crimean Tatar background.

Earlier on August 28, Reznikov announced at a press conference that there were no plans for a new wave of general mobilization. According to Reznikov, the government had yet to complete the previous round of mobilization approved by parliament.  

“This means that we do not need to announce a new mobilization to increase the number of troops today,” Reznikov stated, directly contradicting comments made by Zelensky just days earlier at the Crimea Platform summit that a new round of mobilization could not be ruled out.

“To be honest, the military approached me with this, to allow us to mobilize more [people]...; that’s all I can tell you for now,” Zelensky stated.

According to Zelensky, the matter of increased numbers was not an issue that could wait, contrary to what Reznikov suggested.

“It is necessary as soon as possible to accelerate processes, establish order, and then begin discussions about the need to increase [ranks of the military]—how and with whom,” Zelensky said.

Apart from his well-known involvement in a corruption procurement scandal and the revelation of wide-scale bribery at military recruitment centers in August, the Zelensky government and its NATO backers likely concluded that Reznikov could not be counted on to direct a new round of mobilization and that his continued presence risked a serious backlash from the military, which is desperately seeking fresh recruits to replenish its depleted ranks.

Along with the dismissal of Reznikov, on September 1, the leader of Zelensky’s party David Arachamia inserted himself into the mobilization question by proposing that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies should demand the extradition of men of military age who had illegally left Ukraine to escape mobilization and prosecute them.

According to the Polish conservative outlet Rzeczpospolita, it is estimated that within Poland, a staunch backer of the NATO war in Ukraine against Russia, there are around 80,000 Ukrainian men aged 18-60, who were potentially eligible for military service, who had entered the country since the start of the war and whose whereabouts are currently unknown.

In total, over 650,000 men between the ages of 18 and 64 are registered as refugees throughout Europe, according to EU statistics. 

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian State Border Guard has detained 13,600 people trying to cross the border outside of checkpoints, according to spokesman Andriy Demchenko. Another 6,100 have been caught attempting to cross with forged documents.

Such official numbers are likely a huge underestimation as they only include those too poor to pay the reported $5,000 to $10,000 bribes necessary to avoid conscription.

Just this week, Euronews reported on the well-known secret that tens of thousands of working class Ukrainians would rather be labeled “cowards” and “draft dodgers” than die for Zelensky’s billionaire oligarch government.

Ivan Ishchenko told Euronews that he willingly volunteered to join following the invasion. However, after just a month of combat, he fled and paid $5,000 for a government-plated car to escort him to a forest on the border with Hungary.

“Before I went to war, I thought I was a superhero. But all heroism ends when people see [war] with their own eyes and realise that they don’t belong there,” Ishchenko said.

“I saw someone being shot near his spleen; the pain was crazy. Then I saw a severed head. It all built up. ... I didn’t want to see anything else.”

Australia: Qantas CEO resigns early amid public anger

Martin Scott

Last week, Qantas Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alan Joyce announced that he would step down immediately, bringing forward his resignation by two months. The move came after multiple scandals emerged, involving not just Australia’s largest airline and “national flag carrier,” which Joyce had led since 2008, but the federal Labor government.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce addressing a press conference in Sydney on Feb. 27, 2014. [AP Photo/Rick Rycroft, File]

On August 21, a class action lawsuit was filed against Qantas, alleging the airline engaged in a “pattern of unconscionable conduct” impeding customers from receiving refunds for flights cancelled due to COVID-19. It was believed at the time that Qantas held around $400 million in flight credits, subject to strict conditions, additional fees and imminent expiry.

Despite obfuscation from Joyce, whose initial claim of $370 million omitted credits held by Qantas internationally and by the airline’s low-cost arm, Jetstar, it soon became clear that the figure was much higher. Qantas eventually admitted that the total was around $570 million on August 28, when it was compelled by public outrage and the legal threat to scrap the credits’ December 31 expiry date.

The same day, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) revealed it would take action against Qantas in the Federal Court, alleging the airline had “engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct,” by continuing to advertise and sell tickets on more than 8,000 flights that had already been cancelled.

On average, the ACCC claims, Qantas continued to sell tickets “for an average of more than two weeks, and in some cases for up to 47 days,” after the airline had cancelled the flights. Furthermore, the airline allegedly took an average of 18 days to inform ticket holders that their flights had been cancelled.

The flights in question were scheduled to depart between May and July 2022, during which time Qantas cancelled around one in four scheduled flights, according to the ACCC. At the time, Joyce blamed customers, not staff shortages caused by the company’s mass layoffs and mass infection of workers with COVID-19, declaring passengers were “not match-fit.”

The ACCC claims that “Qantas made many of these cancellations for reasons that were within its control, such as network optimization including in response to shifts in consumer demand, route withdrawals or retention of take-off and landing slots at certain airports.”

The maximum penalty for each breach is the larger of $10 million; three times the total benefit obtained; or 10 percent of the company’s annual turnover.

Joyce’s forced departure is emblematic of the broader political and economic crisis confronting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s federal Labor government and the entire political establishment.

