“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains–let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”—Leon Trotsky, 1938
On Friday night, Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip launched a surprise attack, firing a rocket barrage and attacking Israeli forces surrounding the Gaza Strip. As of Saturday night, there were 200 Israelis dead and 1,100 wounded, and 232 Palestinians dead and 1,697 wounded. Initially caught unprepared, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are counterattacking, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to extract an “unprecedented price” in blood from Gaza.
What began Friday night is an uprising of the Palestinian people against the violent and brutally oppressive Israeli occupation. The Netanyahu government has sanctioned the constant theft of Palestinian lands by fascistic Israeli settlers, blockaded the Gaza Strip, targeted members of its ruling Hamas party for assassination and organized provocations against Muslims at Al-Aqsa Mosque. By imposing unbearable conditions on Gaza, it made armed resistance inevitable.
Pledging “rock-solid and unwavering” support for Israeli military operations against Gaza, Biden said: “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared: “The odious violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel is unprecedented and unjustifiable. This terrorism must stop immediately. Israel has our full solidarity.”
The hypocrisy of these statements is staggering. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.
In its coverage of the Ukraine war, the media never fails to condemn what it habitually refers to as Russia’s “illegal annexation of Crimea.” The United States has repeatedly declared that it will support Ukraine’s war to regain Crimea “as long as it takes.” But it never condemns Israel’s illegal annexation of vast tracts of Palestinian land.
The Palestinian population of Gaza and the Hamas government do not have powerful imperialist backers arming them to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. As the Palestinians take up arms against an occupation by the Israeli military, which receives billions of dollars in US military aid each year, they know they face overwhelming odds.
Yet the Palestinian forces are not hailed as heroes, but rather denounced as terrorists by the reactionary politicians and servile media of the NATO countries. In reality, the Israeli state for years has repeatedly targeted and killed hundreds or thousands of civilians in indiscriminate attacks on the densely populated Gaza Strip.
On Saturday night, in a bloodcurdling address to the nation, Netanyahu told “residents of Gaza” to “get out now, because we will operate everywhere and with full force.” Since his government blockades Gaza and does not let anyone leave, this is a declaration that Netanyahu sees Gaza’s entire population as a legitimate target. Asserting that “Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu pledged to “fight them to the bitter end” and that cities where Hamas operates would turn into “cities of ruin.”
This barbaric threat to destroy the Gaza Strip testifies to the fascistic character of Netanyahu’s regime. The end product of the Zionist regime’s decades-long shift to the right has been his incorporation of violent far-right groups like the Religious Zionist Party into his government. Its members call for the expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories, promote killings of Palestinians such as the 1994 Cave of Patriarchs massacre, demand the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque and promote the legacy of American-born fascist Meir Kahane.
Netanyahu’s justification for his war is based on a falsification of the aims of Hamas, which he treats as a genocidal organization. In reality, the statement issued by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, stresses its opposition not to Jews but to Israeli occupation. Condemning murders of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers, long-term imprisonment of Palestinians, theft of Palestinian lands, and provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it concludes:
“As the Israeli occupation maintains its siege of the Gaza Strip and continues its crimes against our Palestinian people, while showing utmost disregard for international laws and resolutions amid US and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that. We announce a military operation against the Israeli occupation, which comes in response to the continued Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and violations at the Al-Aqsa mosque.”
Hamas’s ability to secretly prepare such an operation and launch it on October 6—50 years after the Yom Kippur War—exposes the depth of the crisis of the Israeli state. It is overrun with fascistic elements, has battled a years-long trial of Netanyahu for corruption, and faced mass protests of workers and youth earlier this year as it tried and failed to ram through a constitutional reform to undermine the legal independence of the judiciary. Its attempt to suppress Palestinian opposition through fascistic terror has failed.
The Netanyahu government was surprised by the Palestinian uprising in much the same way as Nazi commanders in occupied Poland were surprised by the 1943 uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Blinded by its arrogance and racial hatred, it believed that repression had so broken the back of the Palestinians that resistance would be impossible. Its error now exposed, it is moving—also as in occupied Poland, where the Nazis reacted to uprisings by slaughtering tens and hundreds of thousands—towards a bloodbath.
Average household water bills in the UK are set to soar by 40 percent, or £156 a year by 2030. Customers supplied by Southern Water will suffer a bigger rise, by £262 a year to £674, and those living in the Thames Water area by £175 to £598.
The companies say investors won’t cough up the £96 billion needed to tackle their abysmal record on water leaks and sewage pollution and are demanding that customers pay for improvements instead. For the last 20 years leakage has remained virtually unchanged at around 3,200 million litres a day, between 15 percent and 30 percent of water produced. Most criminal of all sewage spilled into rivers and seas more than 380,000 times in 2022.
Map which includes the location of Combined Sewer Overflows [Photo by Courtesy of The Rivers Trust]
The price hikes will further impoverish those who have endured runaway inflation over the last two years for other necessities of life including food, which reached 19 percent in March, gas (130 percent increase) and electricity (70 percent). The water companies have admitted their proposals will see more households qualifying for support with their water billsup from one million to three million.
The increases have been denounced by campaign groups. Clean water campaigner and former musician Feargal Sharkey told the BBC's Today programme the proposals were a “breathtakingly catastrophic strategy” for the water industry.
