License to kill: US police killed over 1,200 people in 2023

Jacob Crosse

Nearly a decade after popular protests broke in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, MappingPoliceViolence.us (MPV) has found that police killed at least 1,213 people this year in the US, slightly more than the 1,202 deaths tabulated by MPV in 2022.

According to MPV, citing data from police use of force collection programs, the Gun Violence Archive, the Fatal Encounters database, and public news reports, police in the United States killed more people in 2023 than any other year in the last decade.

Anti-police violence protesters gather in Times Square on Saturday, January 28, 2023, in New York, following the release of footage the day before showing the vicious beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police [AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura]

There is no doubt the number of deaths recorded by MPV will rise before the end of the year; on average, police in the land of inequality kill just over three people a day. According to MPV, there have been only 18 days in the US this year where police did not kill someone, while there were at least 71 days where police killed five or more people in 24 hours. There were several days this year, such as July 3 and August 25 where police killed 9 people in single day.

Since MPV began tracking police violence in 2013, there has not been a single year in which cops have not claimed the lives of at least 1,039 individuals, overwhelmingly working class and poor. It total, since 2013, MPV has recorded 12,318 police killings in the US, over 5,000 more deaths than all US military personnel killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other “war on terror” battlefields from October 2001 through October 2019, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University.

The killing of over 12,000 people by the police in the last decade is in indication of the deep fear that has gripped the ruling class. Unable to justify their parasitic existence and sociopathic policies—including the “let it rip” approach to COVID-19, which has killed over 700,000 Americans since Biden took office, and the transfer of billions of dollars in war materiel to neo-Nazis in Ukraine and genocidal Zionists in Israel—and amid a growing upsurge in working class opposition, the ruling class is increasingly turning to wanton police violence in an effort to maintain their grip on power.

In an attempt to obscure the class character and widespread brutality of police violence, which is directed against workers and youth of all backgrounds, local police agencies and the federal government refuse to keep accurate, publicly-available information on the number of the deaths their agents cause every year, leaving it up to independent researchers and media agencies to try and piece together the grim toll.

The figures tabulated by MPV are similar to those gathered in a separate database maintained by the Washington Post. Unlike MPV, the Post only keeps track of how many people were shot and killed by police, leaving out deaths caused by police tasers, fists, batons, ‘less lethal’ ammunition, car chases and other causes.

Even with this limitation, the Post found police gunned down at least 1,089 people 2023, only seven less than the 1,096 recorded by the Post last year, which was the “highest number of people on record” according to the paper.

While police violence is overwhelmingly presented in the mainstream press as a racial question, data from MPV shows that the most killings per capita so far this year were in the states of New Mexico, Alaska, Idaho, Colorado and West Virginia, none of which have a black population above 6 percent. In these states most of the victims were white or Hispanic.

While black people continued to be killed by police at a disproportionate rate compared to their actual share of the population, with racism likely playing a factor in many cases, MPV data, shows that overall, 441 victims of police violence in 2023 have been identified as white, the most out of any racial group, with 62 more deaths than recorded by MPV last year. At the same time at least 261 black people were killed by police this year, 9 less than MPV recorded last year.

While police killings are generally swept under the rug by the media, with local news reports typically reproducing police statements verbatim and uncritically, the World Socialist Web Site reported on dozens of killings this year. These are just a few of the more high profile cases:

• On January 7, Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old black man was savagely beaten to death by five black officers from the Memphis Police Department. Nichols’ killing refutes the racialist narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and its identity politics allies who claim that police violence is an expression of “white supremacy,” which can be rectified with the hiring of more black cops and black police chiefs. All of the cops videotaped beating Nichols were members of the “Scorpion unit” an ultra-violent outfit created by Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis, a black woman, with funding provided by Democratic President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan earmarked for “community policing.”
  
• On January 18, 26-year-old environmental and anti-police violence activist, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known by friends and comrades as Tortuguita, was shot and killed by police while protesting the construction of the $90 million public tax payer funded Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known as “Cop City,” in the South Rivers forest in Georgia. Despite the presence of dozens of police from several different agencies, police claim no body camera footage exists of the shooting and killing of Terán. As is the case in over 98 percent of police killings, after a white wash investigation, prosecutors announced in October that no charges would be filed against any of the police involved in the murder of Tortuguita.
  
• On August 14, 27-year-old mechanic Eddie Irizarry was shot and killed by Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial during a traffic stop. Despite the fact that Irizarry did not have a gun, and never attacked police, a Pennsylvania judge dropped all charges against Dial shortly after they were filed claiming prosecutors did not present sufficient evidence.
  
• On March 1, 25-year-old Chase Allan, who was white, was shot and killed by Farmington, Utah, police during a traffic stop over his license plate. During the stop, Allan advanced Sovereign Citizen-esqe arguments to justify his non-compliance with police. Police shot and killed him after they claimed he was reaching for a gun he was legally allowed to own in Utah.
  

This snapshot of police killings occurring this year is a fraction of the enormous scale of state violence inflicted on workers and their families on a daily basis through what Friedrich Engels noted are the “special bodies of armed men” created and elevated by the capitalist system to defend the unearned privileges of the ruling class and maintain the inequality it creates.

The record number of police killings recorded in 2023 is a grim warning for the working class. Under conditions where millions of youth and workers have not only participated in strikes in the face of surging inflation and unbridled corporate profiteering, but also in mass protests against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, police in the US, with the full support of both major capitalist parties, continue to kill with virtual impunity.

