CDC ends Biobot Analytics contract for wastewater surveillance of COVID pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

“Many of you have reached out in recent days inquiring about Biobot’s future with CDC NWSS. The contract Biobot held with CDC NWSS for the last few years was up for rebid this summer, and was recently awarded to Verily, an Alphabet precision health technology company. While we are disappointed with this news, we are incredibly proud of the work we’ve accomplished with CDC to date, and we know that this decision had nothing to do with our past performance. This is just the reality of how government works.”—October 6, 2023, Biobot Analytics

As of September 27, 2023, one of the few reliable sources of information on the real state of the COVID pandemic in the US was halted. The contract between Biobot Analytics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide extended data for the public health agency’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) ended.

Instead, the CDC awarded the $38 million contract for up-to-five years to Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) on September 26, 2023. However, a glance into Verily’s COVID dashboard, WastewaterSCAN, offers little in terms of comprehensible data in regional or national terms. It simply states, “Medium: Downward trend and medium concentration in the last 21 days.”

The last Biobot report indicated the levels of SARS-CoV-2 nationally were rising again, with the Northeast accelerating and the rest of the country seeing levels plateau.

Last update from Biobot Analytics on SARS-CoV-2 virus concentration in wastewater. [Photo: Biobot Analytics]

The available graphics and trends in SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels are limited to the wastewater site and have not been aggregated to provide a coherent picture. And reviewing the CDC’s limited graphics, as of September 28, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of sites reporting.

Last update from Biobot Analytics on SARS-CoV-2 virus concentration in wastewater. [Photo: Biobot Analystics]

It appears that the disruption in wastewater data is another deliberate attempt by the CDC to further dismantle any semblance of organized real-time data on the state of the pandemic. Such shifts in contracts usually take place over a span of time to assure a seamless transition on the data being presented.

It was known in February 2023 that Biobot had been given a six-month extension to ensure data continuity for the NWSS program. The scope of the contract included data from more than 400 locations from over 250 counties across the entire United States, covering 60 million people. On top of this, Biobot also conducted genomic sequencing to identify the latest variants in circulation.

At the time of the contract extension, Newsha Ghaeli, Biobot president and co-founder, released a statement, “As the availability of clinical data decreases, wastewater monitoring has become a more reliable indicator of COVID-19 prevalence and provides local officials with a better understanding of viral spread in their communities. We’re excited to continue our partnership with CDC and lay the groundwork for future program expansion into other infectious disease and beyond.”

Since the beginning of summer, after the Biden administration declared the end to the pandemic in May, a new wave of infections began rapidly spreading across the country, driving up hospitalization rates and deaths. Many schools actually closed for one to two weeks to mitigate infection spread and some hospitals and businesses even went as far as to mandate masks again. Even the most recalcitrant were begrudgingly acknowledging another wave of infections with COVID.

The fraudulent “pandemic is over” was dealt a further blow in early September when the White House acknowledged that Jill Biden had been re-infected with COVID and was isolating at the Bidens’ Delaware home.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden was flaunting his open hostility to even the most limited public health measures to protect himself and others around him. At a press briefing on September 6, before traveling to India, Biden walked to the podium during a press briefing unmasked and holding his KN95 in hand.

He said, “I want to explain to the press, I’ve been tested again today. I’m clear across the board. But they keep telling me, because this has to be 10 days or something, I got to keep wearing it. But don’t tell them I didn’t wear it when I walked in.”

The week of that sick joke, more than a thousand people in the US—predominantly the elderly and immunocompromised—died from COVID.

Biobot Analytics was alone in tracking the entire course of the summer wave, enabling an appreciative public to take what self-protective measures they could and providing vital information to medical science and public health efforts.

The hostility of the CDC and its political and corporate masters to this effort—they evidently regarded data collection on COVID as more dangerous than the lethal disease itself—no doubt accounts for the decision to award the wastewater data monitoring contract to a different company.

As JP Weiland, a scientist and infectious disease modeler who regularly updated and translated Biobot data into clinical terms, recently noted, “I’m concerned the loss of @BiobotAnalytics contract with the CDC (transferred to Verily) will temporarily interrupt wastewater calibration. Biobot has been a fantastic data source, and tie most closely to other non-wastewater data sets. Hopefully Verily’s new data will live up to Biobot’s quality.”

Dr. Mike Hoerger, the founding director of Louisiana’s health psychology PhD program at Tulane University, and an expert in weighing medical evidence, compared Verily and Biobot’s analysis to data from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington from January 2021 to April 2023. While Biobot’s data correlated very strongly, Verily’s data correlated moderately. As Hoerger noted, “Either Biobot is much better, or Verily knows something we don’t.”

