Italy: Five Star Movement makes a deal with the far-right League

Marianne Arens & Peter Schwarz

Three weeks after the Italian parliamentary election, the protest movement Five Star (M5S) and the far-right League (Northern League) have moved closer together, and they might now form a coalition government.

The leaders of the two parties, 45-year-old Matteo Salvini (League) and 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio (M5S), are in constant contact. Salvini noted a few days ago that he speaks to Di Maio on the phone more often than to his own mother. Due to this close cooperation, the leaders of the two chambers of parliament were smoothly elected over the weekend. According to press reports, Di Maio and Salvini are working on a joint government programme.

The M5S and the alliance of far-right parties—the League, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the fascistic Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy)—elected Roberto Fico (M5S) as president of the Chamber of Deputies and Elisabetta Alberti Casellati (Forza Italia) as speaker of the Senate.

The election is remarkable because, shortly before the parliamentary elections, Di Maio had promised that M5S would “never” engage in intrigues and deals behind closed doors. Roberto Fico, the new president of the Chamber of Deputies, declared: “I guarantee we will never ally ourselves with the League: it is genetically different.” But that is exactly what has happened. The election of the two Chamber presidents was the result of secret intrigues and deals between M5S and the League.

M5S, which owed its election success to its proclaimed opposition to corruption, previously presented Berlusconi and his Forza Italia as its arch-enemies. Now, M5S has elevated Casellati, a “super-Berlusconian,” into the country’s second highest state office. The speaker of the Senate automatically assumes the duties of president if 76-year-old Sergio Mattarella is unable to carry out his duties.

The lawyer Casellati, who holds a doctorate in church law, is an opponent of abortion and gay marriage. She has sat in parliament for Forza Italia since 1994. She has supported all of Berlusconi’s campaigns against the judiciary, drafted laws that protected him from trials for corruption, and defended him on talk shows and on demonstrations. She is also implicated in corrupt practices after hiring her daughter as secretary of state at the Ministry of Health.

Casellati, however, was not Berlusconi’s choice. The former head of government favoured Paolo Romani, a minister from his last cabinet. But Salvini, whose League achieved a bigger share of the vote in the election than Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, is now calling the shots in the far-right camp. He nevertheless chose a candidate from Forza Italia and not from his own party because he needs Berlusconi’s support to become head of government.

Negotiations on the new government begin after Easter, when President Mattarella invites the various parties for consultations. Former Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni (PD) has submitted his resignation, as required by the constitution, and is now leading a caretaker government until a new government takes over.

Theoretically, there are four options for a governing majority in the 630-seat lower house, but they all face significant problems—a coalition of M5S (227 seats) with the League alone (125 seats), a coalition of the M5S with the entire far-right alliance (265 seats), a coalition of the latter alliance with the Democrats (PD) (112 seats), or a coalition of the M5S with the Democrats.

M5S and the League have a small majority, even without the participation of Forza Italia, but this immediately raises the question of who takes over as head of government. Both Di Maio and Salvini have laid claim to the post. The M5S parliamentary faction is almost twice as large as the League’s, so Di Maio is disinclined to allow Salvini to head the government. The situation is different when the entire far-right alliance participates in the government. Together it has more deputies than M5S.

For a long time, the League and M5S were considered to be politically irreconcilable. The League, which emerged from the separatist Northern League, is following a far-right-wing course. Its role model is the National Front of Marine Le Pen in France. It has its base in the prosperous north of the country and has promised to deport half a million migrants and reduce taxes to 15 percent if it comes to power.

M5S poses as a protest party that stands “neither right nor left,” and as an opponent of the corrupt Italian political caste. It achieved its greatest electoral successes with the promise of a universal basic income in the south, where poverty, unemployment and precarious work prevail.

After the close cooperation of the past few days, however, an alliance between the two parties looks increasingly possible. What unites them is their criticism of the European Union (EU) and the common European currency. Both have stated that they will not stick to the EU limit of 3 percent of GDP for the government deficit. In Brussels and Berlin, such a ruling alliance in Italy is therefore considered a “horror scenario.” The League and M5S also largely concur in their hostility to immigrants.

The basic income promised by the M5S is far from “universal.” It is more like an Italian version of Germany’s Hartz IV payments. According to a parliamentary proposal of M5S, it would only be paid under certain conditions. An amount of €780 per month would be given to those who are permanently registered at Job Centres and accept at least their third job offer. Above all, the basic income would be paid exclusively to Italian nationals, thereby further deepening divisions in the working class.

Meanwhile, the founder of M5S, the comedian Beppe Grillo, has signalled his agreement to an alliance with the League. “Salvini is one who keeps his word when he says something. That’s rare,” Grillo declared. Salvini returned the compliment: “The Grillini have so far proven to be trustworthy.”

Silvio Berlusconi has called on the president to entrust the formation of the government to League leader Salvini. “The centre right received the most votes and thus has the right to appoint the prime minister, he told the Corriere della Sera. Salvini has the right and duty to try to form a government.”

Berlusconi, who has always been at loggerheads with the M5S, prefers an alliance with the Democrats (PD), the main losers in the parliamentary election. Such a coalition would only have a majority if the entire right-wing alliance is involved. The PD would be the strongest single party and could claim the office of prime minister—a move that would be hardly in the interests of Salvini.

The last option, a coalition of the M5S with the Democrats, would be dominated by M5S, which could claim the office of prime minister. So far, it is unlikely that the PD would support the 31-year-old Di Maio in this endeavour.

All that is certain is that the horse-trading will continue behind the scenes in the coming weeks. Whether the pact between Di Maio and Salvini holds is hard to predict, let alone what other deals may be offered, made or rejected.

Ultimately, the extreme crisis of Italian politics is the result of the deep gulf between the needs and aspirations of the broad mass of the population and all of the parties represented in parliament. None of them has an answer to the horrendous levels of youth unemployment, declining incomes and the social crisis that dominate in the country.

Using populist demagogy, the M5S and the League were able to win a considerable number of votes, but a government of these two parties, like any other conceivable coalition, would pursue a far-right political agenda and rapidly come into sharp conflict with the working class. Only an independent movement of the working class, fighting for an international socialist programme, can prevent the country from drifting further to the right.

Protestors denounce silencing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Robert Stevens

Protests took place outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London Thursday, for a second day, at the decision to deprive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of communication with the outside world.

Protesters held placards as they chanted, “Assange is not silent, we are his voice!” Others read, “Free Assange!” “USA: Stop Attacks on Whisleblowers and Journalists!” and “Free Press and Free Assange!”

In a reference to the 2016 United Nations ruling stating that Assange is a victim of arbitrary detention from which he must be released—with which the UK government refuses to comply—another read, “UN to UK: Free and Compensate Assange.”

