The Asgaard security firm: Neo-Nazi networks in German army and police

Jan Ritter

News magazine Der Spiegel and public broadcaster ARD’s “Kontraste” television programme reported earlier this month on a wide-ranging right-wing extremist network associated with the Asgaard security firm, which reportedly has close ties to Germany’s military, police and state apparatus.

Asgaard advertises among and employs former and active police officers and soldiers, who were described by Kontraste as highly specialised men. The firm is hired, for example, to guard the diplomatic offices of an Arabian power in Iraq, with rumours indicating that the power in question is Saudi Arabia. Asgaard’s headquarters in Iraq was located in 2017 inside the Green Zone, the strictly guarded area of central Baghdad where the government and international representatives are located, and from where the imperialist forces active in the country are commanded.

A breeding ground for Wehrmacht traditions and fascist ideology

A video recently published from the same year shows the fascist Wehrmacht traditions on which the firm and its employees base themselves. Whiteboards, operational plans and several rooms are covered in old German script. A military flag of the German Reich hangs prominently in a waiting room above some seats. In the hallway of the base, the Wehrmacht slogan “Don’t complain, fight!” is shown in old German script alongside a picture of a Wehrmacht soldier.

Asgaard advertisement on Twitter

During their operations as bodyguards in Iraq, the mercenaries wore the German flag on the breasts and arms of their uniform. In 2017, Dirk Gaßmann, the head of the firm, employed 25 men who had previously served as German soldiers in Iraq. Most of them were paratroopers, but there were also some mountain troopers and grenadiers, “but all of them are alpha animals,” as he boasted in an interview with the right-wing Bild daily in 2017.

Gaßmann is a former paratrooper in the German army and has, according to “Kontraste,” close contacts in Germany’s national security apparatus. Gaßmann and his colleagues make no effort to conceal their far-right, fascistic outlook. A photo taken at a party held by the firm shows Gaßmann posing with the bust of a Wehrmacht soldier. Laughing, he points with his finger to a swastika within an Iron Cross, which is on the plinth of the bust.

On social media, Gaßmann agitates against Muslims and propagates the traditions of the Wehrmacht. He sought to recruit people for his firm by remarking in a discussion on Wehrmacht songs that had been banned, “Bobby, you are still allowed to sing in Baghdad. No problem.” This shows that he deliberately seeks to hire people from the right-wing extremist milieu.

Asgaard’s headquarters is located in Hamm in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Torsten W., who is alleged to have supported the terrorist cell Group S, worked in the Hamm transport police commission. His right-wing extremist views were reportedly well known among his colleagues at the police station.

The firm’s Hamm headquarters appears to have played a central role in the right-wing extremist network around Dirk Gaßmann. A meeting between former and active police officers and soldiers took place there in July 2020. Their social media posts make clear their association with right-wing extremist circles.

A former Asgaard employee, who was in Iraq with the firm and is friends with Gaßmann on Facebook, shared a white clenched fist. “White lives matter,” was written around the neo-Nazi symbol. Maps showing Germany’s borders during the Third Reich and under the Kaiser were also posted.

“I am German, if I wrote now what I think, I would be behind bars tomorrow,” stated one meme, while another comment complained that the “pure white race” only makes up a few percent of the global population. Bilal Zaher, a former employee and business partner of Gaßmann’s, told “Kontraste” that employees at the Baghdad base were referred to as “token n----rs.”

Photojournalist Daniel Etter, who accompanied an Asgaard unit for three weeks in Iraq during an operation in 2014, described how they regularly used Völkisch and extremely racist remarks. “The issue of German blood, actually Germany’s past, was repeatedly raised in various forms,” he said. The racist ideology formed the basis of collaboration at Asgaard.

Close ties with the police and state apparatus

Likely one of the central figures in the meeting at Asgaard’s premises in July 2020 was the 41-year-old Thomas S., a police officer from Frankfurt. At the time, he led an investigations team within the Frankfurt police. According to “Kontraste” research, he was a long-serving employee of the security firm and belonged to the leadership circle around Gaßmann. Photos show him heavily armed and wearing an Asgaard uniform in Iraq.

According to Bilal Zaher, Thomas S. was repeatedly appointed commando leader during operations. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ( FAZ ) also reported that he was involved in training and evaluating colleagues. Until recently, the firm advertised its services on its website with a picture of S. under the heading “Asgaard academy—a qualification for professionals.”

Then in August, both S.’s private living quarters and Asgaard’s headquarters were searched. The Frankfurt public prosecutor had initiated an investigation due to suspected bribery and the violation of secret police protocols. According to the public prosecutor, S. had undertaken “an unreported and therefore unauthorised side-job for a private security firm in North Rhine-Westphalia allegedly influenced by right-wing extremism, including in foreign countries.”

The statement from the public prosecutor continued that S. “carried out unlawful accessing of information from police databanks in order to use the information he obtained to personally enrich himself in his side job.”

In Frankfurt during 2018, the personal details of the lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz, who had represented victims of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist group, among others, were accessed from the 1st Police Precinct. Several days later, she received a letter containing threats that was signed “NSU 2.0.” As the FAZ recently reported, a total of 105 threatening letters have come to light, with 88 bearing the signature “NSU 2.0.”

The Frankfurt public prosecutor has been investigating these threats for over two years. According to the FAZ, sources in the state security apparatus said the number of threats has risen dramatically recently, but not a single perpetrator has yet been identified. The public prosecutor and the Hesse state Interior Ministry have denied any connection between the Thomas S. case and NSU 2.0, as well as the suggestion that S. holds right-wing extremist views.

A further participant in the July 2020 meeting at Asgaard’s premises was Matthias D., a 40-year-old army soldier from Neubrandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. According to Kontraste, he maintains close ties to right-wing extremist circles, and has been under surveillance by the military intelligence service (MAD) since 2018 as a right-wing extremist suspect. As a result, Matthias D., who is also a former kickboxing world champion, allegedly threatened to kill MAD employees.

Two weeks ago, on September 14, around 70 officers from the Rostock public prosecutor’s office searched D.’s apartment and storage facilities, and confiscated several electrical appliances and documents on the basis that he was preparing to carry out an act of violence endangering the state.

Such plans, which aim at launching a fascist assault on “Day X” by carrying out the mass murder of political opponents, are deeply rooted in the organs of the state. This applies especially to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. This was where leading members of the Nordkreuz (Northern Cross) group were organised in the reservist association Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and where Philipp Sch., a soldier in the German special forces regiment (KSK), was able to amass an arms dump with thousands of rounds of ammunition, 2 kilograms of plastic explosives, and a wide array of Nazi memorabilia.

Two police officers were suspended from duty in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on September 18 after their houses were searched. They are accused of sharing right-wing extremist views online, according to a Der Spiegel report on September 19. The searches were linked to the investigation into the Nordkreuz terrorist group. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s interior minister, the Christian Democrat Lorenz Kaffier, denied any link with the right-wing extremist chat groups in the police in North-Rhine Westphalia.