He added, “Once Verily brings on Biobot’s former CDC-contracted wastewater sites, that should help. Case estimation will be easier if they fold in the historic data to more accurately represent the nation. If Verily does not fold in historic data, case estimation will be much harder, and likely noisier.”

On his October 2, 2023, X (formerly known as Twitter) thread, Hoerger noted that US wastewater levels are higher than during 58 percent of the pandemic. This translated to one in 64 people infectious, with more than 745,000 COVID cases per day and 37,000 Long COVID cases per day expected. Although there is an expected decline by the end of October, the trough should be reached by November 1 after which these modelers expect levels of COVID to increase again.

Six-month view: US SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels, COVID-19 case estimates, and four-week forecast. [Photo: Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA]

Meanwhile, the US Department of Health and Human Services said last Thursday that just over 7 million Americans have received the latest iteration of the COVID vaccine boosters since receiving the green light on September 12 for those age six months and older. Notably, the updated Novavax boosters are now available too.

But because of the commercialization of these lifesaving treatments and deplorable state of large chain pharmacies in regard to staff shortages, the current figures are far below the deployment of last year’s COVID-19 bivalent boosters. For most health systems, while flu vaccines are mandatory, COVID boosters are not compulsory, even though lethality with COVID remains higher than the flu and COVID is a magnitude of order more infectious.

Indeed, Pfizer, which had made billions on its mRNA vaccines, announced it had slashed its full-year revenue forecast by 13 percent and anticipates it will cut $3.5 billion worth of jobs and expenses because of lackluster sales of its COVID vaccines and treatments.

Currently in the US, the HV.1 subvariant is outpacing EG.5 which has begun to recede. However, the Pirola variant (B.2.86.1) and its progeny are raising alarms. In Particular, JN.1 (BA.2.86.1 plus escape mutation L455S) appears to be showing a growth advantage compared to others despite only a few sequences.

Defeat of Australian Labor’s Voice referendum highlights massive class divide

Oscar Grenfell

The Australian Labor government’s referendum to enshrine an indigenous Voice in the Constitution suffered a resounding defeat on Saturday. Nationally, more than 60 percent of voters cast a ballot against establishing the Aboriginal advisory body to parliament, with the Yes camp registering less than 40 percent support.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigns in Norwood, South Australia on September 20 with Labor Senator Marielle Smith (left) and other Yes referendum supporters. [Photo: Facebook Senator Marielle Smith]

The result was so overwhelming that the defeat was clear an hour-and-a-half after the close of voting. To have been successful, the referendum required a majority of the popular vote, and a Yes result in most states. All the states, however, registered No majorities, with the Australian Capital Territory the only jurisdiction led by Yes ballots.

Another measure of the scale of the defeat is that only 41 seats of the country’s 151 lower house parliamentary electorates recorded majority Yes support.

The outcome has been met by the Voice proponents in the political and media establishment with an outpouring of racialist hysteria. The majority of the population is being denounced in these quarters as racist, mean-spirited and as having rejected a generous offer for “reconciliation” with the indigenous population. At best, ordinary people who voted against the Voice are being presented as the dupes of “misinformation.”

These claims are a fraud, as was the entire Voice policy. In reality, the most striking feature of the result was the massive class divide it revealed.

All the initial demographic breakdowns and voting data paint the same picture. The Yes vote was most successful in the affluent areas of the country, especially the wealthy and inner suburbs of the major capital cities. As a general tendency, the poorer and more working-class an area, the more likely it was to vote No.

In New South Wales and Victoria, the Yes votes were highest in the inner-city areas of Sydney and Melbourne, where median income is multiple times higher than in working-class suburbs. Several former Liberal Party blue-ribbon seats in Sydney with some of the highest income levels, won at the last election by Teal independents, voted Yes.

This pattern underscores the fact that the result is not an expression of mass racism. Instead, it indicates an even greater deepening of popular hostility to the federal Labor government and the entire political establishment, above all, in the working class.

Even the corporate media, for its own reasons, has been compelled to acknowledge that the fundamental issue was the deepening social crisis, expressed in the cost-of-living disaster.