WikiLeaks tweeted of Assange, “He cannot tweet, speak to the press, receive visitors or make telephone calls.”

Deprived of his only remaining liberties, Assange has fewer rights than prisoners. Yet he has never been charged, let alone prosecuted.

Speaking to the media outside the Embassy Thursday, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood said, “Julian Assange is one of the greatest heroes of the world, we are very concerned now that he can’t have visitors. It’s really important that he’s got access to the world by all the exposures he has managed to do.” Assange was “a war hero, he exposed American war crimes,” she added.

The measures imposed by the Embassy on Assange—who is now an Ecuadorean citizen after being naturalised last December—are draconian. Based on information from a WikiLeaks source, RT said, “The embassy reportedly installed electronic jammers to block all radio communications on its premises hours after an individual representing Assange’s interests was informed of ‘strong discomfort and concern that his declarations have caused in Ecuador’s government’…”

So extensive is the blockade that “The jammers cause some disruption for embassy staff, who can no longer use their mobile phones due to the communication blackout.”

Ecuador has given no time scale as to how long its restrictions on Assange will be in place, stating only that it will meet with his attorneys next week.

Ecuador’s measures are in violation of a 2016 United Nations resolution that “condemns unequivocally measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online.” The UN affirmed “that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”

Stepping up the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder is bound up with the efforts by Britain and the US to silence opposition to their preparations for war. This is made clear by the fact that the justification used for Ecuador’s censorship were the tweets Assange posted on Monday challenging Britain’s accusation that Russia is responsible for the alleged nerve agent poisoning of former double agent and Russian citizen, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.

This is an entirely fabricated charge, for which the British authorities have still to provide any credible evidence. Assange pointed this out in his tweet, which read, “While it is reasonable for [British Prime Minister] Theresa May to view the Russian state as the leading suspect, so far the evidence is circumstantial & the OCPW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] has not yet made any independent confirmation, permitting the Kremlin to push the view domestically that Russia is persecuted.”

In an interview with Sputnik Thursday, Australian barrister and adviser to Assange, Greg Barns, was asked, “Do you think that it is Assange’s comments on the Skripal case that caused this cut-off?”

Barns replied, “I can only speculate, because there seems to have been some information from Ecuador that that was the case.”

The British and US authorities are using the Skripal affair to accelerate the campaign against “Moscow meddling”, to justify NATO’s build-up against Russia and, associated with this, a clampdown on social media and internet freedoms.

An essential component of this military escalation is state censorship against political and social opposition. Under the guise of combating “fake news,” websites and social media pages of many groups and individuals are being closed down by states across Europe.

Accompanying this is the strengthening of police state measures. Only days before Ecuador’s act of censorship, the German government, intelligence services and police collaborated with Spanish intelligence operatives to arrest the democratically-elected president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont. He was arrested in Germany as he was travelling back to Belgium after a visit he had made to Finland for talks with parliamentary deputies.

Puigdemont is detained under the draconian European Arrest Warrant (EAW) system. He potentially faces 30 years in prison for advocating the separation of Catalonia from Spain.

As the WSWS warned at the time, the detention of Assange in 2010 under an EAW established a precedent for the railroading of political opponents on trumped up and bogus allegations. Assange’s arrest—on US instructions—was upheld by the British courts despite no charges being laid against him.

To avoid the kind of treatment meted out to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Assange—like Edward Snowden—has been forced into exile. The EAW, under which he was initially held, was dropped in May last year after Sweden finally admitted there were no grounds for prosecution, but Assange still faces arrest.

These events mark a serious escalation in the onslaught on free speech and democratic rights. Ecuador complained that Assange’s entirely legitimate and well-founded questioning of the Skripal events and Puigdemont’s arrest “put at risk the good relations [Ecuador] maintains with the United Kingdom, with the other states of the European Union, and with other nations.” On whose instructions it arrived at its decision is unclear.

There is a real and immediate threat that Assange may be handed over to the US for extradition, either by Embassy officials or a British raid.

On Tuesday UK Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan described Assange in parliament as a “miserable little worm” who should hand himself in to the British authorities. He said, “It is of great regret that Julian Assange remains in the Ecuador embassy. It is of deeper regret that even last night he was tweeting against Her Majesty’s Government for their conduct in replying to the attack in Salisbury.”

Within hours of this provocative statement, Assange had his communications severed. In response, Assange tweeted, “As a political prisoner detained without charge for 8 years, in violation of 2 UN rulings, I suppose I must be ‘miserable’; yet nothing wrong with being a ‘little’ person although I’m rather tall; and better a ‘worm’, a healthy creature that invigorates the soil, than a snake.”

In 2010, US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that Duncan was the focus of particular interest by US intelligence. It disclosed a 22 January 2010 cable, signed off by Elizabeth Pitterle, the US head of intelligence operations, stating that analysts were preparing “finished products on the Conservative leadership for senior policymakers” and speculating on the “political ambitions” of the former oil trader—then international development minister.

On Wednesday, May launched the UK’s National Security Capability Review. The review is based on a “Fusion Doctrine”, mobilising all elements of the state and private sector against the threats to the UK. Foremost among these is what the document refers to as “The resurgence of state-based threats” and “Hostile State Activity.”

Russia is explicitly targeted for military action on its borders, diplomatic isolation and measures to clamp down on alleged interference in UK politics through the dissemination of supposed “fake news.” The very day this justification for the new “Fusion Doctrine” was advanced, Assange was silenced.

Russia expels US diplomats, closes consulate in St. Petersburg

Patrick Martin

The Russian government on Thursday ordered the closure of the American consulate in St. Petersburg and the expulsion of 60 US intelligence agents operating under diplomatic cover, in direct response to the anti-Russian campaign spearheaded by Britain and the United States.

The move came three days after the Trump administration ordered the closing of the Russian consulate in Seattle, Washington and expulsion of 60 Russian officials, most of them working out of the embassy in Washington.

The mutual expulsions and closures mean there are only two Russian consulates in the entire United States, in Washington and New York City, and only two American consulates in Russia, in Moscow and Vladivostok.

US Ambassador Jon Huntsman was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and asked by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to explain his suggestion that the US government would look into seizing Russian state assets within the United States, in a further escalation of the anti-Russian campaign launched earlier this month by Britain and the US.

According to the Foreign Ministry, Ryabkov told Huntsman that such a move would have the “gravest consequences for global stability.” The ministry statement continued: “It was recommended to the US authorities, who are encouraging and fanning a campaign of slander against our country, to come to their senses and put a stop to reckless actions that are destroying bilateral relations.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his government would expel representatives of all 27 governments that have ordered Russian diplomats to leave, matching the number expelled in each case “tit for tat.” In addition to 23 British diplomats already kicked out and 60 from the US, this will mean 13 from Ukraine, four from Germany, one from Georgia and so on, up to a total of 153.