This upcoming year, 2024, will be the tenth anniversary of the Ferguson protests and four years since the upsurge of mass anger sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Zelensky government submits draft law for the mobilization of another 500,000 men

Jason Melanovski

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his end-of-the-year news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023. [AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky]

The government of President Volodymyr Zelensky submitted a new mobilization draft law to parliament on Monday, December, 25 as it seeks to conscript up to 500,000 new troops to continue the NATO proxy war with Russia.

Details on the bill are being purposefully kept under wraps to avoid popular backlash. However, journalists from the news outlet Hromadske were able to download an explanatory description before the Ukrainian parliament’s website was shut down to public access. Among the proposed changes are:

• The conscription age is to be lowered from 27 to 25 years;
• The introduction of basic three-months-long military training for all Ukrainian citizens aged 18 to 25 in every educational establishment;
• The introduction of optional military service for persons aged under 25 who were not able to complete basic military training;
• Restrictions on Ukrainian citizens who evade registering with a military enlistment office and completing military service;
• Administrative service centres and employment and recruitment centres are to be involved in military recruitment.

The draft law also proposes to deliver military call-up notices via email and an online service for conscripts, persons liable for military service and reservists.

Among the controversial aspects of the bill are proposals to cancel the passports of Ukrainians living abroad who refuse to report for mobilization, thus threatening their legal status within the country they currently reside. Following the announcement of the proposal, Ukrainians across Europe were seen waiting in line at consular offices to renew their passports before the mobilization changes take effect. In Valencia, Spain, 550 people reportedly waited in line for hours to renew their passports and ensure their legal status for the upcoming year in Spain.

The Ukrainian parliament is set to review the new mobilization rules, followed by a vote that will likely take place as early as mid-January 2024. According to reports, members of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party have been told not to publicly discuss any details of the bill.

Zelensky first announced the proposal in his end of the year press conference on December 19, making headlines both in Ukraine and internationally. The half a million additional troops are to be mobilized at a cost of $13.3 billion. Zelensky claimed at the time that the proposal was made in response to a request from Armed Forces Commander General Valery Zaluzhnyi, with whom Zelensky has waged a very public political struggle over the direction of the war. Yet Zaluzhnyi promptly declared on December 26 that he and the army leadership had never submitted a request for a specific number of troops to be mobilized, directly contradicting the president and his justification for the mobilization bill.

The new mobilization bill is testimony to the state of extreme crisis of the war and the Ukrainian oligarchic regime as a whole. It also demonstrates that, amidst this crisis, the ruling class is prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions more, for the war against Russia. However, not only the funding of this mobilization effort but also its physical feasibility are in serious question. 

Given that Ukraine had a pre-war population of approximately 36 million, the proposed numbers represent a huge share of the working age population forced into NATO’s proxy war that has failed to achieve any of the stated objectives of the Ukrainian government or NATO. The percentage is even larger if one considers that millions have fled the country and many more live in territories not controlled by the Zelensky government.

BBC Ukraine reported in November that 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18-60 have left Ukraine for other countries in Europe since the start of the war. Zelensky’s former advisor Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of “refuseniks” who have gone AWOL (absent without official leave).

Out of the remaining population, hundreds of thousands have already been killed, with even Zelensky’s former advisor, Alexey Arestovich putting the number of estimated dead at a staggering 400,000. Given that there are an average of 3 wounded per 1 dead soldier, the number of those injured must now be well over 1 million. At least 80,000 people have become amputees.

Meanwhile, Zaluzhnyi himself acknowledged in November in the Economist that the war had reached a “stalemate”, drawing the ire of Zelensky who shortly thereafter cancelled the planned 2024 presidential elections. Confronting a severe shortage of men at the front throughout the past year, the Ukrainian military has resorted to kidnapping people off the streets, grabbing them at shopping malls and other public places, and forcibly drafting them into the army. 

Roman Kostenko, a Ukrainian parliament member and secretary of Ukraine’s parliamentary security committee recently told the news outlet Ukrinform, that “the words about an additional 450,000-500,000 mobilized have become a cold shower for everyone”. He added that the military must be replenished due to losses as the war “can... drag on for a long time.”

Zelensky and the Ukrainian ruling class as a whole are clearly aware that the a new round of mass mobilization would prove unpopular as the war drags on and the casualties continue to rise. In an embryonic but significant expression of growing anti-war sentiment, this fall saw the first nationwide protests by family members of soldiers, some of whom have been deployed at the front since the start of the war in February 2022 almost two years ago.

Zelensky has called the proposal “a very sensitive issue” and attempted to offload much of the responsibility onto parliament and the military with Zaluzhnyi as its leader and public face.

The fact that the bill was introduced on Christmas Day which Ukrainian Orthodox Christians were busy celebrating for the first time ever on December 25 was clearly an attempt to avoid popular uproar. Previously, Orthodox Christians in Ukraine celebrated Christmas on January 7th as in Russia, but the date was changed this year by the newly-formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine in cooperation with the right-wing government in a xenophobic and reactionary attempt to divide the Ukrainian working class along religious lines.

There are also fears within the government and ruling class that the law is too open an admission of the catastrophic state of the war. Statements by Oleksandr Musienko, the head of the Center of Military Law Studies NGO, indicate that sections of the Ukrainian ruling class view the new mobilization law as a sign of panic and desperation on the part of Zelensky.

“The aggressor (Russia) can rejoice to some extent,” Musienko told the New Voice of Ukraine radio this week. “I don’t understand why [this bill was introduced]. The situation in our state is not fatal or catastrophic. They monitor and interpret it as if panic has somehow leaked through to us, and our decision-making is influenced not by rational calculations but by a panicked reaction.”

“I get the feeling that someone consciously, intentionally, or unintentionally (through certain erroneous actions) aims to discredit the mobilization campaign in Ukraine, which is very, very dangerous.” 

