Railway workers strike in São Paulo amidst wave of transportation struggles

Brunna Machado

A strike by São Paulo railway workers last Thursday, July 15, shut down an important section of public transport in Brazil’s largest city over the demand for higher wages. More than 40 stations and four railway lines of São Paulo’s Company of Metropolitan Trains (CPTM), which carry about one million riders daily, were affected by the strike.

The action of the CPTM railway workers takes place amid a wave of strikes by transport workers in Brazil and a general growth of struggles by the working class against the lowering of living standards and the unsafe conditions in workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The strike was launched after the CPTM presented a contract proposal that, once again, offers a zero percent increase in wages. Railway workers are entering their third year without a readjustment of their salaries, accumulating a wage deflation of more than 10 percent, which was the official inflation rate for this period. In addition, the company, which is managed by the São Paulo state government, has not paid workers what they are owed from a profit sharing plan.

Military Police fire tear gas grenades at Francisco Morato station during rail strike (Credit: Diário da CPTM)

In an attempt to discredit the strike, CPTM president Pedro Moro attacked the demand for higher wages, insinuating that railway workers are “privileged.”

“CPTM’s average salary is much higher than the average salary in Brazil. The benefits that CPTM provides to its employees are also above what is even in the CLT [labor laws] and, therefore, we request again that everyone return to work so that we can maintain the operation, not to harm the population,” said Moro in an interview on Band News radio.

In a press statement, the CPTM president said that the average salary at the company is 6,500 reais a month (US$ 1,244). But this number represents a false “average,” a product of lumping the pay of the top salaried positions—a privileged upper middle-class minority—with that of regular workers, who constitute the majority of the labor force and whose “average salary” is 2,800 a month (US$ 536). And the “benefits” mentioned by Moro are, in fact, threatened by the company’s current contract proposal.

In addition to lowering wages, the CPTM has pursued a criminal policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A CPTM railway worker interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site stated:

“The employees in the ‘risk group’ [those of advanced age or suffering from comorbidities] working in the stations were only removed after a court decision. [The CPTM] reversed that decision in mid-November 2020 and made these employees return to work, even though they weren’t even vaccinated.

“We had a huge number of deaths among workers. It is not known for sure how many, since the company did not offer the data even with a union request. But there was a period when we received as many as four death notices in a single day. Until they started not sending death notices anymore.

“The feeling of all the employees was of fear and impotence, since not even a tribute could be paid to the colleagues who had passed away, and not even death notes were sent. The feeling is that the worker is just a number and that his life is worthless to the management.

“Despite all the sacrifice that the railway workers have made and are making during this pandemic, the company, subservient to the state governor [João Doria, of the right-wing Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB)], is intransigent... This morning the CPTM president ratified the ‘proposal’ of a zero readjustment.”

Last week’s strike was the first at CPTM since 2015. Over that period, railway workers have faced a significant deterioration in working conditions, with a reduction in the number of jobs and the loss of rights and benefits acquired by previous generations. This process was facilitated by the trade unions, which stifled workers’ dissatisfaction while a process of privatization of the company advanced.

“Since the inauguration of Governor João Doria and the change of the company’s presidency, today under the management of Pedro Moro, the intention to privatize the company is noticeable,” the CPTM worker said. “In 2018, workers noticed the need for hiring more professionals, which didn’t occur, making clear what was to come.

“In the privatization process of rail lines 8 and 9 there was no struggle by the unions against the flagrant threat to workers’ jobs. Most of the employees were against the privatization and were willing to fight against it, even by exercising their right to strike, an agenda that was never raised by any of the unions.”

The CPTM worker denounced the unions’ efforts to keep railway workers isolated from other sections of the working class and blocking any initiative of struggle during the pandemic.

“There is a gigantic distance between the unions and the workers. Some of the employees already wanted to strike when the company managed to reverse the court decision and put the lives of employees with comorbidities at risk. The unions were previously called by metro workers to participate in a joint strike, but they declined.”

The unions are also working to isolate the workers within the CPTM itself. Four different unions claim to represent the workers at the company, each one claiming their rule over a set of rail lines. Last week’s strike was called by three of the unions—all of them linked to the UGT federation (General Union of Workers)—while the fourth union—linked to the Worker’s Party (PT)-controlled CUT—called a strike for July 20.

While the UGT strike was decided in poorly publicized assemblies, with almost no railway workers participating, the CUT strike was approved through lists left at the stations. This form of voting raises mistrust among workers and can prevent them from joining, because of exposure to possible retaliation by the bosses.

The bureaucratic control of the unions over the strike also prevented railway workers from appealing to the working population that depends on the public transport system and suffers from the same attacks on living standards and unsafe conditions under the pandemic.

During the strike, spontaneous demonstrations of solidarity broke out, like at the Grajaú station, in the southern end of the city, where residents joined the railway workers by blocking avenues in protest against the high transport fares.

But there were also confrontations involving desperate people trying to get to their jobs, which have been widely exploited by the bourgeois press with the intention of turning the population against the strike. In the Francisco Morato station, located on the outskirts of São Paulo, passengers tried to force the gates open and were brutally repressed by the Military Police who attacked them with stun grenades and rubber bullets. A woman was shot in the face and lost sight in one eye.