The US-UK campaign against Russia began with British claims, unsupported by any publicly revealed evidence, that the Russian government was responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal, a former British spy, and his daughter Yulia. The two collapsed on a park bench in Salisbury, England March 4 and have been hospitalized in critical condition since then.

On March 15, the US, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement declaring Russia responsible for the supposed nerve gas attack on the Skripals. This was followed by similar statements from the European Union and NATO, and then the US expulsions, announced Monday, March 26, the most sweeping diplomatic sanctions since the Cold War.

The EU statement covered up considerable division within the bloc. Greece, Hungary and Cyprus have opposed the campaign, and nine other countries--Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, Luxemburg, Malta, Austria, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia--declined to join in the expulsion of diplomats.

There are also divisions within the major European powers, particularly Germany, where prominent leaders of the Social Democratic Party and Left Party have rejected taking action against Moscow in the absence of any proof of Russian responsibility for the Skripal poisoning.

The deputy leader of the SPD, Ralf Stegner, criticized the expulsions in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, saying he feared an escalation “which can still hurt us very much.” Referring to the lack of evidence, he said: “Appearances and plausibility are not enough to convict.”

The refusal to supply any evidence to back up the charges against Russia is the clearest demonstration that the campaign by London and Washington is a planned and deliberate provocation. The British government has not even submitted samples of the alleged nerve gas poison to the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the UN agency which, based on international treaties to which Britain is a party, has oversight in such cases.

OPCW technicians arrived in Salisbury this week to begin their own tests, with results expected sometime in April. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov reiterated his government’s demand that the OPCW meet as early as Monday to discuss the Skripal case and the British government claims.

Lavrov criticized UK Prime Minister Theresa May, saying her government was “forcing everyone to follow an anti-Russian course,” leaving the Russian government no alternative but to respond to “absolutely unacceptable actions that are taken against us under very harsh pressure from the United States and Britain under the pretext of the so-called Skripal case.”

A number of chemical weapons experts have called into question the official British account, since it does not square with the known facts about nerve gas weapons similar to “novichok,” the material allegedly used against the Skripals.

The latest account from London does not help matters. Dean Haydon, the chief of Britain’s counter-terrorism police, said the Skripals had come into contact with the nerve agent from the front door of their home. A Russian security official, Major-General Alexander Mikhailov, pointed out that if a nerve gas poisoning had taken place on the doorstep, the Skripals would have died immediately.

Instead, the father and daughter went out to lunch, finished their meal and moved to a bench in a nearby park, where they collapsed. Moreover, British government sources said Thursday that Yulia Skripal was no longer in critical condition and was expected to survive, a result that appeared to rule out an attack by a poison as lethal as novichok.

Nor does the Russian government have a plausible motive for seeking the death of Sergei Skripal, who was jailed rather than executed when uncovered as a double agent in 2004. Skripal was released in a spy swap in 2010, and his daughter Yulia, a Russian citizen, was allowed to leave the country with him.

From the standpoint of motive, the Skripal affair benefits only the military-intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States, which have been seeking every possible pretext for intensifying conflict with Russia. Tensions have been steadily building up over the US-backed right-wing coup in Ukraine, the civil war in Syria, where the US is seeking to oust the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad, and, more generally, the NATO mobilization in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, clearly aimed at preparing war with Russia.

Washington and London are particularly concerned about the emergence of foreign policy differences with the European Union, which has its own interests in Russia and the Middle East, at odds with those of the United States. The Pentagon is seeking an agreement at the upcoming NATO summit in July on what is being called the “30-30-30” proposal, a commitment to have 30 troop battalions, 30 naval ships and 30 fighter squadrons ready to deploy in the event of a conflict with Russia.

The provocations against Russia also have a powerful domestic motive. The development of a state of quasi-war with Russia provides a pretext for attacks on internal political opposition, both in the United States and Britain, where any significant social struggle can now be branded as “Russian-inspired” or the result of “fake news” spread by Russian “trolls and bots” on the Internet.

Since the New Year, working class struggles have increased in both countries and other parts of Europe in what is emerging as a generalized upsurge of social unrest. The turn to domestic repression and dictatorial methods, including censorship of the Internet, is the response of the ruling classes in all of the major capitalist states. A major aim in demonizing Russia is to stoke up a war fever at home in order to justify repressive measures against social and political opposition from the working class.

Efforts are continuing in the American corporate media to escalate the anti-Russia campaign. NBC News broadcast a report Thursday night claiming--on the basis of a single interview with a Russian defector and former double agent--that the Putin regime has drawn up a “hit list” of eight individuals targeted for assassination.

The list supposedly includes the defector himself, Skripal and Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled a dossier of anti-Trump material gathered from his contacts within Russia and supplied it to the FBI, the Democratic Party and Senator John McCain.

Sisi’s sham election and the fate of the Egyptian Revolution

Bill Van Auken

Polls closed Wednesday in Egypt’s three-day sham election convened by the US-backed dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power in a bloody 2013 coup.

While official results have yet to be released, the outcome was never in doubt. Sisi is reported to have won over 90 percent of the vote, with his lone opponent, the little known pro-regime politician Moussa Mostafa Moussa receiving barely 3 percent.

Moussa had publicly supported Sisi’s reelection until he was drafted to run in a bid to lend the electoral farce a veneer of legitimacy. Prospective candidates that could have mounted a genuine challenge to Sisi, including leading figures within the Egyptian armed forces, were threatened, intimidated and, in at least one case, jailed to prevent them from running.

While the dictator received virtually all the votes cast, the turnout in the election was significantly lower than in the last such vote, held in 2014. While the government claimed that it expected it to top 40 percent, other sources indicated that it was likely closer to 30 percent, with younger people staying away in droves. By all accounts, less than 25 million of the 60 million registered voters turned out.

Polls were largely empty on Wednesday, the third day of balloting, as the regime staged an extraordinary campaign to threaten and bribe voters into casting ballots. Government officials threatened to impose fines on registered voters who failed to vote, and employers bused their workers to the polls and, in some cases, threatened to fire those who did not cast ballots. On the other hand, sound trucks were sent into poorer neighborhoods promising cash payments and food rations for those who voted. In some areas, officials promised to carry out public works projects in districts with a turnout topping 40 percent.

The mass abstention of Egyptian voters under these conditions is a reflection of the seething anger and hatred among broad sections of the population toward the regime.

Since coming to power four years ago, Sisi has carried out savage police-state measures. The Egyptian general consolidated power through the overthrow of the elected president backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Mursi, and the massacre of more than 1,600 of his followers on the streets of Cairo in 2013.