He explained that the financial regulator Ofwat had previously acknowledged that water companies had received enough money “to develop, build and maintain a sewage system capable of properly dealing with our sewage”.
“So I don't know why Ofwat would ever agree that the customer should pay again for a second time for a service we’ve never received,” Sharkey added.
Consumer Council for Water CEO, Mike Keil, said, “If a water company has failed to meet existing environmental compliance, it should be putting that right at its own cost--households should not be footing the bill again.”
Oxford University economics professor and water expert, Dieter Helm said, “The question of whether the water companies have properly paid for capital maintenance and done what they are supposed to have done in the previous periods should come before any new borrowing and hence cost to customers.”
Public outcry over the proposed price increases coming has resurrected calls in the trade unions and Labour Party, ahead of its annual conference this week, for renationalisation of the water industry, a key manifesto commitment under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party from 2015-2020.
GMB national officer Gary Carter declared, “Water bosses are the ones responsible for the terrible state of England’s rivers and waterways; they should be paying to restore them to good health, not the public… Water privatisation has failed—consumers shouldn’t have to pay for this failure.”
The rump of Corbyn’s former parliamentary supporters in the Socialist Campaign Group have chimed in, with Corbyn's shadow chancellor John McDonnell saying, “Water privatisation has been the biggest rip-off privatisation of them all.”
“Fortunes have been made at all our expense as the service has deteriorated, charges have gone through the roof, massive debts have been incurred to pay shareholders, and they’ve polluted our rivers and seas. Thirty years of regulation has significantly failed. Public ownership is the only serious option from here on,” McDonnell added.
This will never happen under Labour. Corbyn's renationalisation proposals are dead and buried. During his bid to become party leader in 2020 after Corbyn’s ousting, Sir Keir Starmer declared, “Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders… Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.”
Key “left” figures backed him. Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator and Corbyn’s former political secretary, declared Starmer had a vision for “unifying the party” and “making an unequivocal commitment to preserving our core policies.”
Parker added: “In defending the transformative economic agenda upon which he stood as a Shadow Cabinet member in 2019, I trust that Keir means what he has written in his ten pledges to us. It would be self-defeating for him to say one thing then act otherwise.”
Within a few weeks, Starmer was indeed acting otherwise, hinting “a massive move forward” on water quality was possible without nationalization. “I think with stronger regulation, stronger enforcement of regulation, and accountability at the top of the water companies we can make a massive move forward on this,” he added.
In March 2023, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves openly abandoned Labour’s promise to nationalise water with the words, “Within our fiscal rules, to be spending billions of pounds on nationalizing things, that just doesn’t stack up against our fiscal rules.”
Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, United Kingdom, speaking in the Is the World in a Debt Spiral? at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 19 January [Photo by World Economic Forum/Walter Duerst/Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]
In May, an 88-page draft programme in preparation for Labour's conference this week was circulated. It included a few anodyne management-speak sentences calling for “a new regulatory approach” that would increase the “accountability” of the industry so that it is “better managed in the public interest”, “punish” illegal activity and “set ambitious targets” to stop pollution. These are not new ideas. Most of them can already be found in Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 Water Act and the remit of Ofwat.
Even these weasel words failed to appear in Starmer's recent “5 missions” statement. In fact, there was not a single word about water.
Neither Starmer’s “new regulatory approach” or Corbyn’s renationalisation under capitalism can solve the problems of a water industry that has been systematically looted. Since privatisation at the end of the 1980s, water companies have paid more than £72 billion in dividends to their shareholders and accrued around £60 billion in debt, the servicing of which contributes 20 percent of the average bill.
The companies have become a maze of indebted financial structures involving international private equity funds, shell companies and tax havens, which no amount of regulation has been able to control. According to one water expert, the companies “rely on Ofwat to act publicly as their defender—rather than a protector of consumer rights.”
Ofwat, whose main role is to ensure that water companies can “appropriately finance all of their functions,” proved itself powerless to prevent the collapse in June of Thames Water—the UK’s largest water company, supplying a fifth of the country’s population. Its £14 billion debt raised the alarm about the critical state of the entire water industry.
Emboldened by Ofwat’s “light-touch” regulation, Thames Water is now saying its £18.7 billion rescue plan won’t get funding from investors—who are able to get better returns from UK gilts and bonds—unless Ofwat changes its rules to allow higher profits. The company demanded Ofwat relax rules around penalties, which sees customers reimbursed for poor performance, including sewage spills.
Subsequent discussions on future financing between the company, regulator and government are shrouded in secrecy.
The nationalisation proposed by the Corbyn leadership was always predicated on compensating the water companies, possibly by up to £40 billion. It effectively rewarded their looting and saddled the taxpayer with the debt as had happened with £56 billion debt of the rail infrastructure owner Network Rail, “nationalised” last year.
A real alternative necessitates a socialist policy for water supply and sanitation. This would involve taking the water companies into public ownership without compensation and supplying clean water based on rational planning and coordination, so that everyone has access to this most basic necessity.
September 27 marked nine years since the disappearance of 43 rural teaching students (normalistas) from the town of Ayotzinapa in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
Relatives of missing Ayotzinapa students; signs read "They were taken alive, we want them back alive." [Photo by Thiago Dezan / CIDH / CC BY 2.0]
There remains little doubt that the normalistas, who had commandeered three buses in the City of Iguala in order to attend a protest in Mexico City, were killed through the coordinated actions of a local narcotics gang, the Guerreros Unidos, local, state and federal police, and the Mexican military. They were likely killed because the buses had some of the gang’s narcotics on them.