In face of these pressures and the divisions they promoted, the unions managed to end the strike at the end of the day, only with a promise of payment from the profit sharing plan, but nothing in relation to a wage increase.

The CPTM strike, as well as recent strikes in the subway and bus transport systems in Brazilian capitals, which directly affect the commutes of large sectors of workers, have demonstrated the necessity and the potential for a conscious and unified action by the working class.

Federal judge rules DACA unconstitutional, blocks new applications

Trévon Austin

On Friday, a federal judge in Texas ruled the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA)—which protects those who qualify from deportation and provides work authorization—to be unlawful, halting the ability of the Biden administration to accept new applicants and throwing the lives of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants into uncertainty.

In a 77-page opinion, District Judge Andrew Hanen determined DACA was unlawful because it violates the Administrative Procedure Act, a law which governs federal rulemaking, by circumventing the normal “notice and comment” process in adopting new rules.

The lawsuit was spearheaded by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—along with attorneys general in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia—who argued the federal program placed an undue burden on states and amounted to executive overreach.

Protesters in San Francisco, September 5, 2017 (Wikimedia Commons)

In his ruling, Hanen cited the 2020 Supreme Court decision in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, stating the majority determined federal courts have the authority to review the DACA program and its implementation. However, Hanen also borrowed from the dissenting opinion authored by the conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, that stated DACA was an “unlawful program.”

“Justice Thomas noted that the majority's failure to address DACA’s creation was ‘an effort to avoid a politically controversially but legally correct decision’ that would result in future ‘battles to be fought in this Court,’” Hanen wrote. “While the controversial issue may ultimately return to the Supreme Court, the battle Justice Thomas predicted currently resides here and it is not one this Court can avoid.”

Hanen’s ruling will not immediately affect the more than 615,000 people, commonly known as Dreamers, who are currently protected under DACA. However, it does mean that the Department of Homeland Security can no longer approve new DACA applications or grant applicants the protections DACA provides. Furthermore, Dreamers again find themselves in a state of legal limbo and uncertainty for their futures.

Explaining his decision to not immediately terminate the program, Hanen cited the large volume of people benefiting from the program.

“Hundreds of thousands of individual DACA recipients, along with their employers, states, and loved ones, have come to rely on the DACA program,” Hanen wrote in a separate ruling Friday night. “Given those interests, it is not equitable for a government program that has engendered such a significant reliance to terminate suddenly.”

In the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, the court found that the Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA in 2017 failed to consider the interests of the more than 600,000 people affected by the change and was an “arbitrary and capricious” violation of the APA. But the court’s decision still left an opportunity for future attacks against the program.

The Trump Administration subsequently stopped accepting new DACA applications and sought to impose other limits on the program, but a federal judge in New York struck down those measures.

New applications surged after it was reinstated in December. The volume of applications has overwhelmed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which reported a backlog of some 81,000 first-time applications pending as of the end of June. All these hopeful applicants, however, are now in limbo following Hanen’s decision and pending appeals.

DACA, established in 2012, protects undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation, in addition to allowing them to legally work in the US. Currently, the program’s protections are renewable and valid for two years at a time. However, in the near decade since it was established, DACA remains one of the few paths to citizenship and employment for immigrants. According to the Migration Policy Institute, as of 2020 there are more than 1.3 million people in the US who are potentially eligible for DACA.

In a statement released Saturday, President Joe Biden stated he will appeal Hanen’s decision and claimed the Department of Homeland Security “plans to issue a proposed rule concerning DACA in the near future.” Additionally, Biden called on Congress to enact a “permanent solution” for Dreamers.

“I have repeatedly called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, and I now renew that call with the greatest urgency,” Biden said. “It is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear.”

However, previous bills attempting to do so have failed to pass the Senate filibuster, despite the overwhelming popularity of providing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. According to a Pew Research Center poll from June 2020, 74 percent of US adults support “granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally when they were children.”

Still, the DREAM Act failed in 2010 despite passing the House and winning majority support in the Senate, because of the filibuster. In 2018, the filibuster defeated four possible DACA fixes, although three of the four also won at least 50 votes.

Most recently, the American Dream and Promise Act passed in the House in two different sessions — first in 2019 and more recently in March this year — but has not come to a vote in the Senate. Despite Democratic control of both the House and the Senate, it is unlikely the legislation would survive the filibuster. At any rate, if signed into law, the bill would only provide “conditional permanent resident status” for several categories of immigrants, including Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status beneficiaries, putting them on a long path to citizenship.

Due to the back-and-forth between the courts and the Trump administration, DACA recipients have come of age in a long period of uncertainty. Although many of them have lived and worked their entire adult lives in the US, they still face the possibility of deportation.

Immigration rights groups quickly pointed out this tumultuous reality.

In a statement Friday, the Home Is Here Coalition described Hanen’s decision as “cruel and malicious.”

“This decision is a reminder that DACA has never been enough to protect immigrant communities who continue to be at risk of deportation,” the group said.