The mobilization draft law was announced amidst a new round of provocative strikes by Ukraine in Crimea on Tuesday. Satellite images showed significant damage to the  Russian tank landing ship Novocherkassk, which Ukraine claims to have destroyed in a cruise missile attack. A part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the ship carries a crew of around 87 with capacity for 237 troops, according to the US military. 

While the Ukrainian military and press made much of the attack, the operation was timed in order to divert attention from the news that Ukrainian forces had lost the city of Marinka in the eastern Donetsk region — yet another territorial loss for Ukraine which even the New York Times was forced to report.

Turkey’s escalating clashes with Kurdish militias in Iraq, Syria threaten war

Barış Demir

On December 22-23, 12 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq were killed by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerillas amid the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) military operations targeting Kurdish forces.

Turkey has military bases and guardhouses in Iraq, which the Baghdad government has declared illegal. The raid came amid air strikes and assassinations by Turkish forces and the National Intelligence Organisation (MİT) targeting the PKK and its Syrian ally, People's Protection Units (YPG) militias in northern Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey have been on hunger strike since November 27 demanding improved conditions.

Turkish and U.S. soldiers conduct the joint patrol outside Manbij, November 1, 2018 [Photo: Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve/Spc. Arnada Jones]

Amid Israel's genocide in Gaza and US preparations for war in the Middle East targeting Iran, rising tensions point to the danger of another war in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish forces intensified air strikes after the raid. The US-backed “Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria” said civilian settlements and infrastructure were targeted.

Turkey's seven warplanes and 33 drones launched air strikes in the area on December 23, killing 8 people, leaving more than 2,000 residents without electricity and targeting hospitals. Thousands of people protested Turkey’s attacks at a funeral in Qamishli.

While Ankara denied targeting civilians, the Turkish Defence Ministry announced that it had destroyed “a total of 71 targets consisting of caves, bunkers, shelters, oil facilities and warehouses,” and “neutralized” 2,201 PKK-YPG members during the year, 81 of them in the last week.

The bloody war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish nationalist forces led by the PKK, now going on for almost 40 years, has been intertwined with the imperialist wars the US has waged in the Middle East over three decades.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government was a key supporter of the CIA-orchestrated regime-change war attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, which killed more than 500,000 people. Erdoğan's NATO-backed “peace process” with the PKK collapsed in 2015 when Washington turned the YPG into its main proxy force in Syria.

Ankara was terrified by the prospect of a US-backed Kurdish state emerging in Syria, fearing it could trigger a similar outcome in Turkey. The Turkish government has gone on the offensive against the PKK in Turkey and northern Iraq and the YPG in northern Syria.

Turkey has so far launched three major ground invasions in Kurdish-majority areas of northern Syria controlled by the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As a result, Ankara now controls an area of 8,835 square kilometres covering more than 1,000 settlements, including cities and towns such as Afrin, al-Bab, Azaz, Jarabulus, Jinderes, Rajo, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. The Syrian government has repeatedly demanded that Ankara end its illegal occupation in the country.

Turkey aims to prevent Kurdish nationalists from dominating its entire southern border with Syria and to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish state. Ankara has established an occupation regime in these areas, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the military invasions. The Erdoğan government has previously announced that it will continue ground operations until it has established a 30-kilometre-deep “safe zone” along the entire Syrian border.

At a UN General Assembly in 2019, Erdoğan announced his plan to resettle three million Syrian refugees, mostly Arabs, who had fled NATO’s regime-change war. He explained his plan, which amounted to an ethnic cleansing targeting Kurds, as follows:

Another important issue is the elimination of the PKK/YPG organization in the east of the Euphrates... Our efforts to create a safe zone are ongoing... Our intention is to create a peace corridor and settle 2 million Syrians here. Once this safe zone is declared, we can settle 1.5-2 million Syrian migrants here... If we can move the depth of this zone to the Deir-u-Zor to Raqqa line, we can increase the number of Syrians returning from other parts of Europe to 3 million.

The October attack on the Turkish National Police headquarters in Ankara, claimed by the PKK, was seen by the Erdoğan government as an opportunity to advance these plans. The Ankara attack was followed by intensified air strikes against Kurdish militias in Iraq and Syria.

Ankara considered turning its escalating military operations into a large-scale ground operation in Syria. However, such an operation was not given a green light by Iran and Russia, which back the Syrian government, and the United States, which supports the YPG. On October 5, the Pentagon announced that a Turkish armed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) had been shot down by US aircraft in Syria.

The Turkish ruling class feared that the US-backed Israeli genocidal war in Gaza could be extended to target Iran and threaten its own interests, so the Erdoğan government was forced to call for “restraint” and temporarily remove from its agenda a full-scale ground operation targeting Kurdish forces that would have increased tensions with Washington.

As the World Socialist Web Site recently stated, “The Turkish bourgeoisie fears that a victory in a Middle East war of Washington and Tel Aviv, both of whom back Kurdish-nationalist militias on Turkey’s borders in Iraq and Syria, could lead to the formation of a Kurdish state.”

In a statement following the deaths of 12 Turkish soldiers in Iraq on December 23, Erdoğan targeted the US, saying, “To eradicate terrorism at its source; we will continue to implement this strategy with determination until the last terrorist is eliminated. Turkey will not allow a terrorist entity in northern Iraq or Syria at any cost. We will never retreat from our fight against the hired gangs of killers who work as subcontractors for the imperialists.”

Erdoğan has repeatedly declared that he sees the US and other imperialist allies as complicit in Israel's genocide in Gaza. Yet the Erdoğan government maintains Turkey's critical trade with Israel and refuses to impose any sanctions.