Over the course of the year, as it has been promoting the Voice, the Labor administration has rejected any substantial relief as the cost of all essential goods has soared, real wages have been cut and mortgage repayments have skyrocketed as a result of interest rate hikes. Labor, narrowly elected in May 2022 on the slogan of a “better future,” has insisted that workers must “sacrifice” as it imposes an austerity agenda benefitting the corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

The Voice was never going to improve social conditions, including for indigenous people, the majority of whom constitute the most oppressed section of the working class. Instead, its aim was to put a progressive gloss on the Labor government’s pro-business program and the other key plank of its agenda, the ever-greater alignment of Australia with the advanced US-led plans for a catastrophic war with China.

The claims of widespread racism and misinformation are a cover for the real dynamics of the campaign, which increasingly exposed the fraudulent character of the Voice.

Those claiming mass racism are incapable of explaining why opinion polls from the beginning of the year showed that 60 to 65 percent of the population supported the Voice, a proportion that has been almost exactly reversed in the final result. The very calling of the referendum by Labor was an acknowledgement of a mass sentiment in favour of redressing the oppression of Aboriginal people, a sentiment the government hoped to cynically exploit.

The Yes campaign, however, was shot through with contradictions.

Labor and its proponents insisted that what they were seeking to enshrine was a powerless advisory body, which they depicted as a minor change.

At the same time, however, they vaguely asserted that the establishment of the Voice would help to resolve the appalling social conditions afflicting most Aboriginal people, including far below average life expectancy, chronic disease and poverty. But they never explained how the Voice would alter this state of affairs in the slightest.

In fact, the Voice was premised on an explicit rejection of any increase to federal funding for Aboriginal health, education and other services, which advocacy groups say is billions of dollars short of what is required every year. Instead, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pitched the Voice as a means of slashing indigenous spending, part of the broader austerity onslaught.

Proponents of the Voice repeatedly denounced those requesting more details about the body, in some instances arrogantly instructing them to “Google it.” But there were no more details. The entire composition and structure of the Voice was to be determined by parliament after the referendum, without any reference to the sentiments or will of the population.

The official No campaign, headed by Liberal-National Coalition leader Peter Dutton, unquestionably dog-whistled at times to anti-Aboriginal racism. At the same time, it was based on the same reactionary Australian nationalism and defence of the anti-democratic 1901 Constitution as the Yes campaign.

The No campaign largely capitalised on the weakness and racialism of the Yes camp, pointing to the lack of detail and warning against “dividing the nation” along racial lines. Polling has shown that despite the swing against the Voice, Dutton remains one of the most unpopular figures in recent Australian political history. Dutton kept a low profile throughout the campaign. He largely delegated leadership of the No camp to Jacinta Price, a newly-elected National Party senator, and Warren Mundine, a former president of the Labor Party. Both Price and Mundine are indigenous.

In reality, there was little in terms of their background and class character that separated Mundine from leaders of the Yes camp, including such figures as Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton. They are leaders of a privileged layer of the indigenous elite that has collaborated with governments for years, including in significant attacks on oppressed indigenous people through the Northern Territory intervention and welfare quarantining.

As many workers, including of an indigenous background are aware, previous initiatives spearheaded by the indigenous elite, such as the establishment of land rights and state-funded organisations, have done nothing to improve the lot of ordinary Aboriginal people.

When polling made it clear that the Yes camp was in a deepening crisis, Langton and others denounced opponents of the Voice, implying they were stupid and racist. The outcome of such tirades was to fortify opposition to the initiative. Langton and others have responded to the defeat by doubling down on the claims of widespread racism and hysterical denunciations of the population.

In a rare breach of the dominant line that the outcome shows mass racism and ordinary people having been duped by “misinformation,” Kos Samaras, a director at RedBridge Group polling, made several comments pointing to the class issues. Samaras supported the Yes campaign. His comments have the character of internal disputes within the establishment, but are nevertheless revealing.

Samaras noted that for months, Albanese had sought to base the campaign on a vague “vibe” of assisting indigenous people. The Yes camp decried misinformation and requests for more details on the Voice, but were unable to respond with any information of its own. Samaras stated that the Yes camp, with its endorsements from major corporations and celebrities, and its deployment of identity politics, “ran a campaign beautifully suited to white, highly educated progressives in inner urban suburbs.”

Notably, as many as 80 percent of traditional Labor Party seats voted against the Voice. That continues the collapse in Labor’s previous working-class base of support. In the 2022 federal election, Labor’s national primary vote was below 33 percent, the lowest level since 1933, and it only scraped into office as a consequence of the implosion of the Liberal Party’s support.

For Albanese, the outcome is a disaster. The Voice was supposed to be the progressive veneer for an otherwise deeply unpopular agenda of war and austerity, but the Voice itself has intensified popular anger and hostility to the Labor administration.

