On Friday, the House of Representatives passed a bill by a vote of 273 to 147 to reauthorize and strengthen warrantless electronic spying by the US government in what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The two-year extension is expected to be passed by the Senate and then signed into law by President Joe Biden.
President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with Congressional leaders in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Washington. From left, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of La., Vice President Kamala Harris, and Biden. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
The surveillance powers in Section 702, which were set to expire on April 19 if not renewed, are a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures. They permit intelligence agencies to gather electronic communications of US citizens and non-citizens without a warrant by tapping directly into the systems of telecommunications and internet providers, such as AT&T, Verizon, Google and many others.
The bipartisan vote—147 Democrats joined with 126 Republicans to pass the bill—demonstrated once again that the US political establishment supports the unimpeded access of the spy agencies, i.e., NSA, CIA and FBI, to electronic communications and claims that blanket surveillance is a critical national security matter that overrides Fourth Amendment rights.
According to the official language of the FISA rules, the US intelligence agencies are authorized to collect email, text and phone call data and monitor the communications of foreign citizens outside of the US without the need for a court-approved warrant. However, this activity also necessarily gathers the same information of US citizens communicating with the foreign “targets.” The intelligence agencies claim the surveillance is needed to fight human trafficking, cybercrimes, drug smuggling and terrorist plots.
The fraud behind these arguments and violation of basic democratic rights has been exposed repeatedly since the illegal spying operation was first established by the George W. Bush administration post-9/11.
After the Section 702 rules were established in 2008, a supposed reform of the surveillance which legalized the operations, the US government’s own internal oversight and monitoring of these powers has shown that the communications of everyone are being illegally collected and searched at will regardless of citizenship.
In May of last year, for example, unsealed court records showed that the FBI violated the rules of Section 702 at least 278,000 times. The documents showed the FISA database was used in domestic law enforcement investigations into the January 6, 2021 US Capitol attack, the mass George Floyd protests in the spring and summer of 2020 and 19,000 financial contributions to a congressional candidate.
During the political maneuvering on the House floor before the reauthorization bill was finalized and passed, a series of extraordinary but unsurprising events took place. President Biden reportedly made phone calls to individual congress-people to flip their votes and defeat an amendment requiring the government to get a warrant before searching the communications of US citizens.
The Democrat Biden was successful in blocking the amendment by joining with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson—who claims the president was not legitimately elected and is working directly with Donald Trump to disrupt the vote in the 2024 elections—who cast the deciding vote for a 212-212 tie. In the House, a tie equals a defeat.
On Thursday evening, the White House issued a statement that said it “strongly opposes” the warrant amendment because it would “rebuild a wall around, and thus block our access to, already lawfully collected information in the possession of the US Government.” In other words, since the data has already been gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution should not be allowed to block the intelligence and law enforcement agencies from using it as they see fit.
In the leadup to the passage of the bill, Trump had mobilized his fascist supporters in the House in a campaign to “KILL FISA,” saying it was used to spy on his campaign for president in 2016. Days before the bill was passed, it went down to defeat, which forced a number of adjustments, including the reduction of the duration of the authorization from five to two years.
Other modifications to the bill, which increase the surveillance powers, permit intelligence gathering on foreign narcotics trafficking organizations and vetting potential foreign visitors to the United States. The bill also empowers certain congressional leaders to observe classified hearings before the FISA court that authorizes national security surveillance of anyone and expanding the types of companies with access to foreign communications that can be required to participate in the program.
Thames Water is seeking either a taxpayer-funded bailout or a massive hike in customer bills, plus reduced fines for environmental breaches, to satisfy its investors. Cutting through the business jargon, its executives are essentially demanding workers pay the super-rich more money to pump more untreated sewage into Britain’s seas and rivers.
Thames Water provides water and wastewater services for 16 million people in the UK. Parent company Kemble Water Holdings was told by auditors in December that it could run out of money in April trying to service Thames Water’s £18 billion mountain of debt—80 percent of the value of the company. Investors offered to provide £500 million upfront and a further £3 billion if regulator Ofwat agreed to let the company raise bills by 40 percent and begin paying internal dividends to Kemble.
The Thames as it flows through east London, with the Isle of Dogs in the centre [Photo by Mai-Linh Doan / CC BY-SA 3.0]
Attempting to force the issue, investors took the £500 million off the table last month, leading to Kemble missing a debt interest payment on a £400 million bond, asking creditors not to take action against the company, and announcing it could not repay a £190 million loan due to mature at the end of April.
Ofwat is to make a draft decision in June and a final one at the beginning of 2025.
The Conservative government has drawn up contingency rescue plans. According to the Daily Telegraph, after speaking with a Whitehall source,“If Thames Water is put into special administration, it is estimated that as much as £5bn of financial support would be needed from the outset ‘just to keep the lights on’.”
The company’s finances are almost as much of a mess as the waters it has been relentlessly polluting for years. It was criticised and fined repeatedly throughout the 2010s for sewage spills, but the full scale of the problem has only recently come to light.
Since 2020, the company has pumped at least 72 billion litres of sewage into the River Thames that runs through London, equating to 29,000 Olympic swimming pools. Figures released last month by the Environment Agency showed the company recorded a 163 percent increase in the number of hours it pumped raw sewage into rivers and seas in 2023—over 196,000 hours.