The Presidents Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a coalition of university presidents and chancellors, also called on Congress to “enact a roadmap to citizenship” for Dreamers “through all available mechanisms—including budget reconciliation,” a process that would require a simple majority instead of the 60 required to override a filibuster.

The organization was also joined by the American Business Immigration Coalition in issuing a letter signed by more than 400 university presidents, CEOs and civic leaders urging Congress to take action on the Dreamers’ behalf.

“This relief is particularly critical for the 98,000 Dreamers who graduate from high school every year and the 427,000 undocumented students enrolled in institutions of higher education,” the letter states.

“These students are working diligently to advance themselves, including pursuing careers in health, STEM, and teaching, notwithstanding the uncertainty they live with regarding whether they will be able to complete their education, invest in beginning careers, businesses, and families, and ultimately become citizens.”

Kroger closes stores, while United Food and Commercial Workers kept workers on the job during pandemic

Cordell Gascoigne

Over the course of the past year, while more than 35 million Americans have contracted coronavirus and 625,000 have died, corporate share values have risen to their highest levels in history. One company which has done particularly well is grocery chain Kroger. According to its website, its total sales were $132.5 billion in 2020, up from $122.3 billion in 2019. Excluding fuel and dispositions, total sales grew 14.2 percent.

This money has not been funneled into higher wages or better safety precautions for Kroger workers but has been funneled back into the pockets of Kroger’s shareholders. Last year, Kroger returned $1.9 billion to shareholders, repurchased $1.32 billion of shares in 2020 under its board authorizations, and increased the dividend by 13 percent, from $0.64 to $0.72 per year. 2020 was the fourteenth consecutive year of dividend increases, resulting in a payout of $534 million.

At the same time, Kroger Chief Executive Officer (CEO) William Rodney McMullen received a compensation package of more than $20.6 million, a $6.4 million raise—an increase by more than 45 percent—from the previous the year. According to WallMine.com, McMullen’s estimated net worth is a minimum of $152 million. This includes over 182,880 units of Kroger Company stock—valued at over $130,677,724.

Kroger store sign (Wikimedia Commons)

As McMullen’s pockets deepen, the typical worker found holes in theirs. Over the course of 2020, worker pay dropped by 8.1 percent, driven by the massive hiring of tens of thousands of new workers on starting pay.

This spring, Kroger said it would raise “average worker pay” to $16 per hour, up from $15.50 currently. How the company calculates “average pay” is unclear, and starting pay is significantly less than $15.50 in most areas. According to Payscale.com, the average wage at Kroger is $11.72, not $15.50.

Kroger workers responded on social media to the announcement with a mixture of skepticism and indignation. “No one, not even full time people in my store are making $16 an hour,” one worker said on a Kroger subreddit. Said another: “Are we including Rodney’s at 8k per hour? Are we including per hours of salaried management? At 50 hours or 80 hours per week? ... the term is insanely vague, and ... the average wage isn’t what the people who work for this company ultimately want to hear has increased. Kroger is playing PR instead of serving its employees who serve it.”

Earlier this year, Kroger retaliated against a Los Angeles ordinance requiring a temporary wage hike of $5 per hour in hazard pay for grocery store workers by closing three stores and eliminating 250 jobs, claiming that the stores were “underperforming.”

One worker told the Guardian, “If this store was underachieving, it was underachieving prior to the pandemic. It should have been closed then. Why are they waiting until now to close it? It’s retaliation. Because none of these executives at Kroger, did they give us their yearly bonus so we could get $5 an hour? No, they’re sitting in their nice houses in the hills or wherever they live, and telling us we don’t deserve an extra $5 an hour.”

In Arkansas, Kroger is closing three more stores in the cities of Morrilton, DeWitt, and England. Morrilton and DeWitt both closed July 17, 2021, and the England store is scheduled to close July 31, 2021. Kroger operates 28 stores in Arkansas, employing approximately 3900 employees.

“Every year, we evaluate our stores and their success in the communities they serve,” said Victor Smith, President of Kroger’s Delta Division. Smith continues, highlighting the importance of profit over life, “Closing a store is a difficult decision that we take very seriously. This store’s low financial returns made it impossible to continue to operate while still upholding our low-price commitment to our customers. Even through a pandemic, our DeWitt[,] Morrilton and England, Arkansas stores did not perform well and for that reason, we made the decision to close.”

“We’re grateful for the service and dedication of the associates at our Arkansas stores,” added Smith. “Today’s announcement is no reflection on our DeWitt, England or Morrilton Kroger Teams. We appreciate their contributions and we are working with them to identify positions in other Kroger store locations. Helping our associates through this transition is a top priority.”

Throughout the pandemic, the role of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union has been to keep Kroger and other grocery and food processing workers on the job as much as possible. It did nothing to protect Evan Seyfried, a Cincinnati-area Kroger dairy manager who was driven to suicide from months of harassment by a right-wing store manager. In the meatpacking industry, it has actively collaborated with management in encouraging maximum attendance in the plants, while helping to conceal the real extent of the spread of the virus from the public.