In his remarks on Saturday night, Albanese did not even attempt to explain why the majority of the population had voted against one of his government’s signature policies.

The result is a crisis for the entire political establishment. While media commentators have anxiously declared the referendum vote does not reflect the political standing of the government, that is precisely what was revealed in prepoll surveys. As the No vote increased, support for Labor decreased, with no rise in the fortunes of Dutton or the Coalition.

This underscores the reality that amid a global breakdown of capitalism and an ever-greater shift to the right by the official parties, none of them are able to make an appeal to the vast mass of the population. Rather than a shift to the right, what is developing is a shift to the left, animated by hostility to social inequality, the evermore difficult conditions of life, and war.

Landslide defeat for Labour in New Zealand election

Tom Peters

New Zealand’s Labour Party government suffered an historic defeat in Saturday’s election. According to preliminary results, Labour’s support virtually halved from more than 50 percent in the 2020 election to 26.9 percent. This is the biggest swing ever recorded against a ruling party and Labour’s second-worst result since 1928.

About one in five votes are yet to be counted, including those cast by voters outside their electorates, so the final result due on November 3 could change slightly.

Contrary to headlines in the Guardian, CNN and other corporate media outlets in New Zealand and internationally, the result does not represent a popular “shift to the right.” Rather, it reflects growing anger and disillusionment with the right-wing program shared by the entire parliamentary establishment.

The conservative National Party, led by former Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon, received only 39 percent. National and its preferred coalition partner, the far-right ACT Party, with 9 percent, together have a precarious one-seat majority: 61 seats in the 121-seat parliament. They will likely need support from the right-wing nationalist New Zealand First (6.5 percent) to form a government, which will take weeks of negotiations.

The Electoral Commission estimates turnout among enrolled voters was 78.4 percent—3.8 points lower than 2020. Actual turnout is closer to 73 percent, taking into account about 7 percent of eligible people who did not enroll.

If one adjusts for more than 1 million eligible voters, one in four, who did not vote for anyone, National’s support falls to only 22.6 percent. National, ACT and NZ First received just 31.6 percent combined.

This will be an extremely unstable coalition government with no mass support. ACT and NZ First are widely despised; the latter, in particular, ran a Trump-like campaign full of racist dog-whistles, climate change denial, anti-vaccination pseudo-science and anti-transgender bigotry.

The plans of all three parties include deep cuts to public services, thousands of layoffs, cutbacks to welfare, and the diversion of more funding to the military, police and prisons. This agenda will fuel a resurgence of working class opposition, as is taking place internationally.

Labour’s landslide loss does not indicate support for this agenda, but rather the opposite. It is the end product of six years of a Labour-led government which presided over soaring social inequality and a profound and worsening social crisis.

Like social democratic parties throughout the world, Labour transformed decades ago into an open instrument of the corporate and financial elite. It responded to the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic by funneling tens of billions of dollars to big business, through subsidies and bailouts, and monetary policies that pushed up rents and house prices.

Widespread anti-war sentiment likely contributed to the party’s crushing defeat. The Labour government has strengthened ties with US imperialism, which is seeking to redivide the world at the expense of Russia and China. Labour, supported by the entire parliament, has sent troops to the UK to train forces for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and has made clear that New Zealand is prepared to support a US war against China.

During the final week of the election campaign, Labour and National joined the rest of the imperialist powers in backing Israel’s brutal war against the people of Gaza—which is widely opposed among ordinary people in New Zealand. Under the fraudulent banner of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” Luxon and Labour’s prime minister Chris Hipkins backed the genocidal onslaught, aimed at crushing a popular uprising by the Palestinian masses. On the day of the election, thousands of people rallied in Auckland to protest against the siege of Gaza.

Chris Hipkins after conceding defeat in the New Zealand election on Saturday, October 14, 2023 [AP Photo/Mark Tantrum]

In his concession speech on Saturday night, Hipkins was incapable of giving any explanation for the party’s historic collapse, saying lamely: “When the tide comes in big, it goes out big.”

He stated that “no government has replaced a prime minister in an election year and carried on to win.” In fact, Labour was on track to lose well before the resignation of Jacinda Ardern as prime minister in January.

Hipkins touted the fact that New Zealand “recorded the lowest number of COVID deaths in the developed world,” without mentioning that this was due to an elimination policy that Labour scrapped at the end of 2021 on the orders of big business. Contrary to claims in the corporate media, the elimination policy was overwhelmingly supported and was the main reason Labour was re-elected in 2020. The government’s support fell sharply in 2022 as COVID-19 spread unimpeded, infecting millions of people, with the trade unions enforcing the unsafe reopening of all workplaces and schools.