The scandal blighted the genteel occasion of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race this year, with competitors given safety instructions after campaign group River Action warned of “alarmingly high levels of dangerous E. coli bacteria” present in the Thames between Putney and Mortlake where the annual event takes place. Three members of the Oxford team were infected with the bacteria in the run-up to the event.
Lenny Jenkins of the Oxford team explained, “We’ve had a few guys go down pretty badly with E. coli strain… It would have been ideal not to have so much poo in the water.” Jenkins, incidentally, is a postgraduate student in Sustainability, Enterprise, and the Environment who described himself in a profile for the boat race as “super excited to learn more about the ways the private sector can work with government to solve complex problems across all shareholder groups.”
The same is done by all private water companies across England. In 2023, they were collectively responsible for at least 3.6 million hours of raw sewage discharge into rivers and seas, a 105 percent increase on 2022. Between 2020 and 2022, just nine companies were responsible for 7.4 million hours of discharge. The River Irwell, which runs through two major cities, Manchester and Salford, was listed as the most polluted waterway in terms of sewage spills, with 95 per mile of water in 2023.
The River Irwell
Lack of monitoring at all overflow sites means what gets reported is just a fraction of the amount of sewage being poured into England’s waterways practically every minute of every day.
In large part due to this pollution, just 14 percent of England’s rivers now have a “good” ecological status, expected to fall to 6 percent by 2027, and none of them have a “good” chemical status. Fewer than one in five estuaries and less than half of coastal waters have “good” ecological status, and none of them “good” chemical status. Of 256 freshwater habitats of special scientific interest assessed in 2023, only 23 were in a favourable condition.
The number of hospital admissions for waterborne diseases like dysentery and Weil’s disease has increased by 60 percent since 2010, to 3,286 in 2022-3.
Privatised in 1989, Thames Water was purchased by Australian company Macquarie (a top 50 global asset manager, responsible for more than $735 billion in assets) in 2006. By the time it sold its stake in the company in 2017, it had tripled Thames Water’s debt to £10.5 billion.
Meanwhile, Macquarie paid dividends worth £2.8 billion, borrowing against the company’s assets to increase payouts to shareholders. In its first year of ownership, it hiked dividend payments to £656 million, against profits of just £241 million.
Thames Water is now owned by a consortium including Canadian pension funds, the UK university lecturer’s pension fund, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and China’s sovereign wealth fund, which picked up where Macquarie left off in 2017.
In total, Thames Water has provided £7.2 billion in dividends since 1990. It spends 28 percent of its current income from water bills just servicing its debt. Very little makes its way into providing modern services. By 2014, the company was leaking 646 million litres a day. Almost a decade on, in 2023, it was still leaking 630 million litres a day.
This is only the most extreme example of a universal trend. Since privatisation, water companies have together paid £72 billion in dividends to their shareholders while accruing £60 billion in debt, which 20 percent of the average water bill goes towards servicing. Of £2.3 billion industry profits in 2022, £900 million was paid out in dividends. Another £24.8 million was paid to just 22 water company executives in salaries, bonuses, benefits and incentives.
In the same period, bills have risen by 40 percent on average and investment in infrastructure has fallen 15 percent. Between them, water companies in England and Wales lose nearly 3 billion litres a day to leaks.
The proceeds of this vast looting operation travel all around the world, with 70 percent of the value of England’s water companies owned abroad—mostly in America (17 percent), Canada (15 percent) and Australia (11 percent).
Big players include BlackRock (managing $9 trillion of assets worldwide), the Vanguard Group ($7 trillion), Lazard Asset Management ($216 billion), IFM Global Infrastructure Fund ($108 billion), Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ($993 billion), Qatar Investment Authority ($526 billion) and a host of lesser-known private investment groups.
Southern Water, supplying 4.6 million people and responsible for secretly pumping 16-21 billion litres of sewage into protected seas over six years, has since 2021 been majority owned by none other than Macquarie, with JP Morgan another major equity holder.
The money-mad drive for dividends paid to a handful of people which has characterised England’s 35 years of privatised water companies highlights the toxic influence of the profit motive on society. Capitalism sees in the basic human need for water not a service to be provided, but a captive market to be leeched—under monopoly conditions to boot. It sees in rivers and seas not pillars of biodiversity and sources of beauty and leisure (unless commercialised), but a ready-made sewage pipe.
All of which is facilitated by a bought-and-paid-for state apparatus. According to the Telegraph, at least seven of the nine water and sewerage companies currently have senior staff in regulatory or strategic roles who have previously worked for regulator Ofwat. Cathryn Ross, head of Ofwat between 2013 and 2017 when Macquarie was taking on billions in debt to pay billions in dividends, is now head of strategy and regulatory affairs at Thames Water.
Finland’s right-wing government announced last week the indefinite closure of its 1,300-kilometre border with Russia. An initial decision had been taken last November by the conservative National Coalition Party (NCP)-led government to temporarily close border crossings after a small number of asylum seekers crossed into Finland from Russia.
Finnish border guards stand by a construction site of the border barrier fence between Finland, right, and Russia, near the Pelkola border crossing point in Imatra, south-eastern Finland, Friday, April 14, 2023 [AP Photo/Sergei Grits]
The four-party coalition government, which includes the far-right Finns Party, is seeking with the move to provoke Russia and demonstrate its determination to clamp down on refugees. After Finland joined NATO last April, becoming the military alliance’s 31st member, its long land border with Russia and close proximity to St. Petersburg transformed Finland into a frontline state in the US-NATO imperialist war on Russia.