The UFCW, in fact, has profited handsomely from the pandemic stock market boom. According to its latest filings with the US Department of Labor, the UFCW’s net assets increased last year from $392 to $431 million. This was driven mainly by a $66 million increase in the value of its investments—that is, stocks and bonds. This massive sum was used to fund approximately $38 million in salaries to staff and officers in its national headquarters alone.

By comparison, the UFCW distributed a paltry $866 thousand in strike pay.

New details show how Pegasus was used to spy on political opponents

Kevin Reed

Further details emerged on Monday about the nature and extent of the spyware operation called Pegasus that has been used by governments since at least 2016 to hack into the smartphones of thousands of journalists, activists and business and political figures around the world.

The existence of the secret spying software was exposed on Sunday by the French non-profit media group Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International—in cooperation with a reporting consortium that includes the Guardian, the Washington Post and 15 other media organizations—following a data breach of its developer, the Israeli-based cybersecurity firm NSO, several months ago.

Photo shows the logo of the Israeli NSO Group company on a building where they had offices in Herzliya, Israel. The NSO is the company behind the Pegasus spyware. (AP Photo/Daniella Cheslow)

Among the new revelations reported on Monday by the Guardian are the fact that at least 50 individuals close to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “including his wide, children, aides and doctor” were on the list of possible targets of the Pegasus spyware; Rahul Gandhi, the major political opponent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “was twice selected as a potential target in leaked phone number data”; the American daughter of the imprisoned Rwandan activist, Paul Rusesabagina, who inspired the film Hotel Rwanda, “has been victim of multiple attacks using NSO spyware.”

A report on Monday in the Washington Post said that Pegasus is “military-grade spyware” supposedly developed for the purpose of “tracking terrorists and criminals” but it was used on a list of as many as 50,000 cell phone numbers internationally. A forensic investigation conducted by Post and the other 16 media partners showed that the NSO spyware successfully infiltrated “37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi…”

While the phone numbers in the leaked NSO data list do not contain the associated names of individuals, reporters have been able to identify “more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents.” Among those identified, the Post reports, are “several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials—including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.”

The journalists targeted in the spying operations work for “CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London and Al Jazeera in Qatar.”

The forensic analysis was conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab on 67 smartphones and, of those, “23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration.” The testing on the remaining 30 phones was inconclusive.

A Guardian report on Monday said that the phone numbers of 15,000 Mexicans were in the leaked data including “Politicians from every party, as well as journalists, lawyers, activists, prosecutors, diplomats, teachers, judges, doctors and academics,” and that “cybersurveillance is unregulated and out of control in Mexico—a country where federal and state governments have long used informants, infiltrators and listening devices to monitor and repress dissent.”

A report in the Post on Monday morning reviewed the manner in which Pegasus infected the iPhone of Claude Mangin, the French wife of a jailed political activist in Morocco. A text message was delivered to the phone without generating a notification or warning that the iMessage from an unknown sender was skirting Apple’s smartphone security and depositing the spyware onto the iPhone.

According to the Post report, once Pegasus is on a smartphone, it can “collect emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact lists, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories,” “activate cameras or microphones” and “listen to calls and voice mails.” The spyware can “collect location logs of where a user has been and also determine where that user is now, along with data indicating whether the person is stationary or, if moving, in which direction.”

In a series of lengthy official statements late Sunday, NSO denied that it was involved in the worldwide government spying operation that has targeted smartphones for the past five years. The company both claimed that the data disclosed by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International was inaccurate and that it was not responsible the illegal use of its technology by its undisclosed government clients.

In one particularly noteworthy passage, NSO states, “We also stand by our previous statements that our products, sold to vetted foreign governments, cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States, and no foreign customer has ever been granted technology that would enable them to access phones with US numbers. It is technologically impossible, and reaffirms the fact that your sources’ claims have no merit.”

The fact that this statement makes no mention of the US government as a well-known and proven user of similar surveillance tools both domestically and internationally is a transparent admission by NSO that its technology has been approved, if not contracted in the first place, by the American military-intelligence apparatus.

In a series of tweets on Sunday and Monday, the whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden denounced NSO and government use of spyware. Responding to the initial reports from the Guardian on Sunday, Snowden wrote, “The Israeli company behind this—the NSO group—should bear direct, criminal liability for the deaths and detentions of those targeted by the digital infection vectors it sells, which have no legitimate use.”

At noon on Monday, Snowden added, “If we don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.”

Snowden also wrote, “This is an industry that should not exist: they don’t make vaccines—the only thing they sell is the virus,” and he also pointed to the fact that the NSO group gave “blood money” to Obama, Trump and Biden officials during their election campaigns.

Japanese Defense White Paper stokes tensions with Beijing over Taiwan

Ben McGrath

Japan released its annual Defense Ministry White Paper on July 13, once again raising tensions with China. The document not only includes an inflammatory statement over Taiwan but more broadly outlines Tokyo’s justification for war preparations, in alliance with the US, aimed at Beijing.