Since then, some 60,000 people have been rounded up and imprisoned for political reasons. Thousands have been forcibly disappeared, and torture is rampant in the regime’s jails. Oppositional websites have been shut down, including alternative media, and the major media have been thoroughly intimidated into echoing official propaganda.

Repression today is worse than it was under the 30-year, US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, which was overthrown by the mass uprising of the Egyptian working class in February 2011.

Meanwhile, Sisi’s dictatorship has implemented sweeping “reforms” to meet conditions imposed under a $12 billion International Monetary Fund agreement signed in 2016.

Big business—including the army, which controls up to 40 percent of Egypt’s economy—has seen its profits rise, while the working class has suffered a severe cut in its living standards as a result of currency devaluations, inflation, cuts in subsidies and increased taxes. Some 40 percent of Egypt’s nearly 100 million people are forced to live on less than $2 a day, while unemployment remains rampant, particularly for the youth. According to official statistics, 26.7 percent of people aged 18-29 are unemployed; the real figure is no doubt far higher.

The same US officials who denounced the recent Russian elections as illegitimate and condemned a planned vote in Venezuela as a sham before it has been held, have cast a benevolent eye on the rigged vote in Egypt.

On Monday, the US Embassy in Cairo tweeted a photo of Chargé d’Affaires Thomas Goldberger at a polling station along with the message: “As Americans we are very impressed by the enthusiasm and patriotism of Egyptian voters.”

And in Washington on Tuesday, the State Department spokesperson affirmed US support for a “transparent and credible election process” in Egypt, while declining to comment on the character of the corrupt and contemptible process actually unfolding in the country on the grounds that it had yet to be completed.

US imperialism fully backs the Sisi regime, continuing to supply it with $1.3 billion in military aid annually, an amount that is second only to that given to Israel. Token human rights and democratization conditions placed upon this aid by Congress are routinely brushed aside in the name of national security, with no protest from either Democrats or Republicans. While justified in the name of the “war on terror,” the US arms are themselves being utilized in a reign of terror against the Egyptian people.

That Washington backs Sisi, while at the same time waged bloody wars for regime change in Libya and Syria in the name of “human rights” and “democracy,” exposes not only US imperialism’s hypocrisy, but its counterrevolutionary strategy throughout the Middle East.

Both the US backing for Sisi’s coup and its military interventions in Libya and Syria were aimed at crushing the revolutionary upheavals that shook the region in 2011 in what was dubbed the “Arab Spring,” while furthering the drive to impose the undisputed hegemony of American imperialism over this oil-rich and strategically vital region.

The counterrevolutionary plans of Washington’s strategists, however, are inevitably running up against a resurgence of class struggle throughout the region. The past months have seen mass protests in Tunisia and Iran, as well as strikes by doctors and teachers in Algeria. The simmering discontent of the Egyptian working class will inevitably erupt once again into revolutionary struggle.

This threat was indicated by Der Spiegel in Germany, whose government has also backed Sisi. “Police arbitrariness, rising food prices, youth unemployment and a president increasingly losing contact with the people—all these factors that triggered the uprising against Mubarak seven years ago are once again present in Egypt,” the magazine warns. “Therefore, the [German] federal government should not be blinded by Sisi’s promise of stability, but look closely, at what happens in Cairo.”

It is vital under these conditions that the lessons of the betrayal of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and the broader upheavals throughout the region be studied and assimilated by class-conscious workers and youth coming into struggle.

The mass demonstrations—and, above all, the mass strikes of the Egyptian working class—were able to topple the US-backed dictator and shake the country’s political establishment to its foundations. However, without establishing its political independence and without a revolutionary party to lead it, the Egyptian working class was not able to overthrow the capitalist state and lay the foundations for achieving its social and democratic aims by ending capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.

Again and again, the Egyptian national bourgeoisie, with the backing of its imperialist patrons, sought to throw up replacements for Mubarak with the aim of subordinating the working class to capitalist rule and imperialist domination. In this operation, it enjoyed the politically critical collaboration of the pseudo-left representatives of privileged layers of the Egyptian middle class organized in the Revolutionary Socialist (RS) group.

Affiliated with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the US, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and elements of the Left Party in Germany, the RS, in each phase of the revolution, worked to channel the revolutionary striving of the Egyptian workers behind one or another faction of the bourgeoisie, first promoting illusions in the military, then backing the Muslim Brotherhood as “the right wing of the revolution” and, as popular opposition to the Mursi government grew, aligning itself once again with the generals and hailing Sisi’s coup as a “second revolution.”

The bitter lesson for the working class in Egypt and workers throughout the world is that the victory of the revolution is impossible outside of establishing the political independence of the working class, in opposition to every faction of the bourgeoisie and their accomplices among the pseudo-left forces in the middle class, who are hostile to a social revolution.

The outcome of the Egyptian Revolution confirms a central tenet of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, developed by Leon Trotsky: that in oppressed countries only the working class can lead the fight for democracy and against imperialism, and that this struggle can be completed only through the overthrow of the capitalist system as part of an international socialist revolution.

The new wave of struggles that is breaking out across the Middle East, and which will inevitably crash down upon the crisis-ridden regime of General Sisi, is intersecting with a far more advanced development of the class struggle internationally than existed in 2011, with mass struggles of teachers and other sections of the working class breaking out in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East itself.

The decisive question is the building of a revolutionary party of the Egyptian working class, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, fighting for workers to take power in Egypt and throughout the Middle East as part of the world socialist revolution.

Perpetrator of Carcassonne and Trèbes terrorist attacks known to French intelligence agencies

Anthony Torres

On March 23, Moroccan-born Redouane Lakdim, 25, carried out terrorist attacks in Carcassonne and Trèbes in southern France. Four people died in the incidents and 16 were wounded, several seriously.

As has been the case with all the significant terrorist attacks in France, this one raises questions about the responsibility of the state and intelligence agencies, which have infiltrated the Islamist networks as part of their war against the Assad regime in Syria.

Lakdim first stopped a car around 10 a.m. Friday morning on the outskirts of Carcassonne, where he lived, seriously wounding the driver and killing his passenger. He drove off in the car and later opened fire on four riot police who were jogging, wounding one. He then entered a supermarket in Trèbes, where he killed two people and took multiple hostages. He shot Arnaud Beltrame, a police lieutenant colonel who had exchanged himself for one of the hostages, multiple times. Beltrame died several hours later.

The terrorist reportedly cried, “Allah Akbar,” and claimed to be a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) before opening fire. According to Minister of the Interior Gérard Collomb (a Socialist Party politician), Lakdim called in particular for the liberation of his “brothers” and declared he was ready to die for Syria. Multiple media outlets, including France 2 national television, reported that Lakdim demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, a principal suspect in the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015.