Finland’s entry into NATO, following the US-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, was overseen by a Social Democrat-led government. Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s coalition lost support due to sweeping attacks on the working class and embrace of pro-war policies, and was defeated in parliamentary elections also held in April 2023. When the NCP unveiled what is widely described as Finland’s most right-wing government since World War II, a central plank of the program was a clampdown on asylum seekers and refugees.
The Finns Party, which has ties to outright fascist forces, has long scapegoated foreigners for the country’s problems.
NCP Prime Minister Petteri Orpo placed the Interior Ministry under the control of the Finns Party. Finns leader Riikka Purra enthused, “I am delighted that together with our negotiating partners we have agreed on an immigration package that can rightly be called a paradigm shift.” Among the measures proposed was a halving of the refugees accepted by Finland from the UN refugee agency from 1,050 to 500 per year, and the creation of lower rates of social welfare for refugees and immigrants. Purra boasted that temporary residency permits for refugees would be “withdrawn if the person is on holiday in their country of origin.”
In the months following the coming to power of the new coalition, from August to December 2023, approximately 1,300 asylum seekers crossed the border from Russia, an increase from an average of one per day before then. Interviews conducted with asylum seekers who successfully made the trek after paying hefty fees to smugglers underscore that they chose the route because it was the easiest way into “fortress Europe,” which, thanks to the European Union’s inhuman refugee policies, has led to the drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean in recent years.
The EU has not only made it virtually impossible to cross safely via the short sea route from north Africa or Turkey, but also funds criminal gangs in Libya and dictatorships like Egypt’s el-Sisi’s to prevent refugees from even attempting to reach the continent.
This did not stop lurid stories in the media, hyped by the international press, about an alleged campaign of “hybrid warfare” directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The fact that a fascistic party’s programme was being implemented was of no concern to top EU officials like EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
During a meeting in Stockholm with Orpo and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in January, von der Leyen declared, “Most recently, Finland suffered from instrumentalisation of migrants orchestrated by Russia. This is yet another form of hybrid warfare. This requires a clear and determined response. Finland has acted decisively. And you can rely on the European Union to support your efforts.”
The Finnish government’s vicious anti-immigrant programme is combined with savage austerity measures to pay for Finland’s massive military build-up. Orpo is committed to imposing €6 billion in austerity measures during his first term. “We cannot put our heads in the sand. There is no more money,” he claimed last June.
In fact, there is plenty of money for Finland’s military, which completed in 2023 the largest single purchase in its history to acquire 64 F-35 fighter jets from US-based Lockheed Martin, at a cost of €8.4 billion. The purchase drove the 2023 defence budget up by 36 percent year-on-year, the highest single-year increase in over six decades.
Finland’s 2024 defence budget rose by 5 percent from the previous year to about €6.2 billion, or 2.3 percent of its GDP. Given its small size, with a population of 5.5 million, Finland has backed the far-right Ukrainian regime since the US-provoked Russian invasion in February 2022 with a substantial €2.9 billion in support. On April 3, newly elected President Alexander Stubb, who has significant powers over Finland’s foreign policy, signed a long-term bilateral defence agreement with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev. Stubb was elected president in February following a campaign dominated by pro-war, anti-Russia hysteria.
In December 2023, Finland finalised a defence cooperation agreement (DCA) with the United States, which gives Washington unimpeded access to several military bases in Finland and the ability to pre-position military supplies for major operations. This is part of a huge military build-up throughout the Nordic region, all of whose countries are now NATO members. After Sweden formally joined NATO last month, Russia is now confronted with hostile adversaries on all sides in the strategic Baltic Sea.
Much like their cultivation of the far right in Ukraine and the Baltic states, Washington and the major European powers are reviving the counterrevolutionary traditions of the Finnish bourgeoisie to facilitate opening a new war front against Russia.
Finland has already emerged as an important base of operations for NATO soldiers to obtain training in Arctic warfare and how to operate along a border with Russia. The military unit overseeing these training operations is the Jaeger Brigade—whose name has its origins in a unit created by the German Empire during World War I to crush revolutionary workers in Finland inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October 1917.
The taking of power by the working class in Russia prompted a general strike in Finland in support, which was prevented from transferring power to the working class by the bankrupt Social Democratic Party leadership. When the Finnish Socialist Workers Republic was ultimately proclaimed in Helsinki in January 1918, it was clear that the counterrevolutionary Whites were ready to launch a civil war with the backing of the imperialist powers.
After the Soviet Union was forced under threat of invasion to sign the peace of Brest Litovsk in early 1918, Germany intervened decisively in the Finnish civil war to support the Whites. The Jaeger Brigade spearheaded the ruling-class massacre of tens of thousands of workers who backed the short-lived Finnish Socialist Republic, which was drowned in blood in May 1918 as Germany invaded Finland. Thereafter, Finland was a key base for the imperialist-backed Whites, who sought to topple the Bolshevik government in the Russian Civil War.
The sharp rightward turn of Finnish politics and the revival of the country’s role as a slavish servant of imperialist war aims have been facilitated by Finland’s nominally “left” parties. The Social Democrats have played an important role since the 1990s in paving Finland’s route into NATO, including joining the alliance’s misnamed Partnership for Peace program in 1994.
The ex-Stalinist Left Alliance, the successor of the once-powerful Finnish Communist Party, ditched its supposed opposition to NATO membership after the outbreak of the US-NATO war on Russia. Although the party only entered Marin’s Social Democrat-led coalition government in 2019 on the condition that Finland not join NATO during the government’s term in office, Left Alliance leaders threw this pledge overboard and remained in the government as it championed the move. The party collapsed in last year’s election as a result.