The White Paper includes a reference to Taiwan for the first time. It states, “Stabilizing the situation surrounding Taiwan is important for Japan’s security and the stability of the international community. Therefore, it is necessary that we pay close attention to the situation with a sense of crisis more than ever before.”

Japanese Defense white paper (Ministry of Defense)

Implicit in this statement is Japan’s preparedness to intervene militarily over Taiwan on the pretext that events on the island represent a threat to Japanese security. The paper falsely places sole blame for the growing danger of war on Beijing, which Tokyo accuses of attempting to alter the status quo in the region.

This passage is not a one-off statement, but codifies Tokyo’s stance on Taiwan and questions of the “One China” policy. Under the “One China” policy, Japan recognizes Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan. Beijing has stated that it will go to war to reunite with Taiwan if the island ever declares independence or if countries like the US and Japan attempt to overturn the policy.

Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and State Minister of Defense Yasuhide Nakayama have made similar comments in recent weeks. Aso stated on July 5 that Japan would have to militarily “defend” Taiwan alongside the US against Beijing. Nakayama, deputy to the Defense Minister, directly questioned the “One China” policy during a speech on June 28 and called the island the “red line of the 21st century.”

These remarks as well as the White Paper directly contradict the claim that Beijing is upending the status quo in the region. The “One China” policy has been the basis for diplomatic relations with Beijing since the 1970s when Washington and Tokyo broke off formal ties with Taipei and acknowledged Beijing. Now the world’s two largest imperialist powers regard China as a threat to their interests and are seeking to subordinate Beijing if necessary through war.

The White Paper praises the former Trump administration for doing precisely what it alleges against China. “Based on the ‘America First’ policy and the realist concept that power plays a central role,” it stated, “the Trump administration has significantly changed the patterns of US involvement in the world. The administration set out a clear stance of emphasizing strategic competition with China, in particular, and also with Russia.”

The document also made clear that President Biden is continuing this agenda. “The Biden administration clarified its intent to conduct a global posture review of the US forces, and announced that the United States would counter China over the long term, which the administration considers the only competitor potentially capable of sustainably challenging the international system, putting the highest priority on the military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The White Paper accuses Beijing of being a threat to the “rules-based order” in the Indo-Pacific, but the “rules” are set by Washington to meet its interests. In his introduction, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi stated that Japan will uphold the “free and open Indo-Pacific (FOIP)”—the pretext used by the US to stage provocative “freedom of navigation” exercises either in or very near waters and airspace claimed by China.

The paper brands China as a threat not only in the Indo-Pacific region, but in technology spheres like artificial intelligence, in outer space exploration, and in the cyber domain, reflecting fears in Tokyo and Washington that China is gaining the technological edge.

The document also highlights the growing relationship between Australia and India, asserting that it is pursuing the quadrilateral relationship between the two countries and the US. The “Quad” is a quasi-military alliance aimed at surrounding China and preparing for war.

Beijing responded angrily to the White Paper. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian stated, “The Japanese side grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, groundlessly blamed China’s normal defense construction and military activity, pointed fingers at China’s maritime activity, and hyped up the so-called China threat, which is wrong and irresponsible.”

The White Paper’s focus on Taiwan has a particular significance. Its claim that Japan needs to defend democracy in Taiwan is simply a pretext. The Japanese ruling class has long seen the island as a crucial stepping stone for projecting its power into Southeast Asia.

There are historical parallels between today and Japan’s colonization of Taiwan in 1895 following the First Sino-Japanese War, a conflict launched to remove China as a strategic competitor on the Korean Peninsula. Tokyo claimed at the time to be defending Korea from China. During the negotiation of the Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the war, Japan forced China to surrender the island, which had been part of China since 1683.

Japan waged a brutal campaign on the island to suppress opposition to the annexation. What followed were five decades of dictatorial rule justified by pseudo-scientific assertions that the Taiwanese were biologically different from the “superior” Japanese. This racist argument was put forward by Shinpei Goto, who became head of civilian affairs on the island in 1895.

Following World War I, Tokyo cultivated a layer of the island’s elite to assist in the exploitation of the island’s young working class and the peasantry. This involved an assimilation campaign to try to erase Taiwanese culture. In 1936, as Japan prepared to invade China, Governor-General Seizo Kobayashi introduced a policy requiring Taiwanese people to adopt Japanese names, language and culture. Taiwan was one of the locations from which the Japanese army coerced young women into becoming “comfort women,” a euphemism for sex slaves, a fact the Japanese establishment today denies.

Japan’s involvement in Taiwan today must be seen in this light. As it attempts to remilitarize, Tokyo simultaneously attempts to whitewash its past war crimes in Taiwan and elsewhere in the region. Like the US, Japan has no interest in promoting democracy in Taiwan or anywhere else in the region. Rather once again, the imperialist powers are exploiting the island as a pawn in the preparations for a conflict with China.

Six months of the Biden administration—A balance sheet

Patrick Martin

Six months ago, Joseph Biden was inaugurated president of the United States, under conditions of unprecedented crisis of US capitalism and the entire social and political order.