At the outset, the Mexican Attorney General (PGR) under former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Jesús Murillo Karam, and his office, concocted a coverup story to the effect that the students had been killed by the local gang members, their remains burned at a local garbage dump, and then tossed into an adjoining river.
This falsification, which, inverting reality, became known as the “historical truth”, was aimed at hiding the role of the police and security forces involved, and especially that of the Army.
The National Defense Ministry (Sedena) maneuvered from the outset to try to buttress the 'historical truth,' and shield the Iguala infantry battalions and their officers, along with Sedena. itself For example, an attempt was made to conjure up a link between the students and organized crime.
On September 27, 2015, retired Gen. Humberto Guillermo Aguilar sent an email to then-Secretary of National Defense Salvador Cienfuegos recommending that he hire experts to support the garbage dump hypothesis. “The “historical truth’ may not be accepted, but it cannot be changed,” Cienfuegos wrote a Sedena document leaked by the Guacamaya hacking group.
As further shown by emails from the Army leaked by the Guacamaya group, in May 2017 Sedena drew up an enemies list of “actors averse to the official version” of the Ayotzinapa case. Human rights organizations, and prominent journalists, academics and legislators figured prominently in that document. Mexico’s current president, the pseudo-left populist Andre Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), was included, because he had demanded that the participation of the Army in the crime be investigated, and that the soldiers involved be punished.
The military’s attempted coverup did not succeed. The major role in debunking the “historical truth” was played by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), made up of four experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to investigate the Ayotzinapa case, and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.
When AMLO took office in late December 2018, he trumpeted that his first order of business was forming a “Presidential Commission for Truth and Access to Justice” (Covaj), to be led by his Undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas. He claimed it would get to the bottom of this atrocity, come what may. AMLO ordered that “all available information” be provided to the investigation.
Things did not exactly work out that way.
The Commission proceeded at a snail’s pace, prolonging the anguish of the families of the 43, and effectively snubbing them.
In 2019, the PGR ordered the creation of the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit for the Ayotzinapa Case (UEILCA), and a special prosecutor was appointed. A select few were then served up to take the rap.
On August 19, 2022, Murillo Karam and his right-hand man Tomas Zerón, now a fugitive from justice, were charged and arrested for the crimes of torturing gang witnesses to force them to lie, the forced disappearance of the normalistas, and acting against the administration of justice.
Conspicuously absent from any scrutiny or prosecution were those who sat at the highest levels of the defense ministry, the military chiefs, or in the national intelligence agency. It would beggar belief to conclude that these layers were not fully informed of the true course of events in 2014, and particularly as to the role of the local military units in the murder of the students. At the bare minimum, they covered up, but they retained impunity.
At that same time, on August 18, 2022, Alejandro Encinas issued, to considerable fanfare, the report of the “Truth Commission.” The report conceded that the persecution and disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43 was a “state crime,” involving local officials and military units, and that the government of then President Peña Nieto had pursued a deliberate policy of concealment of the crime and obstruction of justice.
But the Covaj report failed to address the roles played in the coverup by Sedena, the military brass, and the national intelligence agency, then known as CISEN.
However, the judge assigned to the case at that time declined to issue a warrant against the general on that charge, instead limiting the charge to engaging in organized crime, that is, for collaborating with the Guerrero Unidos gang.
Inexplicably, the FGR itself began to dismantle its special unit in August 2022. It then removed the investigative police it had set aside for that unit, canceled most of the warrants, and otherwise interfered with the work of the special prosecutor, Omar Gómez Trejo. In response Gómez Trejo resigned.
According to members of the GIEI, the FGR took this action because the special unit would have begun to investigate officials from the FGR itself, who allegedly participated in acts of torture to fabricate the “historical truth.”
The GIEI warned that Trejo’s resignation put the future of the Ayotzinapa case at risk, and could delay its resolution for at least three to five years.
The GIEI further emphasized the loss of critical knowledge with the departure of Trejo, while also fearing that he would be the subject of reprisals, such as an internal affairs investigation for focusing on military personnel.
In its final report, the GIEI emphasized the resistance of the Mexican state, and most of all the Army, but including the Navy and the federal intelligence agency, to providing all documentation and evidence bearing on the Ayotzinapa events.
In its reports, the GIEI concluded that the Navy manipulated the scene at the landfill, and that Sedena 'obtained all information through torture' and falsified arrest warrants. Moreover, at least 26 witnesses of the Iguala case have died or been killed.
General Cienfuegos, the Secretary of Defense under Peña Nieto, that is, during the time of the Ayotzinapa killings and coverup, had played a key role in this coverup.
Early on in the Ayotzinapa investigation Cienfuegos refused to permit the GIEI access to troops that had been on the scene in Iguala, saying he would not permit his soldiers “to be treated like criminals.” Cienfuegos in a television interview on October 15, 2015 said: “We had nothing to do with it. Why do they want to enter the military installations? The Attorney General's Office did its investigation and did not find any minimal indication of our participation in something illegal.” These were boldfaced lies.