After eight special forces officers with the state criminal police (LKA) were suspended in the course of investigations into the Nordkreuz group in late 2019, Kaffier ordered the LKA’s director, Ingolf Mager, and the head of the police department, Frank Niehörster, to be transferred into his department instead of removing them from service. The pair had “performed excellent work” and are “renowned experts in their field,” said the interior minister at the time. They would “continue to be important advisers” to him.

Prior to that, Kaffier appointed an independent commission of experts led by Heinz Fromm, a former official with the domestic intelligence agency, whose secret report claimed the SEK units had shown perfect conduct. The report appears aimed at concealing the extent of the conspiracy. Fromm is notorious for destroying files related to the NSU during his time at the intelligence agency.

Focus reported on September 17 that Thomas Haldenwang, the head of the federal domestic intelligence agency, employed a bodyguard who is a member of the right-wing paramilitary Uniter group. A government official stated that it is possible that personal information and secret files made their way into the hands of Uniter as a result. The Uniter club, which presented itself as a support organisation for elite soldiers, police officers, and private security guards, is suspected of having been a right-wing centre of the “Hannibal network,” which planned a fascist uprising on “Day X,” established weapons dumps, and planned to exterminate political opponents.

Kaffier was the patron on several occasions of a competition for elite soldiers, which was featured in a report on ZDF television entitled “Attack from Within.” It characterised the competition as the transfer point for the Hannibal network’s munitions procurement. Within this framework, trainers from GSG-9, USk, SEK and other European special forces met at a private shooting range in Güstrow every year. Photos of the celebration of the winners show Kaffier socialising with the elite troops.

The operator of the private shooting range, Frank T., was given a contract from Kaffier’s Interior Ministry and was apparently a member of Nordkreuz. ZDF reported that close ties existed between the operator of the private shooting range and Marco G., the leading figure in the Nordkreuz group. The broadcast cited an “activity protocol for Nordkreuz,” which Frank T. sent to Marco G. It states, “The better the communication, the easier it will be to gather on ‘Day X.’ But until then, the job of each of us is to avoid causing attention as much as possible.”

The former Asgaard employee Bilal Zaher confirmed to “Kontraste” that Gaßmann regularly spoke about Day X, when he would kill politicians he doesn’t like. A further former employee at Asgaard wanted to remain anonymous because he fears for his life. “I believe Dirk G. is unpredictable and dangerous. He spoke regularly of a Day X, he told the public broadcaster magazine.

Zaher also said that the Iraqi headquarters of the firm was known internally as the “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s bunker on the Eastern Front. The same praise of the Wehrmacht’s traditions is shown on Gaßmann’s Facebook page, where he praises the Wehrmacht commander Kurt Student as inspiring.

Student was a senior commander of the paratroopers during the Third Reich and was responsible for numerous war crimes. For example, in 1941, he ordered acts of retribution against the local population in Greece due to their resistance to Nazi occupation. Student also planned the deployment of German paratroopers to liberate Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini after he was removed from power and arrested in 1943. “As a former paratrooper with its family traditions, Gen. Student is for me privately a model soldier,” Gaßmann told Der Spiegel.

He was merely saying openly what leading representatives of the ruling class think. In the Franz-Josef-Strauß barracks in Munich, a street was dedicated to “lieutenant general Student” until 1998. Student died at the age of 88 in 1978. In 2017, Der Spiegel published an interview with the military historian Sünke Neitzel, which glorified the Wehrmacht and trivialised the Nazi regime’s crimes. One can “act in an exemplary manner even for a regime in total war...such as by leading people or being a successful soldier,” he said. In the same year, Alternative for Germany leader Alexander Gaulland demanded that a line be drawn under Germany’s Nazi past, and the recognition of the “positive achievements of German soldiers in two World Wars.”

One year later, the grand coalition adopted a traditions regulation that permitted the glorification of individual Wehrmacht personnel, and downplayed the criminal character of the regime. The “voluntary military service for homeland defence,” which is scheduled to launch next April, permits neo-Nazis to receive military training while being paid by the state.

Fascist traditions and organisations are being deliberately promoted to revive German militarism, prepare for new wars, and suppress the strong opposition to this. The struggle against these dangerous developments requires the independent mobilisation of the working class on a socialist programme.

Sri Lankan government lies exposed as new COVID-19 infections emerge

Pradeep Ramanayaka

Last Thursday, a Russian visitor, who was staying in a tourist hotel in the crowded city of Matara, in southern Sri Lanka, tested positive for COVID-19. News about the case created widespread anxiety and some panic amongst the city’s residents. Many parents rushed to their local schools to bring their children home immediately.

The justifiable concern exposes the general distrust, within the population, of the boasts and false assurances of the Rajapakse government to have controlled the spread of the pandemic.

Soldiers checking a worker before he boards a train in Colombo (Credit: WSWS)

Since the incident, a number of those in contact with the Russian individual have been placed under quarantine, while health officials are reportedly considering a lockdown in the city, after discovering that he had visited several public places there.

In a situation where the Rajapakse government has already abandoned almost all social healthcare measures, the consequences could be devastating, if the virus has spread within the community. All schools, offices, factories and other work places on the island are now functioning normally. The over-crowded public transport system, along with congestion in workplaces, could pave the way for a catastrophe.

In Sri Lanka, the number of COVID-19 cases reported so far is 3,360 and 13 deaths, with several thousand people still in quarantine. Due to the inadequacy of diagnostic tests, the number of actual infections is most likely higher than the officially reported cases.

The government cites the relatively low number of cases, deliberately ignoring the fact that this is a global pandemic, to justify the bogus claim that Sri Lanka has successfully dealt with the coronavirus and that people do not have to worry. This lie is being peddled, as tens of thousands of Sri Lankans, who travelled to the Middle-East and other countries for employment, have been forced to languish in these countries, against their will and at the grave risk of infection, due to the government’s refusal to repatriate them.

Statements made by health officials have revealed that the infected Russian man was not tested for the virus when he entered the island, as a result of the negligence of the authorities. Public Health Inspectors Union of Sri Lanka president Upul Rohana said that neither the local Public Health Inspectors (PHI) nor the Medical Officers of Health (MOH) were informed about the arrival of the aircraft and the crew, with whom the infected person travelled.

Although the Rajapakse government has largely ignored the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic it is spreading rapidly around the world. On September 23, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a record one-day high of 316,036 new cases of COVID-19 globally. According to COVID-19 figures, the global death toll is nearly one million, while there are already more than 7.5 million active cases. The United States, Brazil, and neighbouring India remain epicentres of the global pandemic, signaling that further infections are likely.

Although health experts, including the WHO, have repeatedly insisted that measures such as social distancing and personal hygiene should not be relaxed, the Rajapakse government has disregarded this advice, pretending that there is no longer any obstacle to moving the capitalist economy forward. The lives of workers, school children, teachers and the rest of the population are being sacrificed in order to boost corporate profits.