On April 11, the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) passed a new law to expand conscription to the army. It is estimated that at least 400,000 Ukrainians have already been slaughtered in the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. After a catastrophically failed “counteroffensive” last year, the Ukrainian army continues to lose territory to Russia in the Donbass region.
A Ukrainian soldier sits in a trench on the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 4 2023. [AP Photo/Libkos]
Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, many of them to avoid conscription. Confronting a severe shortage of men at the front, 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. In his year-end address in December 2023, Zelensky announced a proposal to conscript another 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers at a cost of $13.3 billion.
All men aged 18 to 60 will be required to update their personal information within the next 60 days with the authorities responsible for conscription. This requirement will also go for Ukrainian men living abroad. The new law will make it easier for Ukrainian authorities to issue draft notices, including through an electronic system, and obliges local governments and the police to aid the military in the conscription drive.
The final version of the bill passed does not include a provision for the demobilization of men after three years of service. Since the fall, the wives and families of soldiers who in many cases have been fighting on the front for over two years have been protesting regularly in major Ukrainian cities to demand that their husbands, fathers and brothers be allowed to return home. The move has already provoked a popular backlash on social media, including by soldiers.
The new mobilization law comes just a week after Zelensky signed a bill lowering the age of conscription from 27 to 25. The move was widly unpopular domestically but openly demanded by Kiev’s imperialist backers. When US Republican Senator Lindsay Graham visited Kiev last month, he ridiculed the Zelensky government for not sending enough of the country’s youth into battle. “I can’t believe it’s at 27,” he told reporters. “You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving—not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.”
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian parliament also endorsed a measure that would permit the mobilization of certain categories of convicts underlining the severe shortage the Ukrainian military is facing. Current inmates would be also be eligible for parole if they agree to join the military, and Ukraine is expected to expand the categories of criminals with more serious offenses that can be mobilized.
As Kiev is in the midst of a new wave of mobilization, it has simultaneously ramped up its provocative strikes on both civilian and energy infrastructures within Russia using drones, missiles and artillery. On Wednesday, the regional governor of the Kursk Oblast in Russia reported that a Ukrainian drone strike had killed a father and his two daughters while driving.
These drone strikes, which are taking place alongside terrorist attacks and incursions of Russian territory, would not be possible without Western technology and funding.
An April 2 report in the Financial Times claimed that US officials had urged Ukraine to hold off on drone strikes on Russian oil refineries over concerns that high oil prices could provoke social unrest in the population. However, on Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Celeste Wallander clarified the US’s position by stating that the White House clearly has approved the strikes and only subsequently voiced vague “concerns” to protect itself from backlash from its NATO allies, who had not been included in the decision to increase strikes on Russia proper.
As the Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to NATO, recently acknowledged:
“Ukraine’s partners have also backed Kyiv’s focus on drone warfare. In January 2024, the United Kingdom pledged to spend at least $250 million to rapidly procure, produce, and deliver 1000 one-way attack drones to Ukraine. Although precise details regarding Ukraine’s drone stockpile remain undisclosed, the rhetoric of Ukrainian senior officials and the ongoing strikes suggest the current bombing campaign inside Russia is likely to continue gaining momentum.”
Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted in a joint interview with the German news outlet Bild and the American-based Politico that Ukraine would carry out another counteroffensive in the future.
“Yes, we have a plan for a counteroffensive. But that also requires weapons. Also from the USA. We will definitely win. We have no alternative. But I can’t promise that and give a date,” Zelensky stated.
Last June, following months of propaganda regarding an upcoming counteroffensive that would retake lost territory, tens of Ukrainian soldiers were killed after being sent head on into heavily fortified and mined Russian defensive positions. Across the frontlines Ukrainian soldiers died before even breaching the initial line of Russian defenses. Despite the mass casualties, the counteroffensive resulted in minimal territorial gains and exhausted Ukraine’s and NATO’s ammunition stores.
While the full cost in terms of lives may never be acknowledged, according to the Russian military, between early June and late October of last year Ukraine lost roughly 90,000 troops, 600 tanks and 1,900 other armored vehicles.
Meanwhile the Zelensky government continues to absurdly claim it has lost just 31,000 troops in over two years of war but cannot account for 700,000 soldiers apparently missing from its forces.
As usual, Zelensky blamed all military failures on the lack of Western-delivered armaments. Taken in Kharkiv (Kharkov), where Ukraine is busy building new defenses amid an increase in Russian air attacks, the interview was obviously staged to pressure German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to provide Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles, which he has so far ruled out.
Zelensky also used the interview as an opportunity to squash any plans of a potential peace for territory plan that is reportedly favored by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
While expressing a willingness to work with Trump, Zelensky made clear the Ukrainian government is not willing to give up any territory lost during the course of the war.
“If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea,” Zelensky said.
When Trump promised to end the NATO-backed war “within 24 hours” in March of last year, the Zelensky government responded by inviting Trump to Ukraine to see the war in person.
“We expressed our desire for Donald Trump to come to Ukraine so that he could see the situation with his own eyes and draw certain conclusions. I am definitely ready to meet with him,” Zelensky said obviously hedging his bets prior to the November elections.
Zelensky’s comments follow a recent visit of British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister David Cameron to Trump’s Florida resort, where he reportedly pleaded with Trump to support the imperialist war effort against Russia.