Cienfuegos himself had criminal ties to narcos in Guerrero. In 2005-2007 he commanded the IXth Military Military Region, headquartered in Acapulco, Guerrero. He allegedly protected the Sinaloa Cartel (headed by “Chapo” Guzman) and the related Beltrán-Leyva Cartel (headed by Guzman’s cousins), which controlled the Guerrero region at the time. And clear evidence existed that he was being paid to protect and directly facilitate drug shipments by the H-2 cartel, a Beltran-Leyva offshoot.
General Cienfuegos was eventually seized at an airport in the U.S. and held and investigated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency for drug trafficking and money laundering, protecting drug smuggling corridors and alerting cartel bosses to U.S. enforcement actions. In November 2020, AMLO pressured the U.S. to release Cienfuegos, despite strong evidence against him.
In 2021, through then Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, AMLO negotiated the return of Cienfuegos. The Trump administration dropped the charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico so that, as a joint U.S.-Mexico statement explained, “he may be investigated and, if appropriate, charged under Mexican law.”
Neither occurred. AMLO falsely claimed that Cienfuegos had been expressly exonerated by the FGR, now headed by AMLO’s current PGR Alejandro Gertz Manero. Cienfuegos was a free man. A trial had to be avoided at all costs. It could have implicated other military brass still on duty and exposed the extent of corruption in the armed forces.
As a candidate for president AMLO had slammed Mexico’s armed forces and the “mafia of power” that he said controlled them. He accused soldiers of human rights abuses in the country’s bloody drug war and at that time publicly chastised Cienfuegos.
AMLO claimed only last year that the military's official policy under previous administrations was to “kill them all,” i.e. extrajudicial executions, while he has since minimized or outright lied about numerous reports of extrajudicial executions, torture and spying against journalists and human rights advocates by the military under his administration.
He reneged on his campaign to end the military’s involvement in fighting drug trafficking, while vastly expanding the role of the armed forces in other civilian matters.
AMLO created a National Guard, under the Army’s jurisdiction, which now has over 100,000 troops, and gave the military responsibility for recruiting, training and funding the new force. The militarized National Guard has in large part replaced the civilian federal police. Its presence is now ubiquitous throughout the country.
The president also assigned the military a contract to build a new international airport outside Mexico City, and the military is building part of a multibillion-dollar tourist train on the Caribbean coast. These projects give the armed forces more independent streams of revenue, opportunities for corruption, and even greater autonomy.
The military has taken over ports, airports and customs. It troops play the leading role in oppressing migrants passing through Mexico as they seek to reach the United States. Its budget has expanded by double digits during AMLO’s presidency.
In sum, AMLO increasingly relies on the Mexican military to rule. These moves reveal an increasingly authoritarian course on AMLO’s part, and ultimately his reliance on the military to suppress any threat of working class unrest, and maintain oligarchic rule in Mexico.
The extent of AMLO’s embrace of the military was vividly illustrated in April when he held a press conference with Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval González, Mexico’s current secretary of defense, the supreme commander of the armed forces. As the GIEI was beginning to publicly lay out the basis for its final report on Ayotzinapa, the two belittled its investigation.
Cresencio Sandoval warned that it would be “reckless” to hold the Army responsible for the disappearance of the normalistas. “I have an obligation,” he insisted, “to take care of the prestige of the Army .... ”
The President chimed in, absurdly describing as “conjecture” the statement by the members of GIEI that the Army could hide information on the case. AMLO insisted that “everything the Defense Secretariat has was delivered,” a demonstrably risible claim.
López Obrador went on to attack the advisers and lawyers of the relatives of the normalistas, saying he did not trust them. He made clear where his sympathies lie.
Even more graphically illustrating the integration of the regime of AMLO and his Morena party with Mexico’s military and security forces is the peculiar case of Omar GarcÃa Harfuch, who was the head of the Federal Police in Guerrero state when the normalistas were disappeared.
Mexico City’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is now the official candidate for Mexican president of AMLO’s Morena party in the upcoming 2024 election, appointed GarcÃa Harfuch in 2019 as head of the Investigative Police of Mexico City’s now defunct Attorney General’s Office, as well as intelligence coordinator of her Security cabinet. With Sheinbaum vacating the mayor’s office to run for president, GarcÃa Harfuch is running as Morena’s candidate for mayor to replace her.
Definitive documentation and cell phone records now place GarcÃa Harfuch at a critical meeting in Iguala a week after the normalistas were disappeared, where the “historical truth” was initially concocted. It also appears that the head of the Guerreros Unidos gang had Harfuch’s contact information in his phone book. Yet neither AMLO nor Sheinbaum have called Harfuch and his candidacy for Mexico City mayor into the slightest question.
The leader of South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party (DP) attended his first trial on corruption charges on Friday. Lee Jae-myung faces numerous allegations, with last week’s proceedings focused on a land development scandal. The charges are not simply about the immediate allegations at hand, but are the result of growing social tensions and the government’s targeting of opposition political figures.
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung arrives to attend a hearing on his arrest warrant on corruption charges at the Seoul Central District Court in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon]
Prosecutors have been investigating Lee for months. Lee is accused of using his position as mayor of Seongnam from 2010 to 2018 to illegally benefit property developers working on projects in the city’s Wirye and Daejang-dong districts. This supposedly led to 489.5 billion won ($US364 million) in financial losses for the local government while the private developers were able to reap upwards of 809 billion won ($US602 million) in profits.