The falsity of Erdoğan’s “anti-imperialism” epitomizes by the Turkish ruling class's close ties to imperialist powers and decades-long defence of its foreign policy interests through NATO. This hypocrisy is manifested in the support of both the government and the bourgeois opposition, including the Kurdish nationalists, for NATO's expansion against Russia, with which it is de facto at war. Despite rhetoric criticism and tensions, the Turkish parliament unanimously approved Finland's accession into NATO in last March.

On Tuesday, three days after Erdoğan's accusations of 'subcontracting to the imperialists' and in the midst of Israel's NATO-backed genocide in Gaza, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Turkish Parliament sent a proposal for Sweden's NATO membership to a vote in parliament.

Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), its fascist ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the main opposition, Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP), whose candidate the pseudo-left parties supported in the presidential elections in May, voted 'yes' to the proposal. The Kurdish nationalist People's Party for Equality and Democracy (DEM) showed once again that it is not opposed to NATO enlargement by not participating in the vote, as it did in the vote on Finland.

The Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie are unable to bring a peaceful and democratic solution to the Kurdish question, which is intertwined with the imperialist war in the Middle East, in which they have been complicit for decades. The democratic aspirations of the oppressed Kurdish people, like those of the Palestinians, cannot be met by the imperialist powers and their reactionary regional proxies, who are primarily responsible for the carnage in the Middle East.

Israel guns for war with Lebanon and Iran

Thomas Scripps

Another 210 Palestinians were killed and 360 injured by Israeli forces in Gaza in the 24 hours to Thursday 3pm, according to the Gazan health ministry. More than 21,300 people have now been reported killed in the assault, and over 55,600 injured, with roughly 7,000 more missing, likely buried under rubble.

The United Nations reports that 85 percent of the population of the enclave has been displaced, and 40 percent face famine. UN shelters are at over four times capacity.

Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, December 26, 2023 [AP Photo/Leo Correa]

While the genocide in Gaza continues, Israel and its allies are looking to expand the scope of the war. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared earlier this week, “We are in a multi-front war. We are being attacked from seven fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], Iraq, Yemen and Iran.”

He added Thursday, “This is the end of the era of limited conflicts,” continuing, “We operated for years under the assumption that limited conflicts could be managed, but that is a phenomenon that is disappearing. Today, there is a noticeable phenomenon of the convergence of the arenas.”

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes comments along the lines of Monday’s, “We are not stopping. The war will continue until the end, until we finish it, no less,” it is the wider Middle East more than the already ruined Gaza Strip he is referring to.

The West Bank is one focal point of an already expanded conflict, with Israel tightening its military dictatorship over the occupied Palestinian territories. On Wednesday night, Israel carried out its most intense raids of the war to date in the region, sending large numbers of troops and vehicles into ten cities, killing at least one person and injuring 15 others, while at least two dozen were detained, and seizing $2.5 million from money exchanges.

Over 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or settlers since October 7, and over 4,700 arrested—among them journalists and politicians.

Middle East Journalist Mouin Rabbani told Al Jazeera, “They are out to deliberately provoke the Palestinians to seek to create as much conflict as possible,” adding that this was part of a plan “to permanently consolidate” Israeli control of the West Bank.

The UN released a 22-page flash report Thursday on “The human rights situation in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem” up to November 20.

The paper lists: “Increase in the use of unnecessary or disproportionate force by Israeli security forces (ISF), resulting in unlawful killings”; “Mass arbitrary arrests, detentions and reported torture and other ill-treatment by ISF, raising concerns of collective punishment”; “Exponential increased in attacks by armed settlers leading to displacement of Palestinian herding communities”; and “Ongoing discriminatory movement restrictions affecting daily life and choking the local economy.”

A line from the summary reads, “Palestinians live in constant terror of the discriminatory use of State force and settler violence against them and, while the situation is already dire, all indications are that it may further deteriorate.”

Conforming the threat of a wider war, to the north a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon is on a hair trigger. Israel’s forces are in a “state of very high readiness” and escalating strikes on Lebanon’s southern territory, in a trade of fire with Hezbollah forces.

More than 150 people have been killed on the Lebanese side of the border since October 7, including over a dozen civilians, three of them journalists. Three more, one a Hezbollah member, were killed Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike on Bint Jbeil. Nine soldiers and four civilians have been killed in Israel by return fire.

Al Jazeera journalist Ali Hashem, reporting from Bint Jbeil, explained, “Israeli warplanes are currently targeting towns that are even very far from the border. The fact is that this area is now becoming a complete warzone, it’s becoming very dangerous, very risky, to go around, with the fact that you’re always anticipating an Israeli drone.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen used a visit to the Lebanese border to threaten Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Cohen said “must understand that he’s next. If he doesn’t want to be next in line he should immediately implement the U.N. Security Council’s resolution (1701) and keep Hezbollah away from the north of Litani.

“We will work to exhaust the political option, and if it does not work, all options are on the table in order to ensure the security of the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu’s spokesperson Eylon Levy added the same day, “We are now at a fork in the road. Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with U.N. Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves.”

War cabinet triumvirate member Benny Gantz was most explicit, saying Wednesday, “The situation in the northern border necessitates change. The time for a diplomatic solution is running out. If the world and the government of Lebanon don’t act to stop the fire toward northern communities and to push Hezbollah away from the border, the IDF will do that.”

The ultimate target is Iran, in service to the broader imperialist war aims of Israel’s US patron. Referring to the seven theatres in which the IDF is waging its war, Gallant declared, “Iran is the driving force in the convergence of the arenas. It transfers resources, ideology, knowledge and training to its proxies.”