Within the ruling class and NATO, there is significant worry that Trump as president would abandon the war effort against Russia that was decades in the making, in favor of a focus on a war against China.
Last week in Brussels, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg announced a proposal to set up a $107 billion fund to support the Ukrainian war effort for the next five years. Stoltenberg made clear the fund’s purpose would be to protect NATO’s long-term war plans from any vacillations due to domestic political situations within the 32-member bloc.
“We need to shift the dynamics of our support,” Stoltenberg said. “We must ensure reliable and predictable security assistance to Ukraine for the long haul ... less on short-term offers and more on multi-year pledges.” In the US Congress over $60 billion in aid is currently still being held up.
South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party (DP) won a landslide victory in Wednesday’s quadrennial general election to select a new National Assembly, defeating the ruling People Power Party (PPP). While it represents a rebuke of the PPP and the administration of President Yoon Suk-yeol, the Democrats have no fundamental differences with the pro-war and anti-working-class agenda of the PPP.
Of the 300 seats available in the unicameral legislature, 254 were allocated based on direct election and the other 46 distributed according to proportional votes. The Democrats, who already held a majority prior to the election, increased their seat count from 156 to 175. This includes 14 seats for the DP’s satellite party, the Democratic Alliance, a grouping of members from the DP and the minor Progressive Party and the New Progressive Alliance. In contrast, the PPP and its satellite People Future Party took only 90 and 18 seats respectively, a total loss of six for the bloc.
The PPP will remain the ruling party as President Yoon will still be in office for another three years. South Korean presidents are chosen in separate elections for single, five-year terms.
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party (DP) leader Lee Jae-myung speaks to reporters after exit poll results for the parliamentary election on Wednesday, April 10, 2024 in Seoul [AP Photo/Chung Sung-Jun]
Following the release of the election results, DP leader Lee Jae-myung claimed, “The voters’ choice is a judgment of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, as well as an act of giving the Democratic Party and me the responsibility to create a better world by taking responsibility for people’s livelihood issues.”
The results, however, are less a vote of confidence in the DP than an expression of anger towards the current administration. Only two years ago, Yoon managed to defeat Lee in the presidential election following five years of Democrat Moon Jae-in as president and two years of a DP controlled legislature. Voter turnout in the recent election stood at approximately 67 percent, an indication of widespread dissatisfaction.
Both the South Korean and foreign press have also emphasized the “unlikability” of both Yoon Suk-yeol and Lee Jae-myung. If only in a distorted form, the “unlikability” of the two party leaders is a sign of widespread anger towards the ruling establishment as a whole.
In addition, the election itself was an anti-democratic process in which the two major parties edged out even nominal competition from minor parties. Rather than directly compete for proportionally allocated seats, both the DP and PPP created satellites to take advantage of a 2019 law supposedly meant to favor minor parties. Splinter groups were also formed from the larger parties. Most notably is the Rebuilding Korea Party of Jo Guk, a justice minister in the former Moon administration.
Jo pledged to work with the DP, attempting to put a phony left-wing face on the Democrats by criticizing President Yoon’s “prosecutor dictatorship,” a reference to Yoon’s previous position as South Korea’s prosecutor general. Jo’s party took 12 seats.
The New Future Party of former Democrat bigwig Lee Nak-yeon took one seat and the Progressive Party also picked up a seat, bringing the Democrats entire bloc in the National Assembly up to 189. The New Reform Party of former PPP leader Lee Jun-seok took three seats.
While the DP and PPP paid lip service to the issues facing workers and youth, they sought to make the election a contest between President Yoon and DP leader Lee, covering up the fact that both parties have a record of attacking the social position of working people and lining up with US preparations for war with China.
The Democrats denounced Yoon as “incompetent,” calling on voters to “judge” his administration. However, it is not Yoon’s “incompetence” that prevents him from addressing the needs of broad layers of the population. He carries out the demands of big business, which includes attacks on the position of the working class, as the Democrats would do in similar fashion were they in office.
On the other hand, the PPP sought to portray Lee Jae-myung, who has been embroiled in politically-motivated corruption scandals, as a criminal who would jeopardize the US-South Korean alliance while being subservient to China. PPP leader Han Dong-hun stated last Sunday, “Criminal suspects will run the country the way they want in order to protect themselves. And in the course of that, many foundations we have established will collapse and the (South) Korea-US alliance could collapse.”
The failure of the PPP’s promotion of Seoul’s alliance to win votes points to a latent anti-war sentiment within the South Korean working class. However, this finds no expression within the DP. During the election, the Democrats consciously covered up the growing danger of a US-led war with China, which the Yoon administration has fully embraced.
Instead, the DP focused its campaign on the Korean Peninsula, claiming the party would step up negotiations with the US, Japan, Russia, and China over North Korea in order to posture as anti-war. In reality, this means limiting any “anti-war” measures to those approved by Washington, which has no intention of pulling back from a conflict with Beijing. At the same time, the DP pledged to acquire new weapon systems in an acknowledgment of the growing war danger.
Furthermore, both the DP and the PPP will be united in carrying out attacks on the working class as big business calls for an assault on workers’ wages and jobs, in response to the international crisis of capitalism. Last year, the economy grew by only 1.4 percent.
The Korean Enterprises Federation last month published a report stating that South Korean workers’ monthly wages now surpass those of their counterparts in Japan as of 2022, or 3,998,000 won ($US2,929) and 3,791,000 won ($US2,778) respectively.