Lee also stands accused of soliciting 13.3 billion won ($US9.9 million) in bribes from major corporations, funnelled through Seongnam’s professional soccer team. Seongnam is located in Gyeonggi Province, just south of Seoul.
On September 27, Lee avoided arrest in a different case related to accusations that he had similarly used his influence as mayor to benefit private developers in a project in Seongnam’s Baekhyeon-dong district.
In addition, Lee faces charges that he oversaw the remittance of $US8 million to North Korea during his tenure as governor of Gyeonggi Province from 2018-2021. In another separate case, Lee has been accused of violating the election law during his failed bid in last year’s presidential election.
Lee has denied the accusations against him and denounced them as politically motivated. On Friday, he stated during his court hearing, “Dozens of prosecutors were mobilized for the investigation of me and hundreds of raids were carried out.” He continued, “They will continue with it again and keep doing it as long as I’m alive, will they not?”
There is no doubt that the cases against Lee are politically motivated, regardless of any alleged personal dishonesty. Bribery and corruption are widespread throughout the South Korean political and business worlds. Corruption cases are used to settle political scores in the ruling class and cover up the real motivations for targeting a given individual or group.
The government of right-wing President Yoon Suk-yeol and the ruling People Power Party are deeply concerned over growing social unrest. As around the globe, South Korea is facing declining economic conditions and an upsurge of the working class that refuses to foot the bill for this downturn. Yoon has also directly lined the country up behind Washington for a US-instigated war against China, which includes forming what is essentially a trilateral military alliance with the US and Japan, Korea’s former colonial oppressor.
Lacking any popular support for its agenda, the Yoon regime is responding by reviving the police state measures of past dictatorships. The targeting of the main opposition party stems from the fear that any, even limited, political opposition could become the focal point for a broader struggle against the government and its agenda. The attacks on Lee are aimed at intimidating rival sections of the ruling class while also preparing broader attacks on the working class.
Yoon, who previously served as South Korea’s top prosecutor, defeated Lee by less than one percent in the March 2022 presidential election. After taking office, Yoon stacked various government positions, including at the ministerial level, with former prosecutors close to him. Many of the officials currently holding key positions in the prosecutorial service itself are Yoon allies.
The president has attacked workers’ right to strike and organize, pledged to restrict the right to protest, and attempted to silence critics in the media. In a Liberation Day speech on August 15, the president denounced political opponents as “anti-state forces” who are under the influence of “communist totalitarianism.”
Only seven years ago, a massive protest movement erupted against the right-wing government of Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and removed from office. While seemingly driven by Park’s personal corruption, demonstrators expressed their frustrations with worsening economic conditions and began to draw lines between Park’s conduct and the oppressive character of the capitalist system as a whole.
Democrat Moon Jae-in subsequently replaced Park as president in 2017. He came to office posturing as a friend of workers and even as a vaguely anti-war candidate, pledging to negotiate with North Korea. In reality, Moon oversaw attacks on the working class and the expansion of social inequality, particularly throughout the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which helped pave the way for the conservatives to take power again.
Economic conditions have declined further since then. A driving factor is US protectionist measures aimed at China, which are hampering South Korea’s ability to trade with its two largest economic partners. Exports have fallen for 12 straight months while those of semiconductors, a key export item, have fallen for 14 straight months. Workers’ real wages have declined nearly every month since April 2022 as a result of inflation.
Lee Jae-myung and the Democratic Party are certainly no friends of the working class. The DP represents sections of the bourgeoisie that fear the US-led war drive in the region is cutting across their interests, including business connections in China and the desire to open up North Korea as an ultra-cheap labour platform. The Democrats are also conscious of the widespread anti-war sentiment within the working class, which the party attempts to direct along nationalist channels by utilizing anti-Japanese chauvinism.
In targeting the Democrats, the Yoon administration wants to ensure that no movement can coalesce around the opposition that will disrupt the government’s agenda, including its war preparations alongside Washington and Tokyo. While the DP would attempt to divert or block any working-class movement, the fear within the ruling class is that mass protests could erupt against the government could spiral out of the control of the Democrats and their allies in the trade unions.
The Democrats are downplaying the government’s anti-democratic measures and blaming Yoon’s lack of experience. An article last month in the DP-aligned Hankyoreh newspaper, declared that Yoon had “blundered” his way into office. The article claimed Yoon “ended up running for president and winning without really knowing why he should be president or what he should do if he became president.”
In reality, under conditions of geo-political tensions and an intensifying economic and social crisis at home, the Yoon government is reviving the police-state measures of the past. While the South Korean military dictatorship was formally replaced by an elected presidential administration in 1987, the state apparatus has remained largely unchanged.
Application Deadline: 3rd December 2023 (12:00 noon Beijing time).
Eligible Countries: International
To be Taken at (country): China
About the Award: The Yenching Academy is a fully-funded residential program offering various interdisciplinary courses on China within the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Working closely with their academic mentors, Yenching Scholars have the flexibility to create their study paths by choosing from six research areas and a variety of extracurricular activities. Studying at the Academy represents a unique opportunity not only for intercultural and academic exchange, but also for personal and professional development.
Field of Study: Scholars participate in infield studies to culturally, economically, or socio-politically significant regions within Mainland China. Each Scholar chooses one of six research areas corresponding to thesis topic. (The research area does not affect course selection options or requirements.)