The government’s decision to allow the Colombo Annual Book Fair to occur, for “Literature Month,” is another gross violation of the health measures required to crack down on COVID-19. The book fair, which normally attracts tens of thousands, was held from September 18 to 27 at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall in Colombo. This was deliberately allowed to take place in order to counter the concerns of ordinary people about any hasty lifting of the lockdown.

The country’s Chief Epidemiologist Dr. Sudath Samaraweera, from the epidemiology unit of the health ministry, stated that it was not advisable to hold such mass gatherings, due to the coronavirus. He insisted: “There are certain technical difficulties in holding such an event at present and it poses a threat to the citizens.”

“In the event an individual infected with COVID-19 enters the premises, it will be difficult to conduct contact tracing, due to the large volume of people attending the book fair,” he pointed out. But the government simply ignores such warnings because it is determined to resume events as usual.

One of the arguments used by Rajapakse as he “normalises” the country is that Sri Lanka has a strong health system, which can act to control the COVID-19 pandemic. In a keynote address on September 5 to a group of medical graduates, he boasted that Sri Lanka had achieved outstanding success in preventing the coronavirus, while some of the most developed countries in the world were unable to adequately respond to it.

Promoting the reason for that “success,” he said: “I am also proud to say that Sri Lanka, despite still being a developing country, has managed to face this situation very successfully because of our free healthcare system.”

These statements are simply false. Given the parlous state of the public health service, it cannot deal with the overall health needs of the country, even in normal times. Health officials have been extremely concerned at the devastation that could ensue if the extremely limited number of emergency treatment units is exceeded.

Despite having 34.7 intensive care unit (ICU) beds per 100,000 people, the United States became an epicentre of the virus. The figure is 12.5 in Italy, which faced the worst disaster in Europe. It is clear that the Sri Lankan healthcare system, with a capacity of just over two ICU beds per 100,000 people, could not cope with a major spread of the disease.

According to a survey published this month by the Deep Knowledge Group, an international think tank, Sri Lanka is ranked 92nd in the world, in terms of its ability to protect its population from the COVID-19 pandemic. While Germany has been listed as the safest country in the world, it has nevertheless reported 264,000 positive cases and approximately 10,000 deaths. Even neighbouring India, with more than five million infections and more than 90,000 deaths, ranks as number 80, twelve places above Sri Lanka.

The extent to which any country is currently under attack from COVID-19 was not relevant in the report’s preparation. Its main concerns are the level of political commitment to quarantine and locking down, the nature of management between national and local governments, the quality and capacity of medical care, the impact of the pandemic on the country’s economy, and the ability to manage emergencies.

When considering the quarantine facilities—a primary concern of the report—the Sri Lankan government reported that the maximum number of people able to be quarantined at any one time in Sri Lanka is 7,000. Because of this limitation, the government has reduced the repatriation of workers working abroad, putting tens of thousands of Sri Lankans in danger of the pandemic.

Another major factor that exposes the government’s empty boasts is the low capacity for PCR tests. The total number of tests carried out so far is less than 300,000. No tests have been performed on randomly selected samples from the community, while the number of daily tests averages a maximum of just 2,000. And the tests are limited to only those who have associated with infected people and with people from overseas.

The cash-strapped Rajapakse government has no plans to develop high-capacity hospitals and testing facilities or prepare adequate amounts of the personal protective equipment needed in the event of a major outbreak. For all its boasting, it has neither the ability nor the intention to allocate the necessary funds to implement such a broad program.

More than 2,000 schools in UK hit by COVID-19 outbreaks as thousands of children and staff sent home

Tom Pearce

Almost four weeks into the full reopening of UK schools by the Conservative government and the lie that schools were ever “COVID-19 secure” has been shattered.

This week, almost one in five positive tests in England were in the under-19 age group, 19.7 percent of all tests. Latest figures form the Weekly Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) surveillance report show that educational settings account for 45 percent of positive cases.

Confirmed outbreaks of COVID-19 had hit 2,072 schools by noon Monday. Of these, 1,483 schools are in England, 313 Wales, 166 Scotland and 110 in Northern Ireland, according to research complied by the Tory Fibs organisation. Many schools have suffered multiple infections.

Thousands of children are being sent home to self-isolate, in some cases to isolate with vulnerable parents.

The government is keeping no central record of infections in schools, but the huge scale of what is being concealed was revealed by Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson. He tweeted Monday, “New infections of COVID-19 in this last week in Liverpool is 1,254, this has increased the numbers infected to approx. 5,000, it is doubling every six days. There are currently 8,000 school children at home self-isolating and over 350 teachers & staff.”

All 1,700 pupils were sent home to isolate at one Liverpool school, after testing revealed 48 asymptomatic positive pupils—confirming in-school transmission—reported the Skwawkbox blog yesterday.

Matt Ashton, Liverpool’s director of public health, reported that there were 242 positive coronavirus infections per 100,000 people in the week to September 24. This compares to Bolton’s 211 cases per 100,000, previously the highest rate in the UK. He said Liverpool’s cases were doubling every eight to nine days and 12.8 percent of people being tested were confirmed positive, which is classed as a high rate. There were infections in all age groups and “sharp increases” in COVID hospital admissions. He warned “increases in deaths are likely to follow.”

Liverpool has a population of over 552,000, and this dire situation is undoubtedly replicated in many other towns and cities in the UK, including nearby Manchester, that also has a population in the hundreds of thousands.

Boris Johnson’s government, with the support of the Labour Party and the trade unions, are desperate to keep the schools open to all pupils despite the horrendous conditions being experienced by teachers, pupils and parents.

Johnson announced a week ago a few enhanced national restrictions—which will do nothing to arrest the spread of the virus. But schools had to remain open. Johnson called for office workers to work from home again, if possible, while continuing to force 11 million pupils and teachers into small and unventilated classrooms as cases reach the highest since the height of the pandemic in April.

The maniacal drive to keep schools open means that local lockdown rules exempt grandparents so they can provide childcare for their families. Grandparents are generally of an age which makes them most prone to infection.

This measure came in as official figures show that incidents of groups being sent home from school because of COVID-19 have quadrupled in a week. Roughly 900 schools sent pupils home, with the attendance last Thursday showing four percent of schools not fully open—an increase of three percent from the week before. The figures revealed that over a million children have been off school, with the numbers higher in secondary schools compared to primary. Parents are then having to arrange last minute childcare if they are to continue to work.

Teachers are being used as cannon fodder for the disease yet are not able to get tested to diagnose their symptoms. When teachers are sent home, they and their families face a huge challenge to even access a test. The impact of inadequate testing has left teachers waiting for days to get tested. In some cases, staff are turned away because of the lack of testing facilities.

Headteacher Jenna Crittenden, at Platt Church of England primary school in Kent, said that she had been left without a deputy headteacher who was turned away from a testing facility. “Last week, my deputy head booked a test in Kent after two days of trying,” she told the Times Educational Supplement (TES).

“When she got there they were turning people away as they had no tests, and when she said that could they ask to confirm she was needed back at work as a key worker, the gentleman went off to his supervisor and then returned to tell her that ‘Teachers are not key workers and you need to go home and isolate’.”