This prompted the right-wing financial publication Korea Economic Daily tocomplain that South Korean workers’ productivity was supposedly lower than in Japan. “Wage increases without productivity growth are not only unsustainable but also harm national competitiveness,” the paper stated, declaring there was an “urgency for Korea to implement labor reforms, including a drastic relaxing of regulations on large conglomerates.”
Yet wages are already stagnating or have dropped. In the fourth quarter of 2023, real wages fell by 1.9 percent with inflation. At the same time, expenses have grown including for housing and utilities, which rose by 9.5 percent.
Household debt has also surged as workers are forced to take out larger and larger loans. According to the Bank of Korea last September, it would take 26 years-worth of an average worker’s salary to purchase a medium-sized apartment. For young people in their 20s and 30s, as much as a third of their income can be taken up by monthly rent or loan repayments. At the end of 2023, household debt in South Korea reached 100.1 percent of GDP, higher than Thailand (91.6 percent), the US (72.8 percent), and Japan (64.1 percent).
Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi and a prominent leader of the INDIA opposition electoral alliance, has been detained since March 21 in a politically manipulated corruption case.
On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court rejected out of hand the arguments of Kejriwal’s lawyer contesting his arrest by the Ministry of Finance’s Enforcement Directorate, which is controlled by India’s far-right, Narendra Modi-led, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma ordered that Kejriwal, who leads the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP or Common Man’s Party) and has headed the government in India’s capital territory since 2015, continue to be held in Delhi’s Tihar jail until at least April 15.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal speaks during a protest against the federal government prior to his arrest, in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. [AP Photo/Altaf Qadri]
The legal counsel for Kejriwal had argued that his arrest in the middle of the campaign for India’s national election, which will unfold in seven phases from April 19 to June 1, was politically motivated, with the double-aim of smearing the AAP and its leadership and disrupting its election campaign. He also argued that the evidence Kejriwal participated in an alleged kickback scheme relating to the privatization of liquor sales in Delhi was contrived, consisting largely of testimony from “approvers”—i.e., persons who turned state’s evidence.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) alleges the AAP government conspired with what it has dubbed the “South Indian liquor lobby” to inflate prices for liquor, with at least 100 crore rupees (US $12 million) in excess profits funneled back to the AAP via kickbacks, and that Kejriwal was “the kingpin” of the scheme.
In addition to the Delhi Chief Minister, two other senior AAP leaders are in jail on money-laundering charges arising from the alleged liquor scam. Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal’s chief deputy until his arrest, has been incarcerated since Feb. 2023 and Satyendar Jain, an ex-Delhi cabinet minister, since May 2022. Earlier this month, India’s Supreme Court freed AAP MP and national spokesman Sanjay Singh on bail after six months in jail. At the bail hearing, India’s highest court admonished the ED for its conduct of the case, including its failure to recover or even trace a single rupee of the billions the AAP is said to have received in kickbacks.
The decade-old Modi government is notorious for its use of the Central Bureau of Investigation, other law enforcement agencies, and manipulated and trumped-up charges against its political opponents. But with the approach of the elections, it has become even more brazen in using all means at its disposal to attack its bourgeois political opponents, suppress social opposition, and stoke communal reaction.
This is because Modi and the BJP—all their boasts about India’s “world-beating” economic growth and emergence as a “world power” notwithstanding—are keenly aware there is seething popular anger over mass joblessness, chronic hunger, and the ever widening chasm between the mass of the India people and the tiny crust of billionaire and multi-millionaire capitalists who rule the country with their upper middle class hangers-on.
From the ranks of the BJP there is now a growing clamor for the central government to use the corruption charges leveled against Kejriwal and other senior AAP leaders as the pretext to place the National Capital Territory under “president’s rule,” thereby sacking the AAP government and handing full control over Delhi’s administration to the BJP-led central government.
On Wednesday, the Delhi Labour Minister, Raaj Kumar Anand, resigned saying he did not wish to be part of a party “that’s involved in corruption.” An AAP representative responded by charging this was further proof that the BJP was mounting a concerted campaign to break the party through arrests and intimidation. “Everyone knows that there was an ED raid at his (Anand’s) residence,” said AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj. “He was under pressure and got scared. ... He was given a script and he had no other option but to read it.”
The AAP is a right-wing, capitalist party founded in 2012 under the banner of “fighting corruption.” Apart from Delhi and the nearby north-west state of Punjab, where it was catapulted to power in 2022, the AAP has only negligible electoral support. Nevertheless, its control of Delhi, India’s capital and largest urban agglomeration, gives it an outsized role in Indian national politics and makes it a focus of national media attention. The BJP legal assault on the AAP is clearly aimed not just at boosting the BJP’s electoral fortunes in Delhi and Punjab, but at tarring the entire INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) electoral bloc.
In kicking off his campaign for a third term as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fatuously declared, “While Modi’s mantra is to eradicate corruption, (the opposition parties) credo is protect the corrupt.”
The reality is that corruption is endemic to Indian capitalist politics and the BJP a particularly fetid cesspool of corruption. Modi is personally implicated in “crony capitalist” dealings with India’s and Asia’s two richest billionaires, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.
On March 31, the INDIA alliance had a major “Save Democracy” rally in Delhi to denounce Kejriwal’s detention. It was addressed by many of the foremost leaders of the INDIA alliance, including Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi; Samajwadi Party leader and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav; Uddhav Thackeray of the far-right, erstwhile BJP ally, the Shiv Sena (UBT); and Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist).