Israel drastically escalated this confrontation on Monday by assassinating Iran’s Brigadier-General Seyed Razi Mousavi, a senior commander of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in Syria. Omar Rahman, fellow at the Middle East Council of Global Affairs, told Voice of America, “Israel’s decision to assassinate a high-ranking member of the Iranian military in Damascus is a huge provocation.

“Iran has stayed out of direct involvement so far, but if its commanders are being targeted, it will have trouble continuing along a path of restraint.”

Senior Iranian officials, including President Ebrahim Raisi, have pledged to retaliate. It is only one week until the fourth anniversary of America’s assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, considered second only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, which Iran has repeatedly threatened to avenge.

Any retaliation would serve as a pretext for Israel, whose government is seeking a war it otherwise could not seriously contemplate because it has been assured in advance of US support.

Washington has deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the thousands of soldiers it already has stationed across the Middle East. Since October 7, US forces have carried out multiple strikes in Syria and Iraq against Iran-aligned militias, most recently Kataib Hezbollah, following a drone attack on America’s Erbil Air Base. US Central Command commented that the strike “destroyed the targeted facilities and likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants.”

The government in Baghdad condemned the “hostile act” and violation of its sovereignty.

US and allied forces are also heavily engaged in the Red Sea, where Iran-aligned Houthi rebels have launched attacks on shipping in retaliation for the genocide in Gaza. Washington is attempting to form a coalition navy to police the waters and considering strikes on Houthi bases in Yemen, with Iran placed squarely in the crosshairs.

“We know that Iran was deeply involved in planning the operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea,” US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said last Friday.

Fire at Indonesian nickel smelter leaves 19 dead

Ben McGrath

A fire at a nickel smelting plant in Indonesia on Sunday killed at least 19 workers while leaving as many as 40 others injured. Industrial accidents in this sector are common, with the disaster shining a light on the brutal and unsafe working conditions in the nickel processing industry and throughout Indonesia as a whole.

The fire killed 11 Indonesian workers and eight from other countries. It took place at a plant owned by Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel (ITSS), which is a subsidiary of Tsingshan Holding Group, based in China. ITSS is located in the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) on Sulawesi Island. IMIP is jointly owned by Tsingshan and Indonesia’s Bintang Delapan Group.

The accident occurred at about 5:30 a.m. while workers were conducting repairs on a furnace, according to a preliminary investigation. Dedy Kurniawan, a spokesman for the industrial complex, initially stated that a flammable liquid had ignited, causing nearby oxygen tanks to explode. He later changed his statement and claimed no oxygen tanks were on the site and no explosion had taken place.

Dedy stated that after a furnace had been shut off, its “walls then collapsed and the remaining iron slag flowed out, causing a fire and resulting in some workers at the location suffering injuries and even fatalities.”

In response to this tragedy, around 300 workers rallied on Wednesday demanding improved safety conditions. Workers chanted slogans such as, “No production is worth a life.” Others expressed their anger to the media. Parlin Hidayat, the cousin of Muhammad Taufik, a 40-year-old worker who was killed, told Al Jazeera, “The family is grieving, he was the breadwinner,” leaving behind a wife and two children. “They hope there will be no more incidents like this in the future, let him be the last victim.”

Relatives weep during the funeral of Irfan Bukhari, one of the victims of the explosion of a smelting furnace at a Chinese-owned nickel plant on Indonesia's Sulawesi island [AP Photo/Yusuf Wahil]

Wednesday’s rally was organized by the Serikat Pekerja Indonesia Sejahtera (SPIS) trade union, which submitted 23 demands to management, including improving the maintenance of nickel smelters and better health clinics capable of dealing with emergencies. The union claimed that it would strike if its demands were not met within three days.

Katsaing, the regional head of the union, told Reuters, “Our main demand is for the companies to comply with the occupational health and safety law.” However, he previously told Wired magazine in an article published in February, “The health and safety regulations now are toothless.”

Dedy, the complex spokesman, dismissed the union’s demands. He stated the rally had “no impact on operations” throughout the industrial park and claimed that ITSS had supposedly already implemented the demands.

Workers should not place any faith in the safety regulations or in the companies or government to improve conditions. To claim that if only the company had supposedly followed the law, the explosion would not have happened only deflects workers’ anger away from the government and the capitalist system, which is the root cause of these disasters.

Accidents are common throughout the nickel industry and are the result of President Joko Widodo government’s drive to turn Indonesia into a major producer of the mineral for companies around the world. Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves, at an estimated 21 million tonnes. Between 2020 and 2022, nickel production doubled to 1.6 million tonnes, or more than 48 percent of the global output.

Nickel is used for products such as electric vehicle (EV) batteries and stainless steel, making Indonesia a major part of the supply chain in the production of EVs. Jakarta has also signed deals worth as much as $US15 billion with companies like South Korea’s Hyundai Motors and Taiwan-based Foxconn. The government is also actively trying to entice Tesla to invest in Indonesia in what will no doubt be a further race to the bottom when it comes to workers’ conditions.

Widodo therefore has no intention of addressing health and safety conditions, despite claims from Ministry of Manpower Deputy Minister Afriansyah Noor that Jakarta will strengthen work safety laws. Similarly, none of the three candidates running in February’s presidential election will address these issues.

Instead, the ruling class is seeking to sow divisions between Indonesian and Chinese workers to distract from the responsibility of the local and central governments and from the capitalist system as a whole. The media has focused on the fact that the nickel smelter at IMIP where Sunday’s fire occurred is Chinese-owned.