Research Areas:
• Economics & Management • History & Archaeology • Law & Society • Literature & Culture • Philosophy & Religion • Politics & International Relations
Eligibility: Applicants should have:
· Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree in any field, awarded no later than August 31 of the year in which they wish to enroll; · An outstanding academic record; · Strong interest in interdisciplinary study of China; · A record of extracurricular achievement, community engagement and social responsibility; · Leadership potential; · English proficiency.
Successful applicants will show how the Yenching Academy program is relevant and valuable for their career plans. Preference is given to candidates age 25 or younger as of August 31 2022. For students from countries with mandatory military service, the age preference is 27 years old or younger.
Number of Awards: About 125
Value of Award: Yenching Academy provides a generous postgraduate fellowship covering tuition fees, a travel stipend for one round-trip journey between each Scholar’s base city and Beijing, accommodations, and a monthly living stipend.
Duration of Program:
Fellowships for international scholars are for 12 months, with the option to extend for a second year in Beijing.
During the second year in Beijing, students may apply for a limited number or Teaching, Research, or Administrative Assistantships.
In addition, scholars may apply for grants to help fund research projects related to China Studies.
All students complete coursework during their first year. The second year is for completing thesis writing and defense (international students who choose to leave Beijing after the first year may complete thesis defense remotely). Degrees are granted upon completing all coursework and satisfactory defense of the thesis, and are awarded in January and July of each year.
The Academy also offers a limited number of doctoral scholarships to selected Yenching Scholars who want to pursue doctoral degrees in other Peking University departments.
Public hearings in the second stage of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry began this week. The inquiry was announced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in May 2021 and has been moving at a snail’s pace, with proceedings expected to take until 2026 to complete. In the meantime, 229,000 people have died of COVID in Britain, according to official statistics, while millions suffer from Long COVID.
Lead counsel Hugo Keith KC read out the evidence on Tuesday, the first day of this stage of the inquiry focusing on political decision-making in Westminster between January 2020 and February 2022. It revealed new information on the criminal attitude that prevailed in government circles at the beginning of the pandemic, and their overarching concerns that the economy be protected, not the population.
UK Covid-19 Inquiry lead counsel Hugo Keith KC [Photo: ovid19.public-inquiry.uk]
Despite the World Health Organization declaring COVID a pandemic on February 24, 2020 and reports of thousands of infections and deaths coming in from around the world, most notably from Italy, Dominic Cummings, at the time a senior advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in a text message on March 2: “The PM [prime minister] doesn't think it's a big deal; [he] doesn't think anything can be done, and his focus is elsewhere; he thinks it will be like swine flu and thinks his main danger is taking the economy into a slump.”
At various times, claims have been made that the government was not aware of the seriousness of the pandemic or of the consequences of it running unchecked, to excuse the criminal actions taken. Evidence at the hearings debunks this completely. An unnamed “senior Cabinet official” is quoted as saying on March 13, 2020, “I think this country's [headed] for a disaster, I think we're going to kill thousands of people.” A text sent a day earlier on March 12, from Cummings reads: “We’ve got big problems coming. The [Cabinet Office] is terrifyingly shit. No plans. Totally behind the pace. […] We're looking at 100 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.”
Concerned with ensuring the profits of corporations, the Tory government delayed instituting any public health measures as long as possible. It only acted when it became clear that the National Health Service (NHS) was going to collapse, threatening the stability of the state and massive economic damage. The ruling class had to take into account growing public concern and anger in the working class that measures had not been put in place to protect the population.
The government had no plan in place to institute a lockdown and had to haphazardly come up with one. Despite the decision for a lockdown being taken on March 9, it wasn’t imposed until March 23, causing more people to needlessly die. This is graphically described by Cummings in a text to Johnson: “You’re going to have to lock down but there is no lockdown plan, it does not exist, SAGE [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] haven’t modelled it, the Department of Health and Social Care don’t have a plan”. Reportedly, Johnson replied by musing out loud whether the virus should just be allowed to “let rip”.
Johnson had already declared the homicidal “herd immunity” programme in public on the This Morning TV show on March 5, where he explained, “One of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population.”
As these discussions were taking place, the murderous decision was made, on March 17, 2020, to release tens of thousands of mainly elderly patients from hospitals to care homes, without testing. Taken in opposition to all medical advice and against any public health considerations this resulted in thousands of needless deaths as COVID tore through care homes turning them into killing fields.
Evidence presented in the inquiry makes clear that the consequences of this action were fully understood. Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, had briefed the cabinet about asymptomatic transmission just a few days previously. As lawyers for the bereaved noted, “In light of what was known, the decision in both England and Wales to discharge people from hospital into care homes without testing was indefensible.”
As infections were rising again in September and early October 2020, after an ebb throughout the summer due to the lockdown being in place—and after most lockdown restrictions were lifted at the beginning of July—discussions took place in the Cabinet Office on whether to reimpose the lockdown.
The contending sides outlined their arguments to Johnson. At a meeting on October 25, 2020, one comment made to Johnson was “let it rip”, and, in relation to elderly people, which would have been the most threatened by a new surge of COVID, “They have had a good innings”. Just five days later, on October 30, 2020, even as Johnson had to authorise a second national lockdown to begin six days later on November 5, he made his infamous statement in Downing Street, blurting out, “No more fucking lockdowns. Let the bodies pile high in their thousands”.