President Joe Biden speaks about the economy and his infrastructure agenda in the State Dining Room of the White House, in Washington, Monday, July 19th, 2021. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

His predecessor, Donald Trump, did not attend the ceremony, signaling his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Only two weeks before, on January 6, Trump’s supporters had stormed the Capitol and temporarily halted the congressional certification of state electoral votes. The aim of the attempted coup was to stop the transfer of power and establish a personalist dictatorship. In the words of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment.”

When Biden took office, 400,000 people were dead from the COVID-19 pandemic, while millions were unemployed. Just months earlier, every city, town, and village in America had seen protests in opposition to police violence.

Biden marked the six-month anniversary with brief remarks presenting American society in glowing terms. “For all those predictions of doom and gloom six months in, here’s where things stand,” he said. “Record growth, record job creation, workers getting hard-earned breaks.” He added, “Put simply: Our economy is on the move, and we have COVID-19 on the run.”

Summing up his prognosis, the US president proclaimed: “It turns out capitalism is alive and very well.” The truth is that the policies of the Biden administration have entirely failed to resolve the social crisis in America and they cannot, because they are based on the framework of American capitalism.

The pandemic, far from being “on the run,” is undergoing a new resurgence. Since Biden took office, an additional 225,000 people have died from the pandemic. All indications are that by the winter, with the new surge accompanying the spread of the Delta variant, the death toll under Biden will have exceeded that under Trump.

The policies of the Biden administration have been driven by the interests of Wall Street and the super-rich. This is why, despite occasional criticisms of Trump’s callous and anti-scientific response to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has pursued the same policy of restoring corporate profit-making by forcing workers back to work and children back to school as quickly as possible, regardless of the dangers to their lives and health.

Trump’s response to the economic depression that accompanied the onset of the pandemic was to pour trillions into bolstering the banks, hedge funds and corporations, with bipartisan bills like the CARES Act. Biden pursues essentially the same policy, although with less support from the Republicans than the Democrats gave Trump. He boasts of success on the economic front, although seven million fewer workers have jobs today than before the pandemic began, and millions face wage cuts, poverty, eviction and foreclosure.

Only in foreign policy is there a significant shift from Trump to Biden, and this in tactics only, not strategy. Biden has placed more emphasis on the US utilization of NATO and the “Quad,” a de facto alliance with Japan, Australia and India. Significant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus backed Biden against Trump because they sought a more effective mobilization of US power against Russia and China.

And if Biden’s statement that “capitalism is alive and very well” were true, it begs the question: Why is there a mounting fascist threat to American democracy?

In the six months since Biden’s inauguration, the Republican Party has maintained its intransigent opposition to any serious investigation into the events of January 6. Half-hearted Democratic proposals, first for an “independent” bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, then for a bipartisan congressional investigation, have been blocked outright or endlessly delayed.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to emerge of the central role played by Trump and his allies in Congress in seeking to carry out a political coup d’état to overturn the results of the election and maintain himself in office. But neither Trump nor his accomplices have even been questioned, let alone tried, convicted and jailed.

Instead, Trump has renewed his agitation against the election, seeking to transform the Republican Party into an openly fascistic movement subordinated to his personal authority. And his supporters in the Republican Party are using their control of state legislatures to enact unprecedented and sweeping attacks on the right to vote.

Biden himself acknowledged something of the reality of the crisis of American capitalism in a speech last week in Philadelphia, when he declared “We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” But he offered no way forward, except to appeal to “my Republican friends in the Congress, states and cities and counties to stand up” against this assault—although they are the very ones carrying it out.

In an effort to prop up illusions in the Democratic Party, the representatives of its “left” wing, portray Biden’s policies in extravagant terms. Last week Senator Bernie Sanders claimed that Biden’s “reconciliation” bill on social spending amounted to “the most consequential piece of legislation for working families since the 1930s.” Or, like Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, they express disappointment in what has been achieved so far, but express the hope that “Biden has shown a willingness to think big,” and that additional pressure should be brought to bear on congressional Democrats.

For his part, Biden uses every possible occasion to make clear he has no intention of implementing any measures that challenge the interests of the financial oligarchy, declaring last weekend, “Communism is a failed system, universally failed system. I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute.”

The truth is that the Biden administration is Wall Street and the military, mobilizing behind it sections of the upper middle class through the utilization of identity politics. Well aware of the explosive social conditions developing in America, moreover, the administration supports the union “organization” campaign at Amazon and for the PRO Act, to make it easier to install unions at work locations where they otherwise would have difficulty convincing workers to pay dues for the privilege of having their wages and benefits cut.

It is telling that when workers engage in genuine anti-corporate struggles, like the strikes waged by autoworkers against Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia, the supposedly “pro-labor” president falls completely silent. Biden is for the unions, not for the workers, because he correctly sees the unions as an instrument of the US ruling class in policing the working class.

Workers must draw the lessons of six months of the Biden administration. None of the problems confronting the working class, from the disastrous pandemic response to unparalleled levels of social inequality, to the danger of imperialist world war and fascist dictatorship, can be addressed without breaking the grip of the financial oligarchy over every aspect of society.