Lakdim was later killed during an assault by the French tactical police unit, GIGN, on the Super U supermarket.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks. According to a statement by its propaganda arm, the Amaq News Agency, “The man who carried out the attack in Trèbes in the south of France is a soldier of the Islamic State, who was acting in response to a call” by the organisation “aimed at member countries of the coalition” against ISIS.

Friday night, Lakdim’s partner, “who shares his life,” was taken into police custody for “criminal association in a terrorist undertaking,” according to public prosecutor François Molins.

During a press briefing, officials claimed that the “monitoring” of Lakdim for radicalisation had “shown no evidence of a warning sign for the act.” Referring to a “loner” who “passed abruptly to the act,” Collomb declared, “We were following him and believed there had been no radicalisation.”

The theory of a “lone wolf” who, as in every other terrorist attack, slipped through the cracks, is not credible. Lakdim was known to both Spanish and French intelligence. Agence France Presse reports that sources close to the investigation reveal that Lakdim’s 18-year-old girl-friend has also been known to the security services for at least a year.

Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido indicated to journalists that Lakdim “was part of one criminal organisation dedicated to drug trafficking and another which, at an international scale, carried out organised crime.” Lakdim has been known for being “connected with the radical Islamist movement” and linked to arms trafficking since 2014.

During a police search of his house in the summer of 2015, his telephone was searched and his SMS message exchanges revealed orders for a Kalashnikov and ammunition for 7.62mm and 5.56mm calibre guns.

Le Monde headlined its article on the recent episode, “Aude [French department that includes Carcassonne] attacks: Redouane Lakdim, a terrorist followed by DGSI.” The daily newspaper noted that Lakdim was one of the targets “taken into account” by the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), the French intelligence agency. He fit into the “upper-end of the spectrum,” according to Le Monde, where the most dangerous individuals were grouped.

Le Parisien writes that Lakdim was “very active on Salafist [ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic movement] social media networks [and]...suspected of having travelled to Syria.” According to Libération, he was a “Salafist active on the Internet.”

The bloody attack underlines the reactionary character of the Islamist elements that have been armed against Damascus by European and American imperialism. The various intelligence agencies closely watch but also protectthese groups and individuals, because they are taking part in the Syrian intervention and may prove useful in future operations.

In announcing measures aimed at strengthening the police apparatus, the state is aiming above all at growing social opposition in France and across Europe.

The French government is cynically using the death of Beltrame to incite a chauvinist frenzy, as during the demonstrations that followed the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher supermarket in Paris in January 2015.

A national service will be held for the policeman, “taking account of the heroism that he displayed and the example that this represents for the French people,” President Emmanuel Macron, who will deliver a eulogy, stated. Flags will be flown at half-mast.

Right on cue, the leader of the right-wing party, The Republicans, Laurent Wauquiez, called for the “internment of the most dangerous” individuals identified by the intelligence agencies as a threat to national security. Marine Le Pen of the National Front called for the expulsion of all such individuals and the interior minister’s resignation.

But the state of emergency and the extraordinary powers handed the police are not aimed principally at the terrorist networks sending recruits and arms from Europe to the Middle East. Lakdim was part of these criminal networks providing weapons to Islamist groups, which involve thousands of people in France and tens of thousands across Europe. He was not impeded before carrying out the recent attack, whereas the state of emergency was immediately used to suppress protests in France against the labour law in 2016.

These attacks take place in an explosive international and social context. Large strikes of teachers are shaking Britain and the United States, where massive demonstrations of young people are taking place against violence and social conditions. In Europe, strikes have hit the metal sectors of Germany and Turkey, the British railways, and auto plants in Germany and eastern Europe.

In France, tens of thousands of railway drivers, educators, nurses, air-traffic controllers and other public-sector workers have struck against Macron’s right-wing labour reforms. A general strike is continuing on the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, and another has taken place in French Polynesia. The ruling elite is promoting nationalism and preparing police repression to confront the anger of workers facing war and social austerity—not terror attacks by Islamist groups.

The looming threat of global trade war

Nick Beams

US financial markets are experiencing significant turbulence as the implications of the Trump administration’s trade war measures are assessed and re-assessed. So far, the guiding maxim seems to be the old saying, “sell on the news, buy on the rumour.”

When the decision to launch action against China under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, threatening tariffs on up to $60 billion worth of Chinese goods, was announced last Thursday, Wall Street’s Dow Jones index dropped 700 points. A 400-point fall followed the next day.

Last Monday, however, the Dow rose by 600 points—the biggest one-day jump since 2015—on the basis of comments by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that negotiations were being conducted with China. The conclusion was apparently drawn that economic sanity would prevail and perhaps warnings of a global trade war were exaggerated.

However the market fell again on Tuesday—the Dow went down by 350 points, with hi-tech stocks leading the way—on the news that the administration was looking at ways to block Chinese investment in technologies considered by the US to be sensitive.

On Wednesday, the Dow fluctuated from a low of 234 points down, to 129 points up.

The volatility reflects both the highly speculative character of the market’s rise, particularly over the past year, and fears that a global trade war could puncture this bubble.

It is impossible to predict the exact course of events amid moves and counter-moves, proposals for negotiations, and possible concessions by China to reduce its $375 billion trade deficit with the US and offer openings to the Chinese economy. The basic tendency of development is clear, however.

The Trump administration regards China’s development of hi-tech industries under its “Made in China 2025” plan for communications technology, robotics and pharmaceuticals as a threat to the economic position of the US and is determined to use all measures to prevent it.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a leading “America First” advocate in the Trump administration, told a US Senate committee hearing last Thursday: “Our view is that we have a very serious problem of losing our intellectual property, which is really the biggest single advantage of the American economy.”

Besides the introduction of tariffs on Chinese goods, the treasury department is reported to be considering ways to use “national emergency” laws to block Chinese corporations from acquiring firms that have advanced technology.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is examining the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president power to act on the case of an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

The administration’s direction was indicated earlier this month when Trump banned the takeover of the hi-tech firm Qualcomm by Broadcom. On the basis of an investigation by the Committee for Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), he claimed that the takeover would benefit the Chinese firm Huawei in developing 5G communications technology.

Broadcom is not a Chinese company. It was moving to re-domicile to the US after transferring its base to Singapore for tax reasons. But CFIUS claimed that Qualcomm’s financing of the takeover deal would rundown its spending on research and development, opening the way for Huawei to set international standards for 5G.

The Trump administration’s moves have provoked expressions of concern by financial pundits and economic commentators around the world, recalling the disastrous consequences of the protectionism of the 1930s, which deepened the Great Depression and played no small role of creating the conditions for World War II.

In his column on Wednesday, Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf wrote: “The optimistic view is that these are opening moves in a negotiation that will end in a deal. A more pessimistic perspective is that this is a stage in an endless process of fraught negotiations between the two superpowers far into the future. A still more pessimistic view is that trade discussions will break down in a cycle of retaliation, perhaps as part of broader hostilities.”