People queue for coronavirus booster jabs at St Thomas' Hospital, with the National COVID Memorial Wall in the foreground, in London, December 13, 2021. [AP Photo/Matt Dunham]
This policy of social murder led to well over 100,000 more deaths over the next year, with many among the elderly. It summed up the determination of the ruling elite to end all lockdowns—an aim carried out just a few months later from March 8 to July 2021—in what was described as a “roadmap out of lockdown” that would end all restrictions “irreversibly”. This agenda was fervently backed by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party who worked with the government as a self-declared “constructive” opposition throughout the first years of the pandemic.
The cabinet first had discussions around Long COVID in October 2020. Anthony Metzer KC, speaking on behalf of Long Covid Kids, Long Covid SOS and Long Covid Support, told the inquiry that Johnson initially “denied the truth of the suffering” of Long COVID patients. “In October 2020, while the Department of Health and Social Care was publishing guidance on long Covid and called for recognition and support for people with long Covid, Boris Johnson scrawled in capitals that long Covid was ‘bollocks’”. Metzer added, “Mr Johnson has admitted in his witness statement that he didn’t believe long Covid truly existed, dismissing it as ‘Gulf War Syndrome stuff’. The inquiry will be concerned to probe how the former prime minister could possibly hold this view in October 2020.” Noting that Johnson now accepted that Long Covid was a “serious health condition”, Metzer said at the time, “The UK’s senior most decision-makers were dismissing, diminishing and disbelieving the very existence and risk of long Covid.”
During the second and third day of hearings, the inquiry heard evidence on how the government was prioritizing profit over the health and lives of the population. On Tuesday, it was revealed from the diary of government chief scientific adviser Vallance that “Chancellor [Rishi Sunak] blocking all notion of paying to get people to isolate despite all the evidence that this will be needed.” On Wednesday, the British Medical Association (BMA) testified that the government “abandoned basic public health protection” when setting up a privatised Test and Trace system. Caroline Abrahams, charity director for Age UK, described an “underlying assumption that older people with care needs would be unlikely to survive”.
The evidence presented paints a devastating picture of ruling elite indifference to the suffering and loss of lives of workers and the elderly. Their only motive was protecting the interests of the banks and corporations. But what is known publicly only scratches the surface of their criminal conduct. This was highlighted by the refusal of current Prime Minister Sunak to release all his WhatsApp messages to the inquiry. Sunak’s statement to the inquiry says, “Having changed my phone a number of times over the last three years, I do not have access to the WhatsApp messages that I sent or received during the relevant time, and neither were the messages backed up.”
The body heard that key WhatsApp messages by Johnson from January 31 to June 7, 2020, are “unrecoverable”. The loss of Johnson’s messages were described by Peter Weatherby KC, for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, as a “remarkable and unfortunate coincidence”. Weatherby said, “We would urge the inquiry to commission experts to see why those messages can’t be retrieved and whether they may have been deleted.”
As the WSWS has noted, the role of the inquiry is not to hold anyone to account for the disastrous handling of the pandemic. No matter what evidence is uncovered or oral evidence presented, the Inquires Act prohibits ruling on or determining anyone’s civil or criminal liability. Like every other public inquiry held, from the Aberfan disaster in 1966, to the Grenfell Tower inferno, it will finish in a whitewash.
In a move befitting a fascist regime, India’s Narendra Modi-led government is wantonly trampling on basic democratic rights to intimidate and silence the left-wing news website NewsClick. Following police raids Tuesday on its offices and the homes of scores of people associated with the website, police have arrested NewsClick’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Prabir Purkayastha, and Human Resources head Amit Chakraborty on frame-up terrorism charges.
The now jailed Purkayastha and Chakraborty stand accused of offences under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which allows the government to lock away persons for years on spurious charges without a court hearing and/or providing any sort of meaningful evidence against them.
Since coming to power in 2014, Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has repeatedly used the UAPA, which allows the state to circumvent constitutionally protected due process, and India’s sweeping sedition laws to persecute government opponents.
Unsurprisingly, India’s courts, which have repeatedly given their imprimatur to the Modi government’s ever more brazen evisceration of democratic rights, has sanctioned the UAPA charges against Purkayastha and Chakraborty and ordered them held in police custody for at least seven days.
The authorities have alleged that NewsClick is being funded “from China,” a deliberately provocative claim as the Indian government has identified China as its principal strategic threat and has formed a de facto military alliance with US imperialism to encircle China. Since 2020, Beijing and New Delhi have been locked in a stand-off over their disputed border with each country forward deploying tens of thousands of troops, tanks, and warplanes.
The government—through the Delhi police, which are directly under the control of India’s Home Ministry, and the Finance Ministry’s Enforcement Directorate—has accused the website of peddling “Chinese propaganda” and “plot[ting] to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.”
NewsClick is in the crosshairs of the far-right Modi government because it is one of the few prominent news websites that is stridently critical of its actions, including its relentless promotion of communalism. NewsClick has also sought to expose the corrupt nexus between Modi and his close friend, the billionaire businessman Gautam Adani.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, October 3, hundreds of police mounted a dragnet-style operation across India, raiding offices and residences in order to interrogate scores of journalists, historians and researchers. These individuals were targeted either because they had written articles for NewsClick or were otherwise associated with it.