Yet Chinese workers are no less exploited than their Indonesian class brothers and sisters. Both sections of the working class face similar brutal conditions. The IMIP complex hosts 18 nickel processing companies, employing more than 70,000 workers. In April, two workers were killed at the complex when they were buried under nickel slag. This is not limited to IMIP. At a plant located further north on Sulawesi, another two workers were killed in January during protests over safety conditions and low pay at Gunbuster Nickel Industry.

Wired magazine wrote in February that workers at IMIP labor for up to 15 hours a day with no days off for as long as three months. They earn less than $US25 a day. Workers struggle to continuing working as health, safety, and environmental needs take a backseat to profit. One 18-year-old worker stated, “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. I’m concerned, but I can’t do anything.”

Trend Asia, a non-government organization based in Indonesia, reported in March that between 2015 and 2020, a total of 47 workers in the nickel industry were killed in accidents while 10 others committed suicide as a result of the conditions.

This is not limited to the nickel industry. Jakarta’s Ministry of Manpower reported in February in its “National Occupational Safety and Health Profile” that across the country, 6,552 workers had died in workplace accidents in 2021, nearly doubling the number of deaths from the previous year (3,410). Total accidents have also grown, with 234,370 in 2021, rising from 210,789 in 2019.

The rise in workplace safety accidents and deaths also corresponds to the refusal of capitalist governments around the world, including Jakarta, to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In what is undoubtedly a vast undercounting, there have been more than 6.8 million COVID cases and 161,921 deaths in Indonesia. Just as virus mitigation measures were torn up, so are workplace safety measures, all in the name of profit.

Homelessness soaring in Australia as corporate wealth surges

Mike Head

This Christmas‒New Year period in Australia is marked by growing numbers of working-class people experiencing financial stress, poverty and homelessness.

Homeless woman in Chatswood Mall, Sydney, June 2019 [Photo by Sardaka / CC BY-SA 4.0]

At the same time, the ruling class is celebrating a near-record bonanza on the share market and the top corporate CEOs are taking home huge increases in their annual remuneration packages.

This social divide is becoming increasingly explosive after more than 18 months of the Albanese Labor government, which scraped into office in May 2022, falsely promising “a better future.”

As in the United States and other “advanced” capitalist economies, ordinary people are suffering the greatest cut to their living standards since World War II as a result of soaring prices, rents and home mortgage repayments.

This month’s latest statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare indicate a sharp rise in homelessness. The proportion of rough sleepers seeking homeless services rose by 17 percent in 2023. The proportion of individuals who were already homeless when they sought help grew by 5.5 percent.

“These figures are a stark and alarming indicator of how the deepening housing crisis is pushing more Australians to sleep in their car, pitch a tent or couch surf,” Homelessness Australia CEO Kate Colvin said.

“The data also reveals that homelessness service capacity hardly increased in 2022‒23 despite surging demand, with the number of clients supported across the year increasing only 1.3 percent from 272,694 to 273,648.”

That was a fall of 16,814 from those assisted when funding to homelessness services was temporarily increased during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be slashed again by the federal, state and territory Labor governments now in office across Australia’s mainland.

Homelessness NSW (New South Wales) CEO Dom Rowe said: “Homelessness services are so stretched they are having to turn away one in two people who knock on their doors. And there are many more people who don’t ask for help at all.” Only 21 percent who needed long-term accommodation received it.

Charities are reporting massive rises in requests for help, many from households that have never sought it before.

• Anglicare Victoria reported a 50 percent increase in demand for its emergency relief services over the past year, with about 40 percent of clients asking for help paying the bills after exhausting all other options.

• St Vincent de Paul Victoria spent $2.6 million on its homelessness support in 2022‒23 compared with $1.6 million the year before, a 62.5 percent increase. The charity’s food insecurity support rose by 37.7 percent to $9.5 million, while cost-of-living support, which includes medical expenses, fuel, school supplies and utility bills, jumped by 51.2 percent to $6.5 million.

• Salvation Army Australia said nearly half of the people who reached out to it this year were new. The charity’s survey of 2,000 people, released this month, found 31 percent had used a credit card for Christmas shopping, up from 18 percent last year, while 15 percent had relied on buy now, pay later—double last year.

Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) Acting CEO Edwina MacDonald warned: “The skyrocketing cost of rent and energy has created a tsunami of financial distress that is pushing people on the lowest incomes to the absolute brink. Community services are at a breaking point, unable to keep up with the demand from people in desperate need of support.”

An ACOSS survey in September of people relying on sub-poverty-level unemployment benefits or other government income support reported that 73 percent were eating less or skipping meals, while 64 percent were cutting back on meat, fresh fruit, vegetables and other fresh items. In addition, 60 percent experienced difficulty affording the medicine or medical care they needed, 98 percent said the low rate of income support harmed their mental health and 93 percent said it harmed their physical health.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of a wider social crisis. This month’s National Accounts showed that real household disposable income—a measure of living standards—fell 5.6 percent over the year to September 30 and 8.3 percent over two years. That is the biggest drop in decades. Even so, it underestimates the impact on working-class people, who are being hit hardest by the cost of living.

For the wealthy elite, by contrast, the Australian share market set a new 100-day high on the first day of trade after the Christmas and Boxing Day break. Yesterday, it came close to a record high, following the lead of New York’s Wall Street.

Share prices are surging on expectations of interest rate cuts in 2024, making ultra-cheap money available again, combined with high iron ore and other commodity prices. Perversely, these price rises are being driven by the global economic dislocations and record military spending associated with the US war drives in Ukraine and the Middle East and against China.

The stock market bonanza is also based on booming profits extracted from the labour power of workers, whose real wages continue to fall, as they have for a decade.