Wolf pointed out that the hostility toward China began well before Trump. A decade ago, the complaints were about its current account surpluses and undervalued exchange rate and accumulation of reserves. But the surplus has fallen to just 1.4 percent of gross domestic product and the complaints have shifted to bilateral imbalances with the US, forced transfers of technology, excess capacity and China’s foreign direct investment.

Noting that the world was in a “new era of strategic competition,” Wolf offered no way forward. He merely expressed the hope that China would take the longer view and offer concessions “for its own sake and the sake of the world.”

But the conception that the economic conflicts could be overcome if only politicians search for a “golden mean” or the Trump measures are merely a negotiating ploy ignores the underlying objective economic driving forces of the present conflict.

The Trump administration is not going to be deterred by the fact that its actions threaten to bring down the entire post-war system of economic and trading relations, which the US put in place, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then via the World Trade Organisation. Washington regards that very system as being responsible for the weakening of the economic position of the US vis-à-vis its old rivals, such as Germany and Japan, and emerging new ones, above all China.

This assessment has not sprung from the fevered brains of Trump and his “America First” acolytes in the White House. It was already being made by the Obama administration.

Its two key global economic initiatives—the Trans Pacific Partnership, directed toward Asia, to the exclusion of China, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, directed toward Europe—were aimed at countering the relative decline of the US.

In the words of Obama’s US Trade Representative Michael Froman, writing in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, in 2014, Obama’s policy sought to “make the United States even more attractive to investors by positioning the country at the centre of a web of agreements that will provide unfettered access to two-thirds of the global economy.”

The countries that signed the proposed deals would gain privileged access to the US market in return for concessions, especially in the regulation of intellectual property rights. This was already a repudiation of the basic principles of the post-war trading order, which maintained that concessions offered to one country should be offered to all, in order to prevent the formation of trading blocs that produced such disastrous consequences in the past.

Obama’s policy was not labelled “America First” but that was its essential content—the creation of a vast bloc centring on the US.

Outlining the reasons for the change in the US position, Froman wrote: “Washington faces unprecedented constraints in crafting trade policy. The United States no longer holds the dominant position as it did at the end of World War II, and it must build trade coalitions willing to work towards consensus positions.”

The Trump administration has scrapped both the Obama administration proposals but the orientation Obama initiated, flowing from the recognition that global economic tides were moving against the US and undermining its supremacy, has been continued and deepened.

In 1934, as war clouds were gathering, Leon Trotsky explained that the policies of the right-wing nationalist, fascist and authoritarian regimes of that time were a “utopia” and a “lie” insofar as they set the “official task of a harmonious national economy on the basis of private property.” But, he continued, they were a “menacing reality insofar as it is a question of concentrating all the economic forces of the nation for the preparation of a new war” which was “knocking at the gates.”

Whatever the twists and turns of events, Trotsky’s remarks point directly to the meaning and historical significance of the Trump regime’s measures.

ICE uses Facebook data to locate and track suspects

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

In an article published this week, the Intercept has revealed yet another troubling trend in the anti-immigrant measures that are being institutionalized by the US government. Based on a public records request made by reporters, it was found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not only has access to the vast trove of data available on Facebook, but has actually used backend Facebook data to locate and track suspects.

The story details one instance in February-March 2017, when ICE agents were in contact with a detective based in Las Cruces, New Mexico about a particular suspect. The email chain between various agents reveal that ICE could access Facebook data showing the log of when the account was accessed and the IP address corresponding to each login. Responding to the story, a Facebook spokesperson denied that ICE had any unique access to data and that its request for information was “checked for legal sufficiency.” In this particular case, “ICE sent valid legal process … in an investigation said to involve an active child predator.” Facebook “responded to ICE’s valid request with data consistent with our publicly available data disclosure standards.”

While the initial version of the Intercept story mentioned that the target was an immigrant, this has been denied by both ICE and Facebook. The story was later amended to state that the documents “reported in the story do not establish the target of the investigation was an immigrant or that the individual was being pursued for immigration violations.”

It is possible that the particular instance exposed in this report did not concern an immigrant, though that makes the involvement of ICE questionable. Even if one were to take that seemingly far-fetched claim at face value, it is a matter of record that ICE requested private Facebook data last year to obtain a cellphone number for an unauthorized immigrant in Detroit. The number associated with the immigrant being pursued by ICE was then tracked through a cell site simulator, a powerful surveillance tool used to vacuum up cellphone calls and user location data.

Law enforcement agencies have a broad reach under the “Stored Communications Act” to ask communication service providers, including Facebook, to release information pertinent to ongoing cases. The kind of data that can be accessed by agencies such as ICE is quite extensive and much of it can be obtained without court orders.

Facebook, now under additional scrutiny and pressure to reveal how and with whom it shares information because of the Cambridge Analytica exposé, has released semi-annual transparency reports in the past detailing the number of government requests for user data. While there is no breakdown of which particular law agency has made the requests, the report from last year is quite telling. It reveals that from January 2017 through June 2017, Facebook received 32,716 requests for data from 52,280 users. Facebook notes in its report that it complied with 85 percent of the requests and “approximately 57 percent of legal process we received from authorities in the U.S. was accompanied by a non-disclosure order legally prohibiting us from notifying the affected users.”

As Nathan Wessler, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the Intercept, the subpoenas used by ICE and other agencies are in fact nothing but “a piece of paper that they’ve prepared ahead of time, a form, and they fill in a couple of pieces of information about what they’re looking for and they self-certify what they’re looking for is relevant to an ongoing investigation.” Most companies tend to comply with these requests.

Facebook is just one part of the vast array of the spyware apparatus used by immigration enforcement officials. As even the story of the “non-immigrant” suspect shows, ICE did not stop with getting the backend data from Facebook. This data, one agent claimed, could be combined with “IP address information back from T-Mobile,” and that the agency had “sent the phone company an expedited summons for information.” Jen Miller, another agent on the same email chain, is quoted as saying: “I am going to see if our Palantir guy is here to dump the Western Union info in there since I know there is a way to triangulate the area he’s sending money from and narrow down time of day etc.”

Palantir is the $20 billion data-mining firm founded by billionaire Trump campaign supporter Peter Thiel. As reported by Spencer Woodman in the Intercept last year, Palantir received a $41 million ICE contract in 2014, to build and administer Investigative Case Management (ICM), an intelligence system that was considered to be “mission critical” to the agency. The article points out that this system allows ICE agents to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate both the discovering of targets and then the creation and administering of cases against them.