Many schools have been left with staff having to self-isolate for days awaiting a test or until they can receive their test result. Educators and parents are having to cope without any support from the government. Chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, Alison Peacock, told the TES that teachers are “spending hours on the phone seeking a testing appointment only to be turned away to call again the next day,” or “turned away from a test centre because they were ‘not considered a key worker’.”

While Health Secretary Matt Hancock states that teaching staff with symptoms can get tested “so we can keep schools and classes open,” the government has placed them only fifth on the list for rationed testing. The list does not include children.

The message is clear—teachers, get tested and then get back to your “COVID-19 secure” bubble of 30-200 children, with no social distancing and no PPE, you have nothing to fear!

The teaching unions have abandoned their members and will do nothing to fight the unsafe schools’ reopening. Instead, they claim that adequate testing is the answer. Leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, Ruth Davies, said, “The inability of staff and families to successfully get tested when they display symptoms means that schools are struggling with staffing, children are missing school, and ultimately that children’s education is being needlessly disrupted.”

The crisis goes much deeper than the disruption of education. The conditions that teachers find themselves in is intolerable and unsustainable. There are reports on Twitter of teachers having to teach combined classes in school halls due to teacher sickness and isolation. Teachers are trying to hold this all together, but many are exhausted and still feel unsafe.

Not only this, but any member of staff who comes in contact with the children is also at risk, with school bus drivers raising their concerns about lack of social distancing on their services, which are packed with children not wearing masks.

The Unite union feigned concern that it was “extremely worried” bus drivers were at risk of catching COVID-19 on “packed” buses. This is the same union that has overseen, along with management, the dangerous conditions that have led to the deaths of 33 London bus drivers.

Government guidance is that social distancing is not mandatory on dedicated school buses across the UK, leaving the decision up to the children and their schools to enforce the measure.

The BBC interviewed a driver in Northern Ireland who said his “bus carries children from eight different schools, who are on board for between 20 and 35 minutes.” The pupils who are over 12 should be wearing facemasks but only around 50 percent on his bus do so.

Everyone who works in education is at risk and will remain at risk without further safety measures. The Socialist Equality Party calls for “all cases of COVID-19 [to] be immediately reported to staff and families and affected schools closed until testing and contact tracing establishes that it is safe to reopen.” However, educators and parents are being kept in the dark.

Some school staff say they are not being told which students have tested positive for COVID-19. Teachers and parents are demanding more information be shared with them about cases at their schools. While some local newspapers run stories of school closures, there is nothing in the mainstream media about the thousands of cases that have inevitably broken out nationwide.

The advice that schools are getting from the government is totally inadequate. Last week, Schoolsweek reported that local Public Health England teams had left some schools “in ‘limbo’ waiting three days to get health advice.” The Department for Education (DfE) then seized control of handling calls about school COVID-19 cases, yet even then the advice from the DfE was wrong.

Essex County Council are turning instead to the local Essex Contact Test and Trace Team for advice in the first instance, “rather than the DfE advice line,” if they have a positive case.

The dismay over the deadly situation that educators have been forced into is reflected in a TES survey of more than 8,500 teachers and other school workers across Britain. It found that “nine in 10 school staff in England have limited or no trust in the government’s management of the coronavirus and schools.”

As every day passes, the pandemic is ripping through schools, colleges and universities.

Yet in UNISON, GMB and Unite’s joint statement, “government must do more to keep schools open and safe,” the emphasis is very much on keep open. Their only call is for the size of pupil bubbles to be reduced and for face coverings to be made compulsory on school buses. The unions only “encourage” wearing face masks inside schools, not that they be made compulsory. They call for full pay for lower-paid workers who need to isolate. But this is only because they know that one of their main demands—to increase the hours of cleaners in deep cleaning infected areas—will lead to infections.

As with the teachers’ unions, the three unions—representing thousands of school support staff across the UK including teaching assistants, technicians, catering workers, cleaning staff, caretakers, and receptionists—are leaving workers to their own fate.

Wave of anti-government protests across Egypt

Jean Shaoul

Workers have taken to the streets in towns and villages across Egypt in anti-government rallies, defying a ban on demonstrations.

They are protesting government corruption and the increase in the price of food and basic commodities, as well as the demolition of houses constructed without a government permit or on farmland.

The rallies have been ongoing since September 20, the anniversary of last year’s protest movement that led to 3,000 arrests by security forces. The central demand is that Egypt’s brutal dictator, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who ousted elected President Mohammed Mursi in a 2013 military coup, step down.

The protests were called by Mohamed Ali, a construction contractor living in Spain, who has posted video testimonies about the corruption of senior figures, including el-Sisi, incurring the wrath of the Egyptian authorities who are now seeking his extradition on charges of tax evasion and money laundering.

Egyptian police beat demonstrator (Twitter).

The police made extensive preparations ahead of September 20 to forestall the demonstrations. Patrol cars roamed the streets of downtown Cairo, especially Tahrir Square, the scene of the 2011 mass demonstrations that brought down the long-time US-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

Police were deployed in and around key buildings, and security forces stopped and searched pedestrians, demanding ID. According to Al-Arabi al-Jadeed, more than 1,000 young men and women were arrested in front of subway stations and in the streets surrounding Tahrir Square in the run-up to the demonstrations.

El-Sisi has presided over an International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictated “reform” programme that has included slashing subsidies, raising fuel prices, cutting the health and education budgets and firing government employees. While these measures cut the budget deficit from 12.5 percent in 2016 to 6.7 percent in 2019, they ruined much of Egypt’s middle class and led to soaring poverty rates.

Last month, the government started demolishing homes built without a license, potentially impacting vast numbers of people, particularly in the Cairo conurbation, home to 20 million people and desperately short of affordable housing. People would be spared demolition and eviction if they paid a hefty fine, prompting suspicions that this was a money-raising operation. Such was the anger that three weeks ago the government was forced to reduce the fines for landlords and contractors violating the licensing regulations.

The shortage of homes has become all the more inflammatory in the wake of el-Sisi’s extravagant construction projects, such as the expansion of the Suez Canal and the new $58 billion administrative capital that will benefit the military construction companies and the financial elite, and which have become white elephants in the midst of the pandemic. The new seat of government being built in the desert 40 miles outside Cairo has already cost over $35 billion and will provide luxury homes for 5 million affluent people and just 100,000 “affordable” homes.

The September 20 demonstrations were small and concentrated in towns and villages outside the capital, largely in the Nile Delta region. But within days, they spread to other parts of the country, including Giza, Alexandria, Al-Minya, Damietta, Suez, Qalyoubia, Beni Sueif and Cairo, governorates encompassing Egypt’s main industrial areas.

The mainstream media both in Egypt and internationally have largely ignored the protests and the government’s repressive response. But videos on social media and opposition TV channels showed the security forces using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.

Egyptian security forces killed at least one protester Friday. The Geneva-based Committee for Justice reported that riot police in the village of Balayda in Giza governorate, part of the vast Cairo conurbation, had shot and killed a 25-year-old protester, with other reports that police had killed another three people, including a child.