More than 3,400 people have died from the coronavirus, and tens of thousands have been hospitalised. Many are living with debilitating Long COVID which can impact every organ in the body. During the election campaign the corporate media and the parliamentary parties conspired not to discuss the public health disaster caused by the government’s criminal policy of mass infection, even after Hipkins himself was infected for the second time.

Hipkins sought to portray the Labour government as a champion for “working people,” claiming that Labour had “raised 77,000 kids out of poverty” and “built 13,000 new public homes.”

Official figures show that as of 2022, 16.3 percent of children were living in poverty, defined as households making less than half the median income after housing costs. While this is lower than 22.8 percent recorded in 2018, it does not take into account soaring living costs over the last year, which have eclipsed median incomes and led to unprecedented demand for food parcels.

The housing crisis has, in fact, worsened under Labour. House prices and rents have increased dramatically, pushing thousands of families into homelessness and emergency housing. The waiting list for public housing has increased fivefold from 5,000 to 25,000 since 2017. Ardern’s 2017 pledge to build 100,000 “affordable” homes was a sham: the Kiwibuild scheme has produced just 1,854 homes to date, which are being sold at unaffordable market rates.

Hipkins declared that Labour in opposition would “fight for those who stand to lose from [the new government’s] proposed cuts.”

This is another fraud. Austerity measures are already well underway and the Labour Party promised to slash 2 to 4 percent from government agencies’ budgets if re-elected. Hundreds of jobs are being lost in universities across the country and there is a staffing crisis in hospitals and schools, caused by successive budgets starving these essential services of funds.

Labour’s biggest losses were in working class areas, which have been worst affected by the social crisis, driven by low voter enrolment and turnout. In Māngere, South Auckland, the party got 24,167 votes in 2020 and just 12,077 in 2023; in nearby Manurewa, Labour’s vote more than halved from 22,137 to 10,409; in Mana, north of Wellington, it collapsed from 25,271 to 13,718. Many other examples could be given.

A significant factor in the election outcome is the alienation of young workers from the entire parliamentary set-up. As of September 30, only 66 percent of people aged 18 to 24 were enrolled to vote, compared with 90.5 percent for the overall adult population. In some working class electorates, less than half of young people were enrolled.

A number of Labour’s “stronghold” electorates have been lost or are under threat. Labour’s foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta lost her seat in the Māori electorate of Hauraki-Waikato to Te Pāti Māori’s 21-year-old candidate Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke. In Mount Albert, the electorate held by Ardern until she resigned, the National Party’s Melissa Lee is just 106 votes behind Labour MP Helen White. In the capital, Wellington, Green Party candidates won two seats previously held by Labour.

The Green Party increased its support nationwide from 7.9 in 2020 to 10.8 percent, while Te Pāti Māori (TPM) went from 1.2 to 2.6 percent. Both made gains at Labour’s expense after campaigning for modest taxes on wealth and increased welfare benefits, among other limited reforms, none of which would ever be agreed to by Labour. The Greens have been part of the Labour-led government for the past six years and are complicit in all its right-wing policies, while TPM was part of the National Party government from 2008-2019.

Some of Labour’s supporters—including The Daily Blog’s Martyn Bradbury—have already begun to slander the population as “racist” and reactionary for failing to return the party to power. Such claims cover up the fact that Labour and the Greens formed a coalition government with the overtly racist and anti-immigrant NZ First from 2017 to 2020, with the support of the pseudo-left groups and The Daily Blog. Several predominantly immigrant areas of Auckland voted against Labour, undoubtedly based on its record of promoting anti-immigrant chauvinism.

The election result, despite superficial appearances, points to increasing class polarisation and a movement to the left, particularly among young people. In the absence of a genuine socialist party, this is mainly expressed in the low voter turnout, with the political vacuum filled by deeply unpopular right-wing parties.

As it gives Israel green light for genocide, US prepares war against Iran

Andre Damon

This image shows two US aircraft carrier strike groups on patrol in the South China Sea in 2020. [AP Photo]

Amid a genocide against the people of Gaza by the Israeli military, the United States is threatening to unleash a war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.

Over the weekend, bombs continued to rain down on Gaza, killing hundreds of people each day. A population of two million is being systematically killed through starvation and thirst, while one million people in Northern Gaza are being forced on a death march in advance of an imminent ground invasion.