The system provides its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by numerous agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It can provide ICE agents access to information on a subject’s schooling, family relationships, employment information, phone records, immigration history, foreign exchange program status, personal connections, biometric traits, criminal records, and home and work addresses. As young people and teachers throughout the US and the world are increasingly organizing on social media, the use of these platforms by the state spying apparatus will continue to grow.

It is worth noting that this system as well as the general trend to upgrade the federal government’s push to deport immigrants took place not under the current administration, but during the Obama era. The Obama presidency not only oversaw the maximum number of deportations in US history, but also the very conscious and systematic expansion of the surveillance and intelligence gathering network directed at immigrants.

Now, this surveillance network is in the hands of the Trump administration that has made no bones about its rabid anti-immigrant stance and its willingness to continue the abrogation of constitutional rights as well as international humanitarian law.

Quebec nurses rebel against forced overtime, budget cuts

Louis Girard

Nurses and other health care workers across Quebec have taken action to protest against draconian working conditions and a drastic decline in patient care due to years of austerity. They are demanding an end to compulsory overtime, the hiring of more nurses and other health care professionals, and a reduction in workloads through reduced, and strictly enforced, patient-nurse ratios.

In recent weeks, nurses at hospitals in Laval, the province’s third-largest city, Sorel-Tracy, and Trois-Rivières have resorted to job action, refusing to start their shifts and holding “sit-ins” until additional staff were called in, to protest the chronic lack of personnel.

Thousands of nurses and other health care workers have also taken to social media to voice their outrage at the state of Quebec’s public health care system. Facebook messages posted by two nurses have been shared tens of thousands of times and have attracted an avalanche of supportive comments, many from other nurses with similar experiences.

In the first message, Emilie Ricard, a young Sherbrooke nurse, explained that she had been responsible for more than 70 patients throughout her shift with just two aides and a nursing assistant to help her. In the other message, shared more than 75,000 times, Joanne Leclerc, a nursing assistant from Sorel-Tracy, denounced the fact that when she refused mandatory overtime she was suspended.

Forced overtime is increasingly the norm in hospitals across Canada. In Quebec it mushroomed in the wake of the hospital closures, massive budgets cuts, and elimination of 12,000 nursing positions that the Parti Québécois (PQ) governments of Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard imposed in the 1990s. It has increased further in recent years due to another savage round of budget cuts, this time administered by the PQ’s federalist opponents, the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard.

According to a study, when nurses’ overtime hours increase 5 percent, the patient mortality rate increases 3 percent. Many Quebec nurses are routinely forced to work double shifts,

The nurses’ protests have forced the corporate media, which has enthusiastically supported Couillard’s austerity drive, to report on the deplorable conditions that prevail in Quebec hospitals, though in a very limited way. Articles have appeared on out-of-breath and harried health care workers—not only nurses, but also doctors in residence, who work an average of more than 70 hours per week, respiratory therapists, social workers, and nursing aides. According to a recent survey conducted by the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ—Interprofessional Health Federation), the union that represents the majority of Quebec’s nurses, 30 percent of its 75,000 members are considering quitting their jobs.

However, FIQ has come to the help of the provincial Liberal government in seeking to prevent the incipient rebellion among the nurses from becoming the catalyst for a broader mobilization of public sector workers and the working class as a whole against the ruling elite’s drive to dismantle public services and gut worker rights.

At the conclusion of one of the many emergency meetings between FIQ leaders and Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, the architect of the latest wave of health care cuts, FIQ President Nancy Bédard described the meetings as “very positive.” “We have a [government] commitment to pilot [patient-nurse] ratios in 16 regions of Quebec,” she gushed, adding, “I am confident the Treasury will put up the necessary funds [for the hiring of staff].”

Bédard represents an organization that, in conjunction with the larger Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ), Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) and Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), has repeatedly isolated and sabotaged militant nurses’ struggles, while politically harnessing them to the big business PQ.

FIQ’s latest maneuver is aimed at dissipating and derailing their challenge to chronic understaffing. Barrette has made it clear that there will be no law regulating patient-nurse ratios. These will continue to be decided by health care institutions whose budgets have been ravaged by years of austerity.

As for the “necessary funds” to improve public services, the true attitude of the Liberal government was revealed in the cynical statement of Premier Couillard that “We are in a public health system where, all the time—in the future too—resources are never at the same level as needs.”

The conditions experienced by nurses and their patients are the product of decades of cuts administered by successive provincial PQ and Liberal government to health care and all public services, and of the massive cuts federal Liberal and Conservative governments have made in the funds that Ottawa provides the provinces to fund Medicare, post-secondary education and welfare.

For the ruling elite, the ravaging of health care budgets is not only a means of slashing taxes for big business and the rich. It is meant to erode the strong popular support for a universal, state-funded health care system and thereby politically prepare the wholesale privatization of health care.

In this regard, Quebec is very much in the lead. Over the past decade, Liberal and PQ governments have fostered the growth of privately-owned diagnostic clinics and, in the name of efficiency, have given the green light for various medical procedures to be administered by for-profit clinics, although the cost is still borne by the state.

Under Bill 20, the health “reform law,” Barrette and the Liberals pushed through two years ago, not only did the government fuse health care institutions, eliminating large numbers of administrative jobs. It took an important step toward privatization by establishing the principle that every medical service should be “monetized,” with a price, determined with the aid of private health providers, attached to it.

The turn by the nurses to spontaneous job actions and Facebook protests, independent of the unions, is an indictment of the FIQ and the whole trade union bureaucracy. Time after time, the union leaders have torpedoed struggles of health care and public sector workers—most infamously in the case of the nurses in 1999, when they rebelled against the disastrous consequences of the austerity measures of the Bouchard PQ government and mounted an illegal strike, only ultimately to be forced back to work under the threat of severe sanctions.

Régine Laurent, who headed the FIQ from 2009 until last December, revealed in a recent interview the essential role that the unions have played in quelling the opposition among workers and enabling the ruling class to move forward with its plans for social demolition. “I was here in both strikes, in 1989 and 1999,” she explained. “And in the last two negotiations, in my head there was something that was clear. I never said it publicly, but for me it was clear that we had to use every means except strike action.”

In 2015 more than half a million Quebec public sector workers repeatedly demonstrated their determination to fight the latest government assault on their working conditions. But the Inter-union Common Front—in which the FIQ decided not to participate, the better to isolate the nurses—dissipated this anger in futile protest actions and steadfastly opposed linking the contract struggle over the workers’ terms of employment to any broader mobilization against the government’s austerity measures.

For months, the union bureaucrats refused to discuss, let alone warn workers, about the government’s plans to enact an emergency law illegalizing job action and imposing concessionary contracts by government decree. Such a discussion would have raised the need for workers to launch a political struggle against the Couillard government on the basis of a broad appeal to workers throughout Quebec and Canada for the defense of all jobs, wages and public services.