Police have detained hundreds since the anti-government rallies began more than a week ago. According to human rights lawyers handling their cases, those arrested face charges of “joining a terrorist group,” “broadcasting false news,” “misusing social media” and illegal protesting.

The protests take place amid the pandemic, which has exacerbated the already horrendous economic and social conditions facing most of Egypt’s 102 million people. Egypt has officially recorded almost 103,000 cases of the coronavirus and nearly 5,900 deaths.

The official unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, up 2 percentage points on last year, and is expected to rise to 20 percent this year. It particularly affects educated young people between 24 and 34. The loss of revenues from tourism, fees from shipping transiting the Suez Canal and remittances—worth $25 billion a year—from the five million Egyptians working in the Gulf has decimated the economy, leading to mass layoffs, pay cuts and widespread destitution.

The Gulf states have laid off workers, many of whom have returned home, adding to Egypt’s unemployment, while Kuwait has announced that foreign workers will not be allowed to return while the pandemic continues. This makes the status of 700,000 Egyptians working in Kuwait extremely tenuous.

While the huge Zohr natural gas field in the Mediterranean seemed to offer a lifeline of billions of dollars for Egypt’s beleaguered economy, that too has been hit by the pandemic-induced recession.

Egypt was forced to apply for more loans, in addition to a $12 billion loan, from the IMF that will add a further $8 billion to its massive external debt of $120 billion, equal to 90 percent of the country’s GDP. This means an annual debt servicing charge of about $13 billion and finding a way of rescheduling a quarter of the debt. The Arab Reform Initiative estimates that Egypt will need to raise interest rates in a bid to halt inflation and the flight of capital, revalue or float the Egyptian pound and increase borrowing.

Protests have been relatively small, in part because Ali has no political party or programme, but crucially because of the disillusionment that followed the revolutionary movement that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in 2011 only to be replaced by an even more brutal regime. Nevertheless, the fact they have taken place at all under conditions of el-Sisi’s clampdown testifies to the social and economic powder keg over which he presides. Commentators are already talking about the possibility of the military intervening to organise el-Sisi’s retirement in favour of another military figure to save the regime.

It is of the utmost importance that this new protest movement of Egypt’s powerful working class understands the source of its defeat in 2011-13. The key issue posed by that revolutionary upheaval was to secure the political independence of the working class from all of the various bourgeois forces competing to succeed Mubarak, which included military officers, bourgeois “liberal” parties and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The misnamed Revolutionary Socialists (RS), part of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left milieu in Egypt that reflected the interests of affluent sections of the upper-middle class, initially claimed that the military junta that replaced Mubarak would grant reforms. It then tried to channel the continuing opposition of the working class behind the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming that its electoral victory in 2012 represented a “victory for the revolution.” As working class opposition to Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government grew in 2013, the RS embraced the newly formed Tamarrud (meaning “Rebellion”) campaign, funded and promoted by the military-intelligence apparatus, as “a road to complete the revolution.” This paved the way for the military to overthrow Mursi in July 2013. The RS are on record as welcoming el-Sisi’s coup that inaugurated a reign of terror as a “second revolution.”

As new revolutionary struggles emerge across the Middle East with strikes and protests taking place in recent months in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran and Sudan, as well as in the US and Europe, the fundamental issue remains that of building a revolutionary party to mobilise the working class against capitalism and imperialist war and for socialism. Such parties must be built as sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Egypt and across the Middle East.

New York City resumes in-person schools as COVID-19 infections continue to rise

Alberto Escalera

Hundreds of thousands of New York City students are returning to schools today as the country’s largest school district starts its next phase of in-person instruction even as COVID-19 infections continue to rise in the city and state. The reopening order by Mayor Bill de Blasio threatens to create a catastrophe in a city where nearly 25,000 people have succumbed to the deadly disease.

Schools are opening after a week in which the Department of Education (DOE) acknowledged that teachers, support staff and students in over 100 schools have already been infected. On Sept. 21, the DOE began bringing students in 3K (full-day programs for three-year-old children), Pre-K and special education classes back into buildings. Roughly 90,000 students and teachers across 700 school buildings were ushered into schools to serve as veritable canaries in the coal mine.

Teachers and students at P.S. 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York City on September 2, 2020. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

New York state’s health department has announced a significant increase in the overall positivity rate from those who have been tested. Kings County (Brooklyn) nearly doubled to 2.6 percent positivity, and two ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in Rockland County, 25 miles north of the city, have positivity rates of 25 and 30 percent.

The DOE’s figures obscure the true scale of the spread of the virus in schools because they refer exclusively to the number of facilities in which students or staff have tested positive and not the actual number of those infected. The same is undoubtedly true of the city and state’s positivity rate.

The situation for many special education students as well as the staff who work with them is particularly hazardous. In addition to the specialized services frequently requiring close contact that many special education students receive while in school, a significant number of these children also rely on school buses to get to class. The vehicles are often under-sized and bus attendants must physically assist them while boarding and exiting buses. The upcoming fall and winter seasons pose additional risks due to the use of heating systems on buses, which could hasten the circulation of COVID-19 aerosols.

The next phase of the homicidal school reopening plan includes bringing K-5 students into school buildings on Sept. 29, followed by middle- and high-school students, for whom in-person classes are scheduled to start on Oct. 1.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, initially justified reopening schools with in-person classes by referencing the 0.34 percent positivity rate within New York City. Even a week ago, this figure obscured the fact that several neighborhoods in the city, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, had sustained positivity rates as high as six percent and others had seen recent spikes. De Blasio also ignored the fact that the positivity rate in New York State was rising and at least 20 school districts in neighboring New Jersey had recently experienced outbreaks forcing superintendents to reintroduce fully remote learning.

The arguments used by de Blasio, which have been repeatedly echoed by his backers in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), attest to the naked disregard the corporate and political establishment has for the lives of working-class students, their parents and education workers. Even a 0.34 percent positivity rate among the roughly 550,000 students and teachers set to start in-person classes by Oct. 1 would translate to almost 1,900 infected persons within public schools.

The reckless school reopening policy in New York City has been compounded by an unprecedented level of incompetence, most notably emanating from City Hall. After months of ignoring warnings by principals that schools are facing a shortage of 10,000 teachers to implement de Blasio’s hybrid learning model, the mayor abruptly changed course just four days before the previously scheduled start of in-person classes, announcing that the city would allocate resources to hire 2,500 teachers in addition to redeploying 2,000 central district staff to classrooms. A recent independent investigation of current school staffing needs actually concluded that the shortage of teachers in New York City was closer to 12,000.

When pressed last week about the city’s inadequate efforts to address the teacher shortage by WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer, Mayor de Blasio’s response betrayed the hypocrisy underlying the claims that the reopening of schools was being done to protect the best interests of students from working-class families.

Dismissive of the prospect that persistent staffing shortages would necessitate another delay to in-person classes, an agitated de Blasio proclaimed, “There’s no reason to delay … we are getting the people we need in place, period.”