Despite the Albanese government and the trade union bureaucrats claiming that “wages are moving again,” average weekly wage growth for the year to June 30 was only 3.9 percent. That was far below the inflation rate, which peaked at about twice that level, while total shareholder return for the Australian S&P/ASX 300 index increased by 14.4 percent.

Most of the benefit went to the most affluent layers of society, reflected in soaring rewards for the top company chief executives.

According to the Australian Financial Review, Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake remained Australia’s highest-paid chief executive for the third year in a row. Her reported pay in 2022‒23 was boosted by almost 30 percent, topping $30 million for the first time. She was eclipsed, however, by the Macquarie Group’s head of commodities and global markets Nick O’Kane, who received $57.6 million, after the investment bank reported a $5.18 billion yearly profit.

Victor Herrero, the chief of jewelry chain Lovisa, came second on the CEO list. He received $29.6 million in reported pay last financial year, despite an investor protest vote. Kogan.com founder Ruslan Kogan finished third, receiving $17.2 million in reported pay. Fourth was Greg Goodman of the property developer Goodman Group. He obtained $14.2 million in reported pay, plus an estimated $27.9 million in realised, or take-home pay, after taking into account the market values of shares he received.

The now departed CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, was only the fifth highest-paid CEO in 2022‒23 with reported annual pay of $11.9 million, although his actual payout, including shares and options, was $21.4 million.

As elsewhere around the world, this expanding social gulf is the result of deliberate policies imposed by the ruling capitalist class through its political servants, such as the Albanese government. Backed by the Labor government, the Reserve Bank of Australia followed other central banks in repeatedly hiking interest rates, driving up unemployment levels to stifle workers’ demands for wage rises.

Above all, the Labor government has relied on the services of the union apparatuses to block or shut down stoppages by workers and inflict sub-inflation and employer-friendly industrial agreements.

Calls by ACOSS and the charities for urgently-needed increased funding for homelessness and other welfare services have fallen on deaf ears. ACOSS has repeatedly urged the Albanese government to boost income support, lower the cost of energy bills, and scrap the planned “Stage 3” income tax cuts that will give wealthy households the lion’s share of more than $350 billion over the next decade.

In this month’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), Treasurer Jim Chalmers again rejected calls for cost-of-living relief and reaffirmed the government’s intent to drive up the official unemployment rate to 4.5 percent by mid-2024. That would throw another 150,000 people out of work, in order to keep downward pressure on wages.

The only major increased spending was for military operations. That was another sign of wider US-led war preparations, particularly against China. Workers and youth are being made to pay for the military spending via austerity measures, including deepening real cuts to health, disability, education and welfare programs, placing them on a collision course with the Labor government and the union bureaucrats.

India’s ruling far-right BJP secures narrow overall state election win, as Congress Party suffers further debacle

Arun Kumar

India’s opposition Congress Party suffered a major debacle while the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has formed India’s national government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the past decade, secured a narrow overall victory in the five-state assembly elections whose results were announced earlier this month.

Held in states with a combined population of 230 million, the state elections were widely considered an important testing ground for the national election to be held in the spring of 2024.

The BJP, with the support of much of the corporate media, is pointing to its electoral triumph in the three northern Hindi-belt states that went to the polls in November and December to claim that the state elections showed strong popular support for Modi and his government.

President Joe Biden led Washington in feting India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited the US for a state visit last June. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

In reality, the BJP’s electoral support is not indicative of any widespread popular enthusiasm for its right-wing, pro-big business policies and incessant promotion of far-right Hindu supremacism. Among workers and the rural poor, there is growing anger over the government’s brutal attacks on their basic social and democratic rights, as it implements pro-investor economic “reforms” and slashes social spending to finance a rapid expansion of India’s military.

However, working people do not see the Congress Party and the other opposition parties—various regional parties and the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its Left Front allies—as a genuine alternative to the BJP. Congress, till recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, and its allies have all implemented “pro-investor” policies akin to those of the BJP when in national or state government.

Congress and the regional bourgeois parties also all support India’s ever-expanding anti-China “Global Strategic Partnership” with Washington. While Congress on occasion denounces Modi, his BJP and the RSS-led cabal of Hindu supremacist organizations with which they are closely allied for their most blatant communal outrages, it has increasingly adapted to and connived with the Hindu right.

Buoyed by their state election victories, Modi and his government moved aggressively in the just concluded 18-day-long “winter session” of parliament to ram though a series of repressive laws, violating at will traditional parliamentary norms. This includes a new Telecommunications Act, adopted just days after it was tabled in parliament and while more than 100 opposition parliamentarians had been temporarily expelled for “misbehaviour”. The new law, which has been termed “totalitarian” by some of its critics, gives the government sweeping powers to spy on electronic communications, including encrypted messages, censor online content and in the name of “national security” even take temporary control over the internet.  

In Madhya Pradesh, which with a population of 85 million was the largest of the states to go to the polls this fall, the BJP government that came to power three years ago after it succeeded in organizing defections from a minority Congress-led administration, was returned to power with an increased majority. With 48 percent of the vote to Congress’s 40 percent, the BJP won 163 of the 230 state assembly seats.

In two other Hindi-speaking states—Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh—the BJP wrested power from Congress Party-led governments. In Rajasthan, which with a population of 80 million is India’s seventh largest state, the BJP won just 2 percent more of the vote than Congress. However, due to the first-past-the-post electoral system, which generally disproportionately favors the most popular party, the BJP captured 115 seats to the Congress’s 69.