Then, as support for a province-wide unlimited strike developed, the union leaders, working according to a now familiar script, abandoned the workers’ demands, signed sellout agreements, and invoked the imminent threat of an emergency law and government-dictated contracts to force through their ratification.

Québec Solidaire (QS), the pseudo-left party that has three seats in the Quebec legislature, organized a demonstration in February of a few hundred people in Montreal to “support” the nurses. Their main demand, however, was for Barrette’s resignation. The purpose of the rally was thus not to prepare the mobilization of the workers against the austerity program of the Couillard government, but to help the union leaders defuse the crisis. QS played a similar role in 2015, when it lent support to the anti-worker maneuvers of the union bureaucrats, and in 2012 when it helped the unions politically harness the Quebec student strike to the big business PQ.

US sells Poland Patriot anti-missile system amid continued campaign against Russia

Bill Van Auken

The Pentagon and Poland Wednesday signed a $4.75 billion deal to sell the eastern European country the Patriot anti-missile system.

While Poland’s extreme right-wing government hailed the arms deal, the largest in the country’s history, it will undoubtedly further stoke tensions between the West and Moscow, which has viewed the deployment of such systems as part of a concerted effort by Washington and its allies to undermine Russia’s ability to defend itself against a nuclear attack.

“It is an extraordinary, historic moment; it is Poland’s introduction into a whole new world of state-of-the-art technology, modern weaponry, and defensive means,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said during the signing ceremony, which was held at an armaments factory before a column of Polish troops.

“It’s a lot of money, but we also know from our historical experience that security has no price,” said Duda, whose authoritarian regime will no doubt extract the money to pay for the missiles through redoubled attacks on the living standards of Polish workers.

The Polish arms deal has been inked in the midst of a coordinated international campaign led by London and Washington to indict Moscow for the poisoning of the ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the southern English city of Salisbury on March 4.

Russia has denied any involvement in the poisoning, which the British authorities have claimed was carried out with a nerve agent “of a type” (Novichok) that had once been manufactured in the Soviet Union and that it was “highly likely” that the attack was the work of Russia.

Without presenting any evidence to substantiate these accusations—much less any conceivable motive for Moscow to carry out such an action on the eve of the presidential election in Russia—the British Conservative government of Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats.

London has refused Moscow’s requests to supply a sample of the alleged nerve agent used in the attack, as is required by international chemical weapons treaties. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Wednesday charging that the attitude of the May government shows that “UK authorities are not interested in finding out the motives and those responsible for the crime in Salisbury and suggests that the British intelligence services are involved in it.”

Washington joined this anti-Russian crusade, ordering the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomatic personnel and the closing of the Russian consulate in Seattle, while joining with London in pressuring other countries to follow suit. More than 20 other countries responded with expulsions. Most of these countries took only token actions, however, involving one or two Russian diplomats. Nine members of the EU took no action. The only expulsion of more than four diplomats in Europe came from the rabidly anti-Russian government of Ukraine, which ordered 13 Russian diplomats to leave the country.

Poland, which along with Germany, France and Canada was one of the countries expelling four Russians, has long served as a pillar of the military buildup by the US and NATO against Russia.

Since the coming to office of the Trump administration, Washington has openly promoted the forging of closer ties to Warsaw and other eastern European governments, reviving the so-called Intermarium project of the 1920s, in which the US sought an alliance with fascistic and right-wing regimes in the region directed against both the Soviet Union and the rise of Germany as a continental hegemon.

The turn toward Eastern Europe is in large part a response to mounting tensions between Washington and Germany, which is increasingly seeking its own great power interests, including through commercial and other ties with Russia. While Berlin joined with the UK, France and the US in signing a joint declaration blaming Russia for the Skripal poisoning, there exist sharp divisions within the German ruling establishment and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition government over the issue.

“We must do everything possible to prevent a new Cold War with Russia,” Social Democrat Gernot Erler, the government coordinator for Russia, told the Passauer Neue Presse.

Other prominent Social Democrats went further. Former European Commissioner Guenter Verheugen questioned the objective basis for the sanctions. “The view that if in doubt, ‘Putin and the Russians are responsible for everything’, is one that poisons thought and must stop,” he told the Augsburger Allgemeine.

Such views reflect the concerns of major German corporate and financial interests, whose profits are tied up with the Russian market.

The German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, whose members include some 200 German companies, warned against “over-hasty conclusions” over the Skripal affair leading to a “spiral of escalation.”

Just one day after it expelled a handful of Russian diplomats, the German government on Tuesday announced final approval for the construction and operation of the Russia-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which will pipe Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The project has been bitterly opposed by both Washington and its Eastern European allies.

It is no doubt such tensions that the US defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, had in mind when he told reporters at the Pentagon that Russia was “trying to break the unity of the Western alliance.” Mattis claimed that it was “pretty obvious” that Russia was responsible for the attack on Skripal and charged Moscow with having “chosen to be a strategic competitor, even to the point of reckless activity.”

The sharp divisions that have emerged among the NATO powers notwithstanding, there are continuous signs that active preparations are underway for war with Russia.

Senior US military officers speaking at the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Symposium on Monday issued warnings that the Pentagon must “dramatically increase the range of the service’s artillery and missile systems to counter a Russian threat that would leave ground forces without air support in the ‘first few weeks’ of a war in Europe,” the website military.com reported. The American military, the officers revealed, is working on a number of new weapons systems designed to counteract superior Russian air defense systems that would preclude the operation of fixed-wing aircraft.

“We’ve got to push the maximum range of all systems under development for close, deep and strategic, and we have got to outgun the enemy,” Gen. Robert Brown, commanding general of United States Army Pacific Command, told an audience of military officers and defense contractors.

Meanwhile, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, announced Wednesday that it has launched an initiative to create a “military Schengen zone,” allowing NATO military forces to freely cross European borders. The military project is being unveiled even as right-wing nationalist and anti-immigrant European politicians, including Germany’s new Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, are openly rejecting the original Schengen Agreement, in effect for over two decades, which allows border-control-free travel between the 26 European countries that signed on to it.

EU transport commissioner Violeta Bulc told reporters that the aim was to ensure “quick and seamless mobility across the continent. This is a matter of collective security.”

In addition to removing border controls, she said that investments would be made to assure that key corridors would be capable of handling tanks and heavy military vehicles. “We must be able to quickly deploy troops either within the EU or rapidly launch military operations abroad and to do so we need infrastructure that is fit for the purpose.”

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Col. Gen. Alexander Fomin responded to the announcement by stating that the real goal was to “fast-track to the maximum extent ... deployment towards Russia’s borders.”

He also told the Russian Defense Ministry’s official newspaper that the US and NATO were creating arsenals of weapons, ammunition and food supplies in various countries, including Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, to prepare for war with Russia.