But recent reports have emerged that a significant number of the “people” to which de Blasio was referring are substitute teachers for whom the DOE has allocated an additional $47 million. While this money could have been used to hire 600 full-time teachers, guidance counselors or social workers, the mayor and district officials decided to hire temporary workers who can quickly be fired once authorities implement their plans for savage budget cuts.

The ongoing chaos characterizing school reopening efforts was exacerbated over the weekend after rumors began circulating on social media late Friday that a deal had been struck between the mayor and the UFT to expand the number of teachers who could work remotely. The DOE did not inform principals of the agreement, which was subsequently confirmed and directly contradicted previous policy announcements issued by superintendents. The last-minute change further complicated ongoing preparations for in-person classes.

In response, the executive board of the Council of School Administrators (CSA), the union for principals and assistant principals, declared on Saturday a unanimous vote of “no confidence” for de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, and called for the New York State Department of Education to take over city schools, a measure that would turn over management to Governor Andrew Cuomo. The Democratic governor has overseen an equally deadly and chaotic reopening of school districts statewide and massive budget cuts.

In fact, the teacher shortage in New York City is already being felt by K–12 students who started remote instruction on Sept. 21. An increasing number of parent complaints and teacher grievances have called attention to remote classes with as many as 50 assigned students.

Staffing shortages also continue to impact health care services essential to schools. Reports of a school nurse shortage in New York City have circulated for months. In August, the DOE began frantic efforts to fill over 400 school nurse positions in order to place a minimum of one nurse in each school; a woefully inadequate target considering the many buildings that have student populations in excess of 1,000. To date, approximately 100 school nurse positions remain unfilled.

Significantly, the DOE is hiring new school nurses under temporary contracts with no employment guarantees or long-term benefits. In essence, these school nurses are “at will” employees who are receiving just four days of training before being sent into schools. Typically, school nurses receive six weeks of training before being assigned to a school.

From the perspective of the ruling class and its political representatives like Trump, de Blasio and Cuomo, workers must be forced back to work, no matter the cost in human lives, because the capitalists require them to produce the surplus value to pay down debt and resume the accumulation of profits.

Of course, neither the self-proclaimed “progressive” Democrat de Blasio nor his backers in the municipal unions have suggested that the budget shortfall be addressed by sharply increasing taxes on the obscene wealth held by the city’s parasitic financial elite, many of whom have taken to self-quarantining within their sprawling luxury estates located in exclusive areas like the Hamptons. Rather, de Blasio is using the current $9 billion budget shortfall to initiate further austerity measures in the city, including the projected layoff of 22,000 municipal employees.

The struggle of public school teachers is assuming a central role in the broader opposition movement against the unsafe reopening of schools as well as the back to work campaign taking place throughout the US. Education workers in the city, along with parents and students, continue to carry out walkouts, marches and other actions.

On Sunday, rank-and-file teachers at the Hunter College Campus Schools, a specialized K–12 public school administered by the City University of New York (CUNY), voted to authorize a strike to protest unsafe conditions at the school. The elite school has few windows and a long history of ventilation problems. The Hunter College Campus teachers, who are members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), are defying New York state’s reactionary Taylor Law, which penalizes state employees two days’ pay for every day they strike. Teachers at the school are also demanding an independent monitor to review building safety.

Earlier this month, teachers, school bus drivers and other school workers formed the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Committee to unite and coordinate the opposition to unsafe conditions, independently of the UFT and other unions. This committee and others established in Los Angeles, along with Texas, Florida and other states, are working to unite education workers across the US and indeed, internationally, with other sectors of the working class. Increasingly, education workers are arriving at the conclusion that these rank-and-file committees are the only viable means through which to mount a genuine opposition to the murderous school reopenings. We urge all educators to join our committees today.

Armenian-Azeri fighting escalates as war danger surges across Middle East

Alex Lantier

Dozens of soldiers and civilians were killed yesterday in a second day of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Heavy fighting involving tanks and armored vehicles, fighter-bombers and drones is by far the bloodiest since the 1988–1994 war between the two former Soviet republics broke out in the run-up to the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Armenian authorities who run Nagorno-Karabakh said they lost 28 soldiers, bringing total casualties to 59, while Armenia has suffered 200 wounded. he Human Rights Defender Office in Artsakh, the Armenian name for the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, claimed all its towns including Stepanakert, Askeran, Martakert, Martuni, Hadrut and Shushi were hit; a grandmother and her granddaughter were killed. Armenian forces claimed to have destroyed 15 drones as well as several Azeri armored vehicles and killed hundreds of Azeri soldiers.

In this image taken from footage released by Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020, Azerbaijan's soldiers fire from a mortar at the contact line of the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan. (Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry via AP)

Azeri forces, who have not given their military losses, said 26 Azeri civilians had been wounded as towns were shelled. They also reportedly made small advances on the ground. Videos they released showed their drones, reportedly provided by Turkey, destroying Russian-made Armenian armored vehicles and short-range anti-aircraft missile batteries. Turkish forces have already used drones to destroy such batteries fielded by Russian-backed forces in the wars in Libya and Syria.

Azerbaijan issued a “last warning” to Armenia after Armenia reportedly shelled the Azeri city of Terter. “The Ministry of Defense gives the last warning to Armenia that adequate retaliatory measures will be taken against them if needed,” it said.

This war is the disastrous product of both the Stalinist bureaucracy’s nationalist policy to dissolve the Soviet Union and restore capitalism, and decades of imperialist war in the region since 1991. Vast geopolitical tensions are now concentrated on the Caucasus—a strip of land at the center of Eurasia, between the Black Sea and Europe to the west, Russia to the north, the Caspian Sea and China to the east, and Iran and Turkey to the south. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned Sunday that fighting could “spill outside the region and acquire a much larger scale.”

In particular, the fighting comes amid a growing US military escalation against Iran, China and Russia. After NATO, the European Union, Russia, Iran and France issued statements calling for restraint in the Armenian-Azeri conflict early Sunday, Washington did so as well. Asked about the Armenian-Azeri conflict at a Sunday evening press briefing, US President Donald Trump simply said: “We’re looking at it very strongly. We have a lot of good relationships in that area. We’ll see if we can stop it.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government thrust aside these perfunctory statements, however, calling for aggressive Azeri action.

The 1988–1994 war that ended with Armenia in control of Nagorno-Karabakh was a bloody conflict that exposed the reactionary nature of the nation-state system. One million people were displaced and over 20,000 killed in an Armenian-Azeri war between states with only 3 and 10 million in population, respectively. However, Erdoğan called to reverse the war’s outcome, help Azerbaijan retake the Nagorno-Karabakh, and deal a bloody defeat to Armenia.

“The time has come for the regional crisis that started with the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh to be put to an end,” Erdoğan declared yesterday in Istanbul. “Once Armenia immediately leaves the territory it is occupying, the region will return to peace and harmony.”

Erdoğan dismissed calls for restraint from the United States, Russia and France, who traditionally brokered Azeri-Armenian peace talks in the post-Soviet period. “They basically did everything they could, but this did not resolve the issue,” he said. “Now Azerbaijan must take matters into its own hands.”