Nothing is Happening in South Africa (Just Devastation)

Paul Cochrane

Huge swathes of South Africa are smouldering from days of rioting and looting. Some 27 million people have been going through the equivalent of a force 10 hurricane, yet judging by the limited news coverage internationally, you wouldn’t think so. It’s not too much of a stretch to say there’s been a near global media blackout.

The crisis has been going on since Friday 9th, and really took off on Monday. Indicative of how little international coverage there has been is that it took until Thursday for me to start receiving a smattering of messages asking if we are OK – “I heard something is going on…”

The contrast to Lebanon (where I lived for 17 years, until 2019) is incredible. Whenever there was a bomb or another security incident, I’d invariably get messages within minutes if not hours checking in.

Yes, South Africa’s at the end of the world, but it’s the continent’s largest (or was) economy, with 59 million people. The country is on a knife’s edge right now, particularly the two most populated provinces of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng, which includes Johannesburg, and the location for the majority of rioting.

Over 200 malls, 800 shops and dozens of warehouses had been looted and in many cases burned to the ground by late Monday. Town centres have become burned husks. Farms have been destroyed, livestock stolen. 117 people have been killed so far. Operations at the fourth largest container terminal in the southern hemisphere, in Durban, and train freight have ground to a halt. Telecom towers were hit. The country’s third largest oil refinery has closed. On Wednesday night alone there were 208 ‘incidents’ in KZN and Gauteng. Food and fuel are now in short supply. There is talk of armed insurrection. The damage is in the billions of dollars.

Abroad, it’s as if not much is happening in South Africa – “ah, Africans rioting again” seems to be the overall impression. Some of the titles imply that what’s happening here is just a bit of ‘unrest’, if that – “South Africa is wandering from Mandela’s Vision”. On the major news networks there’s more news about the floods in Germany and Putin-Trump election meddling.

What has become clear is that the rioting is more than just calling for the release of former President Jacob Zuma, who turned himself in last week for contempt of court, sparking the crisis. Poverty and rage against the machine are of course drivers of the looting. But there are nefarious elements at work  purposefully destabalising the country. Investigations have been started into 12 intelligence agents and cadres loyal to Zuma, including former special operations boss Thulani ‘Silence’ Dlomo.

Zuma, it should be recalled, was head of the ANC’s intelligence department during the apartheid years, and his team know well how to organise mass demonstrations and foment unrest.

There are massive internal struggles within the ANC government, with Zuma’s so-called Radical Economic Transformation faction demanding the former president’s release and the overthrow of the president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Such internal struggles prevented the deployment of 75,000 troops, as the opposition wanted; as of Thursday, just 25,000 have been deployed.

Food and fuel trucks are under military escort to keep supply lines open on the country’s main transport artery, the N3 highway, which runs from Durban to Johannesburg.

The army has come too late to have prevented the rampage. The underwhelming response of the South African Police Force (SAPs) to the rioting is indicative of not only their low numbers (less than 200,000) and resources but in cases a lack of willingness to take on rioters, in part because of orders from elements that are pro-Zuma.

In a town near to where we live, Howick, with a population of 21,000, there were just eight cops on duty when thousands of looters descended on the centre. Civilians had to band together to defend the town, firing off thousands of rounds. In Durban and areas where thousands of looters went after malls and shopping centres, the SAPs were running out of rubber bullets and then live rounds.

People feel they have been abandoned by the state. Vigilante justice has surfaced. Across KwaZulu-Natal, civilians are manning checkpoints (in our town it is eight unarmed civilians, to two armed per checkpoint), with some backup from the police and the country’s over-sized private security companies – two and a half times that of the police, at 500,000. Everyone with an weapon is carrying it or keeping it close to hand. Communities have banded together – of all races – to defend their neighbourhoods, businesses and property.

The talk now is of attacks on gun stores, and that some 1.5 million rounds of ammo were looted from Durban port. If that is true and the ammo gets into the wrong hands, an armed insurrection could just be around the corner. In any case, there are plenty of guns and ammo around. Local farmers say they have expected something to happen for a long time, with many stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammo per farm.

Contributing to the overall crisis is the legacy of apartheid, and decades of misrule and corruption, for which Zuma was being investigated during his nine year as president. The country also has the highest inequality in the world – youth unemployment is 75% – which has only gotten worse over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the situation is able to stabilise in the coming days, the immediate challenge is to ensure food, fuel, medicine and other essential supplies start being distributed or hunger will spread, the pandemic will run rampant (the country was put back to Level 4 restrictions a few weeks ago due to the spread of the Delta variant), and more trouble will be afoot.

As the novelist Alan Patton, from Pietermaritzburg, the provincial capital of KwaZulu-Natal just down the road from me, entitled his renowned anti-apartheid novel, Cry, the Beloved Country.

Presidential Prerogatives

Mel Gurtov

Once upon a time, American leaders only went to war when, in accordance with the Constitution, Congress declared it. That practice has long since been abandoned.

In recent times Congress either votes to “authorize” a war already underway or is only casually consulted if at all. Though the 1973 War Powers Resolution was meant to restrain an imperial president who had led the country to defeat in Vietnam, no president since has faithfully followed that law’s requirements. Thus, whereas in authoritarian systems the great leader simply orders troops into action, in democracies like ours, going to war is sneakier, in two ways.