Only in the south Indian state of Telangana was the Congress able to win government. In a state in which the BJP is an also-ran, it defeated the regional Bharat Rashta Samiti (BRS), which had held power in Telangana since it became a separate state in 2014.

In the fifth state to go the polls, Mizoram, the Mizo National Front, till recently an ally of the BJP, fell from power. The Congress, meanwhile, saw its popular vote fall by 9 percentage points and won just 1 of the 40 assembly seats. Mizoram, which lies in India’s northeast and has a population of little more than one million, will now be governed by a recently-formed alliance of six tribal-based parties known as the Zoram People’s Movement.

A significant indication of growing opposition towards all bourgeois parties was the number of votes for NOTA (None of the Above), which is the bottom-most button on the electronic voting machine ballot. It was reported that NOTA polled more votes than the winning margin in 47 seats across four states, most of them in Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress Party dominated Indian politics during the first half-century after independence, and between 1991 and 2014 it did much of the heavy-lifting in dismantling the state-led capitalist development and “non-aligned” policies with which it had previously been associated and falsely touted as “Congress socialism.” This included spearheading the drive to fully integrate India into the imperialist-led world economy and making an Indo-US partnership the cornerstone of India’s foreign policy.

In 2004, after eight years in opposition, the Congress returned to power at the head of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on the basis of the fraudulent claim that it could intensify the implementation of pro-investor policies while providing increased social support to working people—what it called pursuing “reform with a “human face.” It was under the Congress-led UPA that New Delhi forged its “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism.

By the time the Congress was swept from power in 2014, its rule was synonymous with high prices and mass joblessness and corrupt ties to big business. Since then, India’s so-called Grand Old Party has suffered one electoral defeat after another. It has been eliminated as a major political force in large swaths of India, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, respectively the country’s largest, third largest and fifth most populous states.

In the 2019 national election, the Congress won its lowest ever share of the popular vote, 19.5 percent, and won just 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, less than the 10 percent required to be formally recognized as the official opposition.

With the outcome of the recent state elections, the Congress holds power outright in just three of India’s 28 states, Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh, and is a junior partner in coalition governments in three others.

The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and its Left Front allies—including the older but smaller Communist Party of India (CPI)—have similarly suffered a massive hemorrhaging in their electoral support and for like reasons. Since 1991, the Stalinists have supported a succession of right-wing governments at the Centre, most of them Congress-led, in the name of blocking the BJP from power. Indeed, the CPM was instrumental in stitching together the Congress Party-led UPA alliance. Moreover, in those states where they have held office, West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the Stalinists have implemented what they themselves have termed “pro-investor” policies.         

As a result, the supposedly “secular” and “progressive” Congress Party and the Indian “Left” have been discredited among the working class, rural toilers and lower middle class. It is the rotten record of these parties that has created the political opening for the BJP to exploit mass social anger and frustration with a combination of phony promises of development and reactionary communalist appeals.

India’s corporate media and big business have provided solid support to Modi and his BJP, which they view as their best bet to ruthlessly pursue their class war agenda at home and great-power aspirations internationally. And they have continued to do so throughout Modi’s second term, during which the BJP has been even more brazen in whipping up animosity against Muslims and other minorities and suppressing dissent, even from within the bourgeois establishment.

The Indian ruling class’s further turn to the right and towards autocratic and fascist forms of rule, as indicated by its lining up behind Modi and his BJP, is not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is part of a global trend, personified by Donald Trump in the US, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina and Rishi Sunak in the UK.

The BJP’s campaign for the state elections combined Hindu communalism, jingoistic Indian chauvinism and casteism, as well as bare bones populist schemes, often targeting the most desperate of the poor. The party made use of caste divisions for electoral gains, above all, in the selection of its election candidates.

In the wake of Congress’s debacle in the state elections, many of its partners in the newly formed anti-BJP electoral bloc, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance or I.N.D.I.A., roundly criticised the Congress leadership for its refusal to agree to seat sharing with other alliance members. The INDIA alliance is a political coalition of 28 opposition parties, formed last July, with the aim of ousting the BJP in the 2024 Indian general elections. The Stalinist CPM is part of the INDIA alliance and promotes it, just as it previously did Congress and the UPA, as a “secular” bulwark against the Hindu supremacist BJP. The Stalinists thus provide political life support for the highly discredited big business Congress.

The Congress and INDIA’s alliance “secular” credentials are a fraud. Among its key constituents are the Janata Dal (United), which for most of the past quarter-century has been a major BJP ally, and the fascistic, pro-Hindutva Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray).

As for the Congress, in many of the five states it ran an expressly Hindu chauvinist campaign. In Madhya Pradesh, former Chief Minister Kamal Nath, who led the Congress election campaign in the state, sought to outdo the BJP and the virulently communalist RSS by patronizing chauvinist Hindu priests. Recently he engineered the merger of the Bajrang Sena (a Hindu extremist outfit) with the Congress. In Chhattisgarh, Congress Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel implemented Hindu chauvinist programs, like building the Ram Van Gaman Path.

Congress has been so closely associated with Hindu chauvinism that even the Stalinists have had to admit it. In its statement on the state election results, the CPM lamented that the Congress Party was “pandering to Hindutva sentiments” during the election campaign, blaming Kamal Nath as “the chief practitioner of this soft Hindutva”.

These criticisms from the CPM are all the more cynical given that they are made of a party that it has been hailing for decades as a “progressive” alternative to the Hindu supremacist BJP. The Stalinist CPM continues to play an extremely reactionary role by subordinating the working class and the rural poor to the pro-big business, pro-imperialist and “soft” Hindutva Congress party and numerous regional right-wing parties under the guise of fighting the fascistic and communal BJP.