“Opposition leaders are being intimidated and arrested,” Gandhi told the rally. “This is match-fixing.” He continued, “This is not an ordinary election ... This election is to save the country, protect our constitution.”
Of course, Gandhi—whose party has led India’s government for more than two-thirds of the 77 years since it gained independence and was the bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government till 2014—could provide no explanation apart from the malevolence of Modi and the Hindu supremacist BJP as to why Indian democracy is collapsing.
The jailing of Kejriwal follows a series of other patently politically manipulated “corruption” cases.
These include the freezing of the Congress Party’s accounts since February on the orders of the Tax Department on claims of tax irregularities. “This is a criminal action” against the Congress Party “done by the prime minister and the home minister,” Rahul Gandhi told a March 21 press conference. Subsequently, the tax department issued a series of orders for the Congress to pay taxes and fines totaling 36 billion rupees or some $450 million. The Congress has accused the BJP government of “tax terrorism” and charged it with trying to “financially cripple” it in the midst of the election campaign.
Other opposition parties, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Trinamool Congress, the governing party in West Bengal, have also been hit with income tax department orders to fork over large sums.
In February, Hemant Soren of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), an INDIA alliance partner, stepped down as Jharkhand chief minister after the Enforcement Directorate arrested him on charges of acquiring land through illicit means. Soren and the opposition claim the charges are yet another fraudulent case manipulated by the BJP government.
Last month amid the flurry of corruption cases targeting opposition leaders, the Indian Express published a report that underscored the politically motivated and manipulated character of the BJP government’s “anti-corruption” campaign. It showed that out of 25 opposition leaders facing corruption probes, 23 got reprieve after they crossed over to the BJP. The politicians involved were from various opposition parties including the Congress Party.
The government is also targeting left-wing opposition media voices. Since last October, Prabir Purkayastha, the founder and editor of the NewClick website, has been detained without charge under India’s draconian anti-terrorism laws. According to reports, the Delhi police filed an 8,000- page First Information Report against Purkayastha at the end of March in which they accused him of accepting Chinese funds and publishing Chinese propaganda.
The US State Department and Germany’s foreign office have issued pro-forma statements on Kejriwal’s arrest, expressing concern that the elected chief minister receive a “fair, transparent, and timely legal process.” The imperialist powers have shown time and again that they are prepared to look the other way as Modi runs roughshod over fundamental democratic rights and whips up Hindu communalism, so long as the BJP government continues to integrate India every more fully into the reckless US-led military-strategic offensive against China.
The Modi government made a point of taking umbrage at the US and German statements despite their anodyne character. It summoned US and German embassy officials to voice its objection to what it called “interference in India’s domestic affairs.”
For its part, the London-based Financial Times published an editorial last week headlined, “The ‘mother of democracy’ is not in good shape,” in which it expressed alarm at “the sharp step-up in state enforcement agencies apparently being used to stifle opposition parties and politicians as the election approaches.” Like a minority faction of Indian big business, the FT is concerned that Modi’s ever more authoritarian rule could spark massive popular opposition threatening “India’s attractiveness for investment.”
The ruthlessness with which the Modi government is attacking even its bourgeois rivals must serve as a warning to the working class as to how it will respond to any challenge form below.
In February and March when farmers attempted to march on Delhi, they were met with a massive mobilization of state forces. Tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces were deployed; multi-layer barricades made up of massive concrete blocks and barbed wire erected; internet and social media shut down and protesting farmer brutally attacked with tear gas canisters fired from drones.
To defend their democratic and social rights and defeat Modi and the Indian bourgeoisie, which stands four-square behind his far-right government, India workers must mobilize their class strength, uniting their struggles and rallying the rural toilers behind them in opposition to Indian capitalism and all its political representatives.
This means implacably rejecting the attempts of the Stalinist CPM and its Left Front to once again subordinate them to the BJP’s ruling class opponents, organized today in the Congress Party-led INDIA election bloc. In the name of defending India’s “democratic and secular” character it proposes to continue the same ruinous socio-economic and foreign polices as the Modi-led regime—“pro-investor reforms” and the anti-China Indo-US “global strategic partnership”—while adapting to and conniving with the Hindu right.
Two decisions taken in the last few days highlight the political direction in which the German government is marching. Germany is permanently stationing 5,000 heavily armed soldiers and their families on the Russian border in Lithuania. At the same time, it has declared that the creation of 5,000 jobs to combat child poverty would be too costly.
Students eating lunch at school. [Photo by Pixnio]
The funds would go to the Kindergrundsicherung (Basic Child Protection program), i.e., government support to protect children in Germany’s poorest families. According to Federal Minister for Family Affairs Lisa Paus (Greens), administering the program would require the hiring of some 5,000 people to staff a “family service.” Although the plan had been approved as part of the coalition agreement between the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens, the FDP and to some extent the SPD and sections of the Greens are now up in arms against it.
In the most recent budget, Paus had already agreed to reduce the 12 billion euros originally budgeted for Kindergrundsicherung to two billion. When she raised the need to create 5,000 new jobs, which would cost an estimated 250 million euros a year, the proposal sparked a storm of indignation.
Politicians who have never had to suffer a day’s hardship in their lives are raising a hue and cry. “Monster bureaucracy!” rants the FDP. The plan is “absurd,” says Johannes Vogel, parliamentary secretary of the FDP. In response to the uproar, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) convened the cabinet for an internal discussion on Wednesday.