This genocide has the full support of the Biden administration, which has given Israel a blank check to carry out war crimes. Operationally, Israel’s actions are being overseen by the United States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Israel last week, and Blinken is scheduled to return this week.

Israel’s war on Gaza has been accompanied by a massive expansion of the US military presence in the region, led by the deployment of two aircraft carriers and their associated battle groups. The dispatch of an armada of over a dozen warships to the Middle East is not simply to threaten Hamas, which has no navy. The United States is preparing for a much broader conflict in the Middle East, including war with Iran.

The US is using the present crisis to put into effect long-standing plans for a war with Iran, as the Middle Eastern front of the US war with Russia and war plans against China. On Saturday, Austin announced that the US would double its military assets deployed in the Middle East, sending a second carrier strike group, led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the region.

Austin said the strike group “includes the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and Carrier Air Wing 3, with nine aircraft squadrons.” The Eisenhower will join the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which has already been deployed to the region. Austin noted, “The Ford CSG includes the USS Normandy, USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt.” Earlier in the week, the US Air Force announced deployment to the region of squadrons of F-15, F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft.

Each nuclear-powered carrier strike group has a total personnel of up to 8,000 sailors, airmen, and Marines, meaning that over 15,000 troops have been deployed to the Middle East in the span of just over one week, alongside dozens of other aircraft and thousands of support personnel.

These plans could not have been put into practice at the drop of a hat. There are indications that the Netanyahu government and US intelligence agencies had some degree of advanced knowledge of an attack from Hamas, though it was shocked by the scale of the rebellion. In any case, the Israeli regime has planned for an all-out war against the Palestinians, in part to deflect from its escalating internal social and political crisis.

The United States, for its part, has used the crisis to put into effect its own plans for an escalation against Iran.

US officials have made clear that the aircraft carriers are targeting Iran. On Friday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “There is a risk of an escalation of this conflict, the opening of a second front in the north, and, of course, of Iran’s involvement… It’s why the president moved so rapidly and decisively to get an aircraft carrier into the Eastern Mediterranean, to get aircraft into the Gulf, because he wants to send a very clear message of deterrence.”

In an editorial Sunday night, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The Ayatollahs in Tehran need to understand that more than their terrorist proxies are at risk. They need to know that their nuclear sites and oil fields are also on the target list.” Echoing these points, Senator Lindsay Graham raised the prospect of a declaration of war against Iran, which he said he had discussed with the White House.

“I’ll introduce a resolution in the United States Senate to allow military action by the United States, in conjunction with Israel, to knock Iran out of the oil business,” he said. “Iran, if you escalate this war, we’re coming for you.”

In an interview on 60 Minutes, Biden seemed to imply support for opening a second front in the war and attacking Lebanon’s Hezbollah political party. “Going in and taking out the extremists, Hezbollah is up north but Hamas down South is a necessary requirement,” Biden said, adding, “Iran constantly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.”

In this context, there is the possibility that the US will stage some sort of provocation to justify a war against Iran. Significantly, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said he would not rule out deploying US troops into combat in the present crisis, ostensibly to save hostages held by Hamas. The deployment of US troops on the ground would not be about saving hostages, whose lives are of no significance to American imperialism, but at directly involving the US military in a developing conflict with Iran. 

The United States has planned for a war against Iran for decades. In January 2002, following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, then President George W. Bush called Iran part of an “axis of evil” that included Iraq, which the United States invaded and occupied the next year. Inside the White House, Bush administration officials were fond of the saying, “Boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran.”

The US conflict with Iran was massively intensified under the Trump administration. Following the 2018 US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Iran shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz in June 2019. That month, then President Donald Trump ordered a series of airstrikes on Iranian targets, which he called off at the last minute, while the planes were already in the air.

In January 2020, the US murdered Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a major figure in the Iranian military establishment.

The development of a full-scale war in the Middle East is a continuation of the same policies that have led to the protracted and escalating US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. The US instigated the conflict with the aim of militarily defeating Russia and orchestrating a regime change operation. The war against Russia is seen as preparatory to a military conflict with China.

The free rein given to Israel to commit mass murder against the population of Gaza, and the intensifying US war plans against Iran, must be seen in the context of the eruption of what is, in effect, the initial stages of a third world war.

The war plans of US imperialism are being disrupted by a growing movement of the working class, which is intersecting with a global movement against imperialist war. Over the weekend, millions of people marched in the Middle East, Europe and the United States in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Parroting Washington, Chile’s President Boric denounces Palestinian uprising as “terrorist”

Mauricio Saavedra

Mass demonstrations have erupted across the Middle East and internationally in support of the latest Palestinian uprising against Israel’s criminal apartheid system and against the fascistic Netanyahu regime’s campaign of collective punishment in the Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air concentration camp.