According to the Press Trust of India, 88 locations in Delhi and seven in other states were raided.
The raids in New Delhi were mounted by the Delhi Police (DP) special cell on economic offences and the Indian government’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a police agency set up to investigate financial crimes such as money laundering.
The police reportedly interrogated the targeted individuals for an average of eight hours and seized their laptops, cell phones and other devices, including disk storage.
In a flagrant demonstration of the raids’ true political motivations, the police demanded to know of those they interrogated whether they had covered the farmers’ revolt of 2020-21, the anti-Muslim attacks fomented by the BJP in Delhi in February 2020, or the government’s ruinous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among those interrogated was the journalist and social activist Teesta Setalvad. At the instigation of India’s highest court, Setalvad is already facing grave criminal charges of “fabricating evidence” for her dogged efforts to reveal the role the then Modi-led Gujarat state government and senior police officials played in the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.
The authorities have sealed the offices of NewsClick. The website, which continues to post material, issued a statement following Tuesday’s raid which pointed to the police’s brazen violations of due process. “We have not been provided with a copy of the FIR (preliminary police report), or informed about the exact particulars of the offences with which we have been charged. Electronic devices were seized from the NewsClick premises and homes of employees, without any adherence to due process such as the provision of seizure memos, hash values of the seized data, or even copies of the data. NewsClick’s office has also been sealed in a blatant attempt at preventing us from continuing our reporting.”
NewsClick has been hounded since 2021 on “money laundering” charges, purportedly for receiving foreign funds. Even after two years of so-called investigation, during which the authorities have scrutinized Newsclick’s records, neither the DP nor ED have been able to file an official complaint against it in the courts.
Demonstration by activists and journalists in front of New York Times building denouncing persecution of NewsClick. [Photo: Radio Free Amanda/Twitter or X]
The charge of NewsClick carrying “Chinese propaganda” comes after the New York Times (NYT) published a particularly foul anti-China, hit-piece article on August 5 that purported to unravel “financial networks [that] push Chinese talking points.” From the Times’ standpoint, such “talking points” include any criticism of US imperialism’s all-sided strategic offensive and war preparations against China.
The Times article singled out an American IT specialist and businessman, Neville Roy Singham, who it claimed “is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes and works closely with the Chinese government.” According to the article, Singham has “financed” NewsClick which has “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.”
The police are also trying to connect their case against the NewsClick editor-in-chief Purkayastha with another notorious UAPA frame-up case—known as the Bhima Koregaon case—in which a group of anti-government writers and social activists, labelled “urban Naxhalites” by the police and BJP, have been accused of inciting communal violence and colluding with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). In court documents police have reportedly pointed to the friendship between NewsClick’s editor-in-chief and one of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon (or Elgar Parishad) case, civil rights activist Gautam Navlakha. It also has claimed Navlakha is a NewsClick shareholder and that “Chinese” funds were dispersed to him via NewsClick.
There has been widespread condemnation of the Modi government for its recourse to police-state tactics and against the NYT for its filthy role in facilitating Modi’s assault on the press. Protesters picketed the Times’ Manhattan office on Tuesday to draw attention to the witch-hunt against NewsClick and the Times’ role in it.
There have also been protests involving hundreds of journalists and activists in New Delhi and Hyderabad in south India.
Fifteen Indian press organisations, including the Press Club of India, Digipub News India Foundation and the Indian Women’s Press Corps, have written to the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court urging him to intervene to protect constitutionally guaranteed press freedoms. “Subjecting journalists,” they wrote, “to a concentrated criminal process because the government disapproves of their coverage of national and international affairs is an attempt to chill the press by the threat of reprisal—the very ingredient you identified as a threat to freedom.”
Throughout its nine-year rule, the Modi government has used repressive methods to muzzle journalists, political activists, and even foreign news organisations that have criticized its conduct.
One of the most prominent instances was the massive raid by Income Tax officials on the British broadcaster, the BBC, in February of this year. The BBC was targeted after it aired documentaries pointing to the central role Modi played, when Chief Minister of Gujarat, in instigating and facilitating the February 2002 massacre of at least 2,000 innocent Muslims.
Similarly, in July 2021, the same Indian tax authorities raided the offices of TV channel Bharat Samachar and Hindi-newspaper Dainik Bhaskar for “tax evasion.” These organisations came under the government’s scanner after they exposed some of the horrors that resulted from the government’s criminal indifference to the COVID-19 pandemic, and drew attention to the government’s routine spying on journalists, politicians and activists using the Israeli-origin Pegasus spy software.
Even the mainstream newsmagazine and website Outlook was forced to concede this week: “Over the last decade, countless Indian journalists have been targeted by probe agencies and many have been put behind bars. While the charges framed against them have been over alleged terror links or illegal funding and anti-national activities, these journalists are usually renowned for their detailed reportage, usually not much in favour of the government.”
The Modi government’s assault on the press has been especially egregious in Kashmir. There journalists are routinely arrested and charged with criminal offences for reporting anything inimical to the narrative of the Modi government. In October 2020, police sealed the Srinagar offices of the long-established Kashmir Times. At least five Kashmiri journalists are currently indefinitely detained under the UAPA— Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah, Sajad Gul, Manan Gulzar Dar, and Irfan Mehraj.