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar reiterated his regime’s ethnic solidarity with Turkic Azeris against Armenia, saying: “Ties between Turkey and Azerbaijan are based on ‘two states one nation’ principle. We are always together, on good or bad days. We are on the side of our Azeri brothers in their defense of homeland.”

This support for Azerbaijan could escalate into a war between Turkey, a NATO member state, and Armenia’s main backer, Russia, which has a military base at Gyumri in Armenia.

This risk is all the higher in that NATO wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria have inflamed tensions between Russia and Turkey, who have supported rival factions in the civil wars in Libya and Syria that followed the NATO proxy wars launched in these countries in 2011. On Sept. 25, talks collapsed between Russian and Turkish officials over control of Syria’s Idlib province. Fighting may soon erupt again between Russian-backed Syrian government troops and Turkish-backed Islamist “rebel” militias there.

Russian- and Turkish-backed troops are also fighting in Libya, while offshore, Greek warships backed by France are disputing control of the large areas of the eastern Mediterranean with Turkey.

More broadly, however, growing Russian-Turkish tensions driving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are only one element of the accelerating breakdown of the nation-state system across the Middle East and Central Asia, and the drive towards a new imperialist world war.

There is a growing danger that the Trump administration, which has already announced it plans to launch a coup and ignore the results of the November presidential election, may try to start a war with Iran in a pre-election “October surprise.” Yesterday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Iraqi President Barham Salih that he aims to withdraw US troops and diplomats stationed in Iraq since the illegal 2003 US-led invasion. If they stayed, they would be vulnerable to attack, if Washington went to war with Iran.

Already, Iran launched limited missile strikes on US bases in Iraq after Washington’s state murder of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in January.

In a dispatch titled “Threat to evacuate US diplomats from Iraq raises fear of war,” Reuters noted: “Any move by the United States to reduce its diplomatic presence in a country where it has up to 5,000 troops would be widely seen in the region as an escalation of its confrontation with Iran … That in turn would open the possibility of military action, with just weeks to go before an election in which President Donald Trump has campaigned on a hard line towards Tehran and its proxies.”

Reuters cited unnamed Western diplomats who said Pompeo was announcing this because Washington does not “want to be limited in their options” against pro-Iranian forces in Iraq. “Asked whether he expected Washington to respond with economic or military measures,” Reuters writes, “the diplomat replied: ‘Strikes.’”

These threats are bound up with Washington’s confrontation with both China, which is negotiating a military alliance and $400 billion trade deal with Iran, and Russia. Washington is threatening to enforce a ban on renewed Russian and Chinese arms exports to Iran, which could lead US warships to try to seize Russian and Chinese vessels on the high seas.

Turkish officials clearly see Erdoğan’s inciting of pan-Turkic sentiment as linked to threats against nearby Iran. Turkey’s state-run TRT World news agency denounced Iran for “quietly backing Armenia in the conflict” against Azerbaijan, asserting that “Iran’s Turkic problem” is due to ethnic-Turkic minorities in northern Iran.

TRT World cited Professor Bülent Aras at Istanbul’s Sabancı University: “Increasing Turkish nationalism in Iran has been seen as a serious political problem by Iran. Connections and relations between the country’s north and Azerbaijan have been an important factor in Tehran’s political problems with Azerbaijan.” TRT speculated that “the idea of Greater Azerbaijan” might inflame ethnic separatism in Iran.

These conflicts are a warning of the rising danger of all-out war across the Middle East and internationally, bound up with the collapse of American democracy at home. It underscores the urgent necessity of building an international, anti-war movement unifying the working class in socialist opposition to nationalism and war.

Trump’s tax returns and the parasitism of the financial oligarchy

Patrick Martin

The detailed analysis of the tax returns of President Donald Trump, spread across the front page of Monday’s New York Times, is more than an exposure of the corrupt gangster who lives in the White House. It is an indictment of the American ruling class as a whole, of the super-rich families who monopolize the country’s wealth, exploit the working people and dominate its politics, including the Democratic and the Republican parties.

The Times gained access to 20 years of personal and business tax returns that provide exhaustive details about the financial manipulations conducted by the Trump Organization. The family holding company used hundreds of subsidiaries and shell companies to evade the payment of taxes, incur paper losses that were used to offset real income, and ensure the never-ending enrichment of Trump and his children despite the fact that their empire of real estate, casinos and golf clubs was largely unprofitable.

President Donald Trump speaking during a news conference at the White House, Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

As the report declared, “ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.” His long-running NBC reality program, The Apprentice, was far more profitable than his actual business activities. His bankruptcies and reverses have long been known, but the Times account gives a picture, in granular detail, of how the tax system—set up and run by both Democratic and Republican administrations—allowed him to amass and maintain great wealth despite his generally disastrous forays in business.

The Times account does add another dimension to the explanation of the response of the Trump administration to the coronavirus crisis. Given his vast holdings in real estate, hotels and golf clubs, Trump had a direct and immediate financial interest in demanding the reopening of the economy and the resumption of travel, business meetings and sporting events, regardless of the cost in human lives. In this he was not alone, but rather spoke for the interests of his class.

The details in the newspaper account—that Trump paid zero income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he ran for president; paid $750 in income taxes in 2016 and 2017, about the same amount as a waitress working at the minimum wage; wrote off $75,000 in haircuts as a business expense; and steered hundreds of thousands in “consulting fees” into the pockets of his adult children—are damning. But it is hardly surprising to see it proven in black and white that Donald Trump is a phony and a fraud. Millions of working people have long recognized him as an unscrupulous swindler in both business and politics.

Two years ago, the Times published an equally detailed examination of how Trump’s father manipulated the tax system to pass on the bulk of his wealth to his son Donald while paying an effective tax rate of only 10 percent, even though the official estate tax was then 55 percent. The WSWS commented at the time, “With its detailed exposure of the Trump fortune, the Times has unwittingly confirmed the insistence of socialists that the continued existence of a parasitic oligarchy is incompatible with the most basic social and democratic rights of the vast majority of the population.”

Corruption and tax evasion, perhaps less crude but in some cases on an even larger scale, are commonplace throughout the American ruling elite. According to IRS figures, the effective tax rate on the transfer of inherited wealth is less than 4 percent, compared to the average tax rate for working people of 18–19 percent. Decades ago, before her conviction for tax evasion, Manhattan hotel heiress Leona Helmsley sneered, “Only the little people pay taxes.” That serves today as the motto of the entire financial aristocracy.

Everyone knows that the IRS makes it a point to prey upon workers. Woe unto the teacher or auto worker who is accused of underpaying the IRS, even as the agency regularly turns a blind eye to massive tax-avoidance schemes like those run by the Trump family. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have described how, for decades, the US government continuously slashed taxes for the wealthy and destroyed enforcement mechanisms, with the deliberate outcome of expanding social inequality.