A study by SECNewgate last month found that 46 percent of Australians survey disagree that businesses are “behaving ethically and doing the right thing,” up from 39 percent in April. In parallel with the growing distrust of corporations, just 36 percent believe that federal Labor is doing a good or better job, down from 46 percent in April.

Labor has come under fire in recent weeks for its close ties to Qantas. This included the government blocking international competition with the airline, under conditions where flight availability is far below pre-COVID numbers while fares are much higher.

In July, the federal government denied an application from Qatar Airways for 28 more flight slots each week into Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Qatar is a partner airline of Virgin Australia, meaning the additional flights stood to benefit the only serious competitor to Qantas in the domestic market.

Various conflicting explanations, ranging from “human rights,” to carbon emissions, to protecting “secure well-paid jobs” have been offered up by Transport Minister Catherine King and other parliamentarians. All were couched in terms of Australia’s “national interest.”

But Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones made clear that the “interest” Labor was motivated by was that of the Qantas bottom line. Vast profits for Qantas were, he declared, “a good news story.”

Qantas reported a record windfall in the 2022–23 financial year, with annual net earnings of $1.77 billion from underlying pre-tax profit of $2.47 billion.

This has been achieved through a combination of inflated ticket prices and rampant cost-cutting, evidenced by the airline’s increased profit margins compared with 2016-17, from 11.5 percent to 18.2 percent for domestic flights and 5.7 percent to 11.7 percent for international flights.

Data released in May showed that average international airfares from Australia were more than 50 percent higher than in 2019, before the pandemic, while domestic prices were up by around 10 percent.

Meanwhile, Qantas, with the complete cooperation of the aviation unions, used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to impose a two-year wage freeze and has this year locked in three years’ of sub-inflationary pay rises across most of its workforce, along with reduced working conditions.

This followed the standing down of tens of thousands of workers in the early stages of the pandemic, and the sacking and subsequent outsourcing of 1,700 ground handling workers in 2020.

While this was found to be “illegal” by the Federal Court, the workers have still not been reinstated or compensated and Qantas continues to appeal the decision. The Transport Workers Union (TWU), which covers the workers, has blocked any mobilisation of workers across aviation or more broadly to oppose the sacking, instead dragging the baggage handlers through years of court proceedings.

TWU National Secretary Michael Kaine has been a leading voice in the cheer squad of union bosses and corporate media commentators hailing the departure of Joyce as “welcome news for workers,” and promoting the conception that a change in leadership is all that is required for Qantas to “bring back good, secure jobs and quality standards.”

Kaine declared last week, “Alan Joyce is slipping into retirement two months early with a $24 million pay packet, leaving one of the biggest messes in corporate Australia’s history in his wake.”

While there are now calls from Qantas shareholders and others for the company to withhold some of the bonuses “owed” to Joyce, any reduction decided will not make a significant dent in the estimated $125 million he has accrued in his 15-year term.

But Joyce has been handed these vast sums by the Qantas board because of the job-destruction and cost-cutting he has carried out, not in spite of it. As Nine’s Peter Hartcher wrote on Saturday, “Joyce did what’s expected of any private company’s CEO.”

This included slashing the airline’s workforce from 37,500 in 2010 to 25,000 today, engaged by 38 separate subsidiaries and labour-hire providers as a means of continually eroding pay and conditions and undermining workers’ legal right to strike in defence of their coworkers.

It also included grounding the entire airline in 2011 to shut down limited industrial action, taking advantage of draconian anti-strike laws in Labor’s union-backed Fair Work Act to help the unions impose an enterprise agreement slashing workers’ pay and conditions.

Joyce’s replacement, Vanessa Hudson, played a key role in the infamous operation, as one of three Qantas executives called as “witnesses” in the company’s Fair Work Commission case seeking to have the strike terminated.

The union-backed claim that the change of CEO represents a “fresh start” is utterly false. Hudson has worked at Qantas for almost three decades and is thoroughly steeped in the machinations of the airline’s board and management, having held a variety of executive positions.

As chief financial officer (CFO) since October 2019, Hudson was in charge of the airline’s books as it grabbed almost $2.7 billion in JobKeeper and other government handouts in the early part of the pandemic, while standing down tens of thousands of workers. She presided over a three-year plan announced in June 2020 to cut $1 billion a year in costs, including through the destruction of “at least 6,000” jobs.

In a token gesture aimed at promoting the conception that Joyce’s departure will herald sweeping changes at Qantas, Hudson took an economy class flight from Melbourne to Sydney the day she took the helm.

Earlier that day, Hudson had made a video address to staff, hailing Joyce’s “huge contribution over 22 years at Qantas.” Speaking as if workers, not the management team that she has played a leading role in, were responsible for the airline’s flagging reputation, Hudson said, “Together, we can get through the current challenges and show our customers why we deserve to be their trusted first choice.”

But there is no reason for Qantas workers, customers or the Australian public to believe that Joyce’s departure will reverse the airline’s relentless pursuit of profits at the expense of workers, safety and service.

The plummeting standards and reputation of Qantas are a direct product of its privatization by the Keating Labor government in 1993. This is an example of the fundamental incompatibility of the capitalist profit system with the needs of ordinary people for a modern transportation network, including aviation.