The majority of the Christian Democratic (CDU-CSU) opposition parliamentary group opposes Kindergrundsicherung, and CDU (Christian Democratic Union) leader Friedrich Merz wants to abolish the Citizen’s Allowance, another form of support for the poor.
“We can no longer afford 40 billion euros for the so-called Citizen’s Allowance at a time like this,” Merz said in the Bundestag (parliament).
Nor is Lisa Paus insisting on the additional jobs. She and the Greens have once again retreated. “There won’t be 5,000 new jobs,” the co-chair of the Greens, Ricarda Lang, told broadcaster ARD.
Meanwhile, child poverty is rampant. It is a consequence of social cuts to finance the government’s pro-war policies.
The war offensive against Russia stands at the centre of the coalition government’s policies. After the US, Germany is the next largest funder of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Over the past two years, Berlin has provided Ukraine with 32 billion euros in financial and military aid, according to the German government’s own figures. The total value of authorised German arms exports to Israel has increased tenfold in the past year, making Germany responsible for 47 percent of all Israeli arms imports.
The working class pays the bill in the form of social cuts, wage-cutting, increased exploitation, unemployment and poverty. The rise in child poverty is the inevitable consequence of this.
This is confirmed by the annual Joint Poverty Report 2024, which was published on March 26. It does not include the more recent figures from last year, which reflect war-related inflation. However, the statistics for 2022 already paint a devastating picture.
In 2022, 16.8 percent of Germany’s population—14.2 million people—were income poor. One fifth of the poor are children, and of all children living in Germany significantly more than one in five (21.8 percent) are now affected by poverty.
The poverty report defines a household as poor if its income is below 60 percent of median income. In 2022, this poverty threshold was €1,186 per month for a single person, €1,779 for a couple without children and €1,540 for single parents with a child under the age of 14. As the figures for 2022 show, single parents are disproportionately affected (43 percent of all single parents are poor), while large families, the unemployed and people without a German passport are also often poor.
In such households, it is the children, in particular, who suffer—from new-borns to adolescents. They are disadvantaged by poverty in many ways.
This ranges from health problems caused by malnutrition to developmental lags and psychological problems, to educational deficits, social exclusion and a lack of future prospects. Child poverty often sets in motion a cycle from which the victims can no longer escape in adulthood. According to the poverty report, this potentially affects 2.9 million children who are poor or at risk of poverty in Germany.
This vicious cycle was supposed to be counteracted by the Kindergrundsicherung, as the parties that formed the coalition government agreed before taking office. The project originally envisaged bundling together all benefits for children from January 1, 2025 and proactively allocating them to the families concerned.
“We want to turn the citizens’ obligation to pay taxes into a service obligation on the part of the state,” Minister Paus grandly announced on her ministry’s website.
Of course, the entire project was inadequate from the outset, as only existing benefits—the child benefit and supplement, the child support element of the Citizen’s Allowance, the child allowance, etc.—were to be combined. Today, these benefits comprise pitifully small sums on which no child can realistically live. For example, the support rate for a child in the Citizen’s Allowance is €350 per month. This is linked to the claim that one can feed a child on €4 a day.
According to Ulrich Schneider, head of the charity umbrella organisation Der Paritätische, which publishes the poverty report, much more money would be needed to seriously tackle child poverty. At least 4 to 5 billion euros would be needed just to fund the Citizen’s Allowance in a reasonable manner.
“The truth lies in the parents’ wallets,” Schneider told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. He emphasised that parental poverty was responsible for child poverty: unemployment as a result of job cuts, low wages, a minimum wage that is far too low—these are all poverty factors.
In 2022, an additional 100,000 people were considered poor compared to the previous year. Compared to 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, there were almost one million more people in poverty. Almost two thirds of the adult poor were either working or retired, a clear indication of the precarious situation of the working class as a whole.
The handouts provided so far do not reach all the families who are entitled to them. As a result, several million children should already be receiving significantly more money than they are today. According to the minister for family affairs, up to 70 percent of all those entitled to benefits do not actually manage to claim them.
This is because applications for the child benefit and the child supplement have to be made at the Family Benefits Office, applications for the Citizen’s Allowance are made at the job centre, applications for social assistance at the Social Welfare Office, and for the child tax allowance—at the tax office. Not everyone can do all this straight away, and where can help be found? Originally, the proposal that is now being vilified as a “bureaucratic monster” was intended to provide a way out of this jungle of bureaucracy.
However, the coalition government designed its project for a basic child protection scheme primarily as a public relations manoeuvre rather than a substantive social reform. It is concentrating its efforts on arming the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and its planned war against Russia. Since an overwhelming majority of the population does not want this, war policy abroad inevitably goes hand in hand with intensified class war at home.
This political tendency can be seen in the government’s Kindergrundsicherung project. From the outset it excluded refugees and asylum seekers. Refugee children are already more disadvantaged than everyone else in almost every respect, and do not even receive the child benefit. This is in line with the government’s attempt to divide and thus weaken the working class.
Meanwhile, the heated dispute over 5,000 new jobs shows that the government is prepared to ditch the entire Kindergrundsicherung scheme, as meagre as it is.
On this point, too, the coalition is increasingly adopting the policy of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which rejects the Kindergrundsicherung scheme because it fosters a “social parasite mentality.”
The “large group of people who benefit are those who make use of our social system without ever having paid a cent into it,” rails Martin Reichardt, family policy spokesperson for the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag.