Gabriel Boric and Joe Biden at Summit of the Americas, June 2022. [Photo: Fernando Ramirez]

Continuing demonstrations are also taking place across Europe and North and South America, demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, it’s herding millions into ghettos without access to water, electricity, food, medications and to the outside world, and it’s indiscriminate killing of defenseless people in a seven-decade war of attrition. This is despite the governments of the major imperialist powers moving to criminalize these protests, while turning a blind eye to Israel’s flagrant crimes against humanity. 

Standing reality on its head, the US, Germany, France, Italy and the UK issued a joint communiqué on October 9 expressing their “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel, and our unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism.”

This banding together of imperialists behind their militarized bulwark in the Middle East is par for the course. All of them have centuries of accumulated experience in subjugating colonial and semi-colonial nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America—each power having individually committed unspeakable atrocities, laying waste to whole societies and ending the lives of millions.

But what accounts for the Chilean government shamelessly regurgitating the imperialists’ slander of the Palestinian struggle as terrorist and their subsequent silence before Israel’s razing of schools, hospitals and residential apartments, its targeted murder of journalists and paramedics and the dispatching of the IDF into Gaza? Its hostile position is all the more significant since Chile is home to half a million Palestinians, the largest concentration outside of the Middle East.

On October 8, the government of Chile expressed “its absolute condemnation of the attacks that occurred today against a number of towns and cities in Israel,” referring to the actions of the Palestinians as “violent terrorist attacks.” 

Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren added that “the use of force against civilians is never acceptable in armed conflict, even in the exercise of self-defense. We call on all parties involved in acts of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories to respect that basic principle.”

On October 10, Chilean President Gabriel Boric went further, equating the actions of Hamas with the repressive apparatus of the Israeli state:

Our solidarity is and will always be with the victims of violence, without distinction. … We condemn without qualification the brutal attacks, murders and kidnappings by Hamas. Nothing can justify them or relativize their most energetic rejection. We also condemn the indiscriminate attacks against civilians carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory for decades in violation of international law. … From Chile we will urge firmly in all spaces for peace, recognizing the right to exist of both States, Israel and Palestine, and of the peoples who inhabit it to have a dignified and safe life.

He was followed by others from his ruling alliance that includes the Stalinist Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and his own Broad Front, the most noteworthy being the comments of Communist legislator Carmen Hertz.

According to Hertz, “adherence to the Palestinian cause, to its justice and desires, does not prevent us from condemning categorically, without ambiguity, without any relativization whatsoever, the massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians by the Hamas group.” That the accusations of rape, the beheading of infants, caging of children and other libels against the Palestinians have proven to be IDF propaganda did not compel Hertz to set right her self-righteous rebuke. 

On October 12, the pseudo-left government also prohibited a March for Peace in Santiago called by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, forcing the humanitarian organization to demand that its “right to free expression and our commitment to non-violence” be respected and urging “the national and international community to be attentive to this situation and to support our demand for fair and equitable treatment and our legitimate right to free expression in Chile.”

The reasons for the pseudo-left government’s position are twofold. Firstly, whereas some states in Latin America are attempting to straddle between the imperialist powers and the Chinese and Russian-dominated BRICS amid the ever-deepening fissures within the US-dominated world capitalist order, the Boric government has openly tied itself to the strategic foreign policy objectives of the Biden Administration. 

Since coming to power in March 2022, Boric has been on key with the US State Department talking points, railing against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba for not meeting up to Washington’s “democratic” standards while aligning with the imperialist war drive against Russia, to the point of inviting President Volodymyr Zelensky to address the Chilean Congress on the virtues of Ukraine’s Nazi-infested “democracy.” 

Less publicized is the country’s deepening ties with the Pentagon. For a decade US Southern Command has held annual joint exercises in Chile and across the region with all the branches of the Chilean Armed Forces. This past April, the Army carried out the Fused Response war games to deal with “regional security challenges,” followed by joint Air Force special operations exercises held in August, and most recently joint Naval operations in late September.

US Army Gen. Laura J. Richardson, SOUTHCOM commander since 2021, has taken the lead in pushing Washington’s pivot to Latin America and has made it her mission to arrest Chinese strategic influence in American imperialism’s “own backyard” by any means, while at the same time preparing the region’s militaries to deal with the ongoing insecurity and instability caused by obscene levels of poverty and social inequality. 