A central aspect of Trump’s financial flim-flam over many decades is that he has taken advantage of tax laws enacted by both Democrats and Republicans for the deliberate purpose of enabling such chicanery and minimizing the tax burden on the financial elite. It was under the Obama administration in 2010 that the IRS authorized a payment of $72.9 million to Trump, supposedly as a refund of “overpayments.”

At least until he launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, Trump bribed Democrats and Republicans alike with “campaign contributions” and was rewarded with loopholes such as the favored treatment of real estate losses in the Obama administration bailout of Wall Street in 2009.

Among the politicians benefiting from Trump’s largesse over the years were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, his current opponents. He gave campaign contributions on 17 occasions to the two New York Democratic senators, Charles Schumer, now the Senate Democratic leader, and Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential contest. None of this politically inconvenient history appears in the Times account of Trump’s tax evasion.

Apologists for the Democratic Party, particularly in the camp of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), may see the Times article as a brilliantly timed masterstroke. They no doubt hope that the conclusive exposure of Trump as a corrupt fraud—unlike the release of the sex scandal transcripts in 2016—will succeed in sinking his campaign.

It is possible that the exposure of Trump’s blatant tax evasion will cost him some votes. But this exposure does not change the reactionary character of the Biden campaign.

A central feature of this campaign is the suggestion that Trump is an agent or patsy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that his administration has undermined US “national security” interests in the Middle East, Central Asia, and more generally, in relation to both Russia and China. Many media commentators immediately seized on the fact that Trump paid far more taxes to foreign governments, including India, the Philippines, Turkey and Panama, than he did to the US government.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the most vociferous advocates of the anti-Russia campaign, was quick to sound this theme again in response to the publication of the details of Trump’s taxes and personal finances. Noting the Times’ conclusion that Trump had accumulated $400 million in losses since taking office, including $300 million in loans that would come due during a second term in the White House if he should be reelected, she declared that Trump’s taxes revealed a “national security issue.”

Even though the Times admitted that the tax returns showed no business income from Russia, Pelosi connected Trump to Moscow: “The question is what does Putin have on the president politically, personally, financially in every way that the president would try to undermine our commitment to NATO, give away the store to Russia and Syria … he says he likes Putin and Putin likes him. Well, what’s the connection? We’ll see.”

Such grotesque McCarthy-style attacks on Trump’s alleged master in Moscow contribute to a political atmosphere justifying an explosion of American militarism. It moreover simply ignores the equal role of American banks in financing Trump’s swindles.

Moreover, the use of a scandal to unseat Trump—assuming that this is the outcome—does nothing to change the political climate in the United States. With or without Trump, the intensification of the social crisis—for which the Democrats have no answer—will provide fuel for the development of fascist and authoritarian movements.

It is impossible to defend democratic rights and defeat Trump’s drive towards authoritarian rule through the Democratic Party, which defends the capitalist system of which Trump is a product.

Trump’s tax returns paint a portrait of a ruling class totally enmeshed in corruption and criminality. The oligarchs generate their wealth through shuffling around money, based on the provision of endless amounts of cash by the central banks. Trump’s gaudy and tasteless palaces, with the look of bordellos, are the product of a whole period of American capitalism dominated by swindling, speculation and fraud, creating nothing of value besides ever-greater heaps of debt.

Trump is not the exception; he is the rule. The entire ruling class owes its social existence to various forms of criminal activity, whose victims are inevitably workers. The expropriation of this financial oligarchy is an urgent social necessity.

The North Korean Nuclear Knot and China’s Dilemma

Manpreet Sethi

The relationship between China and North Korea has often been described as similar to that between lips and teeth. Besides sharing the political ideology of communism, China is important for North Korea for sustaining its economy, especially in the face of increasingly severe economic sanctions as Pyongyang continues its nuclear and missile advancements. China ensures that its neighbour’s economy remains sufficiently afloat, even as it stands as a bulwark against global criticism of North Korea’s actions.

Meanwhile, North Korea, particularly with its nuclear capability, is important for China not only as an instrument to complicate US security concerns, but also as an effective buffer against perceived hostile elements in the region. Therefore, in order to secure its own interests, China remains deeply invested in North Korean stability. Beijing’s preference is for a Pyongyang that is internally politically stable, fairly economically viable, ideologically in sync with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), headed by a leader who is personally obliged to China, and whose interactions with the world can be dictated and moderated by Beijing. In other words, a country that is proficient in handling its domestic business to avoid any spill-over of socio-economic instability across the border, but that listens to China on other matters.

While China is keen that North Korea remains stable, it nevertheless prefers a state of managed instability for the region, with the controls of calibrating that instability resting in its own hands. In the creation of a nuclear North Korea, China hoped to be able to tailor its nuclear capability in such a way as to be of concern for others, but still under some sort of Chinese control. It wanted it to be sufficiently distracting for Washington without making it overly concerned to contemplate military actions in the region. It is worth noting that when Pyongyang conducted its first two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, China was relatively quiet. But the next four tests met with greater Chinese criticism and support for UN sanctions. China could sense its strategic asset turn into a liability as a nuclear Pyongyang showed quite a mind of its own.

Over the past decade, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has continued his country’s nuclear and missile programmes for greater self-sufficiency and independence. His expressed nuclear doctrine signals brinkmanship of a high order. This becomes a matter of concern for China. A reckless leader, when facing a crisis he fears being overwhelmed in conventionally, or losing his small nuclear capability to a first strike, could be tempted to use nuclear weapons. The ensuing exchange would result in a humanitarian and ecological disaster in China’s backyard, the consequences of which it could hardly hope to escape.

Therefore, too independent a nuclear North Korea is an issue for China. It fears that such a country could become an albatross around its neck and a drag on its own great power aspirations. In this context, it is interesting that despite the 1961 Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty, China has added conditions on when it would be obliged to intervene in case of a conflict. Chinese neutrality in case a conflict is initiated by North Korea is one of them. The treaty is coming up for renewal in 2021 and it will be worth watching how China negotiates this space.

China is quite certain that North Korean denuclearisation is well-nigh impossible. It does not want it, either. What it would not mind is a freeze on the programme in exchange for lifting of some economic sanctions. This would be a win-win from Beijing’s perspective in at least three ways. One, it would halt further North Korean nuclear growth; two, it could pave a way to address missile defence deployments in South Korea and Japan that are perceived to pose a threat to China’s own nuclear deterrence; and three, allow Beijing to expand the economic relationship with Pyongyang towards increased interdependence and concomitant leverages which have dwindled in the current sanctions-riddled relationship.

An unbridled expansion of North Korean nuclear capability is not in China’s interest. But, it is beyond its individual capacity to rein this in given the nature of the current leadership in Pyongyang. Such an opportunity may arise in case Kim Jong-un’s much-rumoured ill-health leads to a change in the top position and China is able to slide in somebody who is far more mindful of its instructions. In the absence of such an eventuality, however, China will look to the US to bell the North Korean nuclear cat. The 2021 occupant of the White House could find a greater convergence of interest with China in untangling the North Korean nuclear knot than has existed in the past.