She elaborated, if somewhat unintelligibly, on this diplomatic, propaganda, economic and military strategy at a meeting held last Wednesday by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank “focused on national security and foreign policy.” 

“I’ve been working, you know, really hard to, you know, not just pressurize our abilities and—from the military perspective, you know, and military equipment and helping their militaries and their public security forces. Number one, that’s, you know, how we build a strong deterrence, is through the strength of all of us together.” Earlier in April she explained that in SOUTHCOM’s exercises, “the goal is to work together to strengthen us and also to increase interoperability. It’s very important that we communicate, that we work so closely that we can finish each other’s sentences. That’s how close we want to understand each other.”

Seventy-five years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the Pentagon initiated similar joint operations for similar reasons. Imperialist counter-insurgency operations against the Algerian, Vietnamese and other independence struggles became the basis for training Latin America’s rabidly anti-communist officer corp and its future dictators at Fort Benning and in Panama in the doctrines of National Security. 

By 1973, that is 50 years ago, more than half the Chilean military officers had been through US training when it overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende and unleashed counterrevolutionary terror against a working class betrayed by its own leaders in the Popular Unity Alliance brought to power three years earlier.

The second reason is intimately linked to the first. Increasingly, the government of Gabriel Boric is responding to legitimate social and democratic demands of the population with the same authoritarian and police-state measures that have made Israel infamous and which governments internationally are turning towards.  

As the WSWS has noted, Boric is preparing the “legal” justifications for repression in anticipation of a revolutionary eruption over fundamental and unresolved questions such as the right to housing and land tenure by sponsoring a bill that criminalizes school and workplace occupations as well as all forms of land seizures, including by the homeless.

The bill, which not only imposes hefty jail terms, but grants property owners the right to use lethal force in defense of private property, particularly targets the indigenous Mapuche communities, the most marginalized population in Chile since the genocidal dispossession of the Pacification Wars of the late 19th century. 

Mapuche communities, which for decades have sought to reclaim ancestral lands in southern Chile, daily suffer persecution and intimidation, mass indiscriminate arrests and deaths while in custody at the hands of Chile’s murderous Carabineros police and military. 

The virtually permanent presence of the state apparatus in indigenous communities, deployed by Boric in May 2022, is just the sharpest expression of what the Chilean ruling class has in store for the whole working class. Along with the anti-usurpation law, Boric is also proposing to revamp anti-terror laws routinely applied by the military dictatorship, as well as a plethora of other anti-democratic and police state measures.

None of this would be possible without the duplicitous role of the so-called “lefts” like long-time Stalinist operative Carmen Hertz. Most if not all the reactionary and anti-working class legislation has had their backing. 

Hertz, 78, made her name as a human rights lawyer during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet after her partner, Carlos Berger, was killed in 1973 by the Caravan of Death, a death squad created by Pinochet to summarily execute his regime’s left-wing opponents in the provinces. Berger was one of hundreds who were “disappeared” not once, but twice, first buried in a clandestine grave, only to be later exhumed and have his remains thrown into the Pacific.

Today, the pseudo-left cynically capitalizes on this horrific past to further integrate themselves into the capitalist state and play an indispensable part in safeguarding bourgeois rule. 

The government’s eagerness to accommodate deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic political forces cannot be overstated. The pseudo-left and the Stalinists are both part of “team capitalism” but perform different functions according to a political division of labor. The Stalinists posture as the guardians of “human rights” and regularly attack imperialism and the putschist right. But when capitalism is threatened, they line up behind it. 

Therein lie the reasons for the Boric administration’s defense of Israel’s latest war crimes.

Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza

Alex Lantier

A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.

The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.

As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies becomes clear, protests are erupting around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.

The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.

Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure which will only continue to grow.

Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.

A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.

Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over 1 million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.

Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades, as well as the Israeli regime. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, it has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.

In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising:

(There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …

There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.

All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.

Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”

What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave or targeted assassinations of its residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters summed up their policy to the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”

In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion:

We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time. 

We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.

And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.

In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.

While the deaths of Israeli civilians were undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?

History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.

In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s that cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.

In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.

Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.

The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.

For nearly two years, they have waged a war on Russia in Ukraine in alliance with neo-fascists like the Azov Battalion, who hail the memory of the Nazi collaborationist and antisemite Stepan Bandera. NATO attempts to deny this fact or dismiss it as Russian propaganda have fallen apart. Last month, the entire Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to the 98-year-old Ukrainian Nazi war criminal and former Waffen SS member Yaroslav Hunka.