First, in justifications, as when the President dispatches troops on the basis of his role as commander-in-chief, invoking “national security,” the “national interest,” “regional stability,” “humanitarian intervention,” “restoring order,” and other wide-open categories that most Congress-members are loath to challenge.

Second, in methods, by using indirect warfare, such as drones, special forces, economic and cyber warfare, and sabotage; and unofficial (and deniable) assets such as the CIA, private company mercenaries, and third-country partners.

No one understands the game better than Joe Biden, who as a senator had a consistent record of opposing the use of force without Congressional approval. He says he wants to end the “forever wars” in the Middle East. As Afghanistan shows, however, “ending” does not actually mean terminating. With the Taliban now intent on overthrowing the US-supported government, and many in Congress already critical of Biden’s troop withdrawal, US policy will actually entail reducing US involvement, using a different mix and level of intervention—what he calls “over-the-horizon capabilities.” The “forever wars” will go on, justified by an understanding of presidential power that leaves enormous room for military action even when troops are withdrawn.

Without Constraint

In the Middle East since the George W. Bush administration, the legal basis for US military involvement has been Congressional Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Authorizations amount to blank checks, and have been freely exploited by Democratic and Republican presidents alike to attack terrorists and unfriendly states, support allies, and sustain very large forces in the region.

The authorizations are so expansive that they could be used to go to war with Iran, attack the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons depots, protect Israel, or reintroduce forces in and around Afghanistan.

Biden says he would like to revoke the 2002 AUMF, which was directed at Iraq, and he apparently has support in both houses of Congress to do that. But that still leaves the much broader 2001 AUMF, which gives the president the power to “prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” His capacity to deploy forces and use other assets in the Middle East and Africa will not be all that constrained.

Remember Ronald Reagan’s war making in Central America, which culminated in the Iran-Contra affair? That secret operation, though eventually exposed, demonstrated how a president determined to defeat a particular enemy (Nicaragua) could go around Congress and, with the help of dogmatic advisers and secret channels, erect a sophisticated network of state and private entities to fund war fighting.

The Democratic opposition in Congress fought a rearguard action as it struggled for legislative language that would tie Reagan’s hands. The lesson of Iran-Contra is that presidents have enormous resources at their disposal for conducting wars. A skeptical or hostile Congress is often playing catch-up.

Two scholars who have served in government have this to say about the current state of affairs with respect to restricting presidential authority to make war:

To understand the limited significance of [Biden’s] approach [on AUMFs] to ending the forever wars, you need look no further than Mr. Biden’s Feb. 25 airstrikes in eastern Syria against the Iran-backed militias responsible for assaults on U.S. and allied personnel in Iraq. The United States is not at war with Syria or Iran, and Congress had not authorized the strikes. The president ordered them nonetheless, based on his independent authority, under Article II of the Constitution, “to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.” Narrowing the 2001 and 2002 [AUMFs] would leave this presidential power untouched.

The Need for Fundamental Change

But the problem goes much deeper than presidential hubris. Congress may often be behind the curve when it comes to national security, but it is still part of the problem rather than the solution. Bipartisanship has much to do with the expansion of presidential power in national security matters.

A majority almost always rejects efforts to limit the commander-in-chief’s authority, as shown, for example, during the Bill Clinton intervention in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the post-9/11 start of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans and Democrats then rejected efforts to restrain a president by recourse to the War Powers Bill.

In fact, if that bill were up for a vote today —and two senators plan on doing just that —it probably wouldn’t pass, whereas if continued direct US involvement in Afghanistan—or sending troops to Haiti in order to “help restore order”—were put to a vote, those actions probably would pass. The reality, of course, is that a president wouldn’t put any of those decisions to a vote by Congress.

I conclude that no significant inroads in presidential power in foreign affairs are possible without redefining US national security. Foreign policy needs to be humanized and demilitarized; Congress must resist authorizing poorly defined military action in advance; the bloated military budget, three times the size of China’s and 10 times Russia’s, must be deeply cut; the use of force must be proportional and seldom used; and diplomacy must be reenergized, with an accent on engaging adversaries as well as friends.

Pres. Biden is correct to say that foreign policy begins at home. But he must avoid the trap presidents typically fall into—the temptation of undemocratic warmaking.

UK government proceeds with criminal “Freedom Day” and junks COVID safety measures

Robert Stevens

The Conservative government is proceeding with its criminal policy of ending all COVID safety restrictions today. This is happening while the UK is facing a massive surge of coronavirus infections, with daily cases passing 50,000 on Friday and Saturday.

In the last seven days, Britain recorded 296,768 new cases of COVID-19, up 41 percent on the previous week and the second highest seven-day total in the world. Only Indonesia with 341,749 cases, but with a population of 276.5 million—four times the size of Britain’s recorded more.

On Friday the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced that one in 95 people in England have COVID, a leap from one in 160 the previous week. The hot weather, with many people travelling, staying in the UK for a holiday and gathering on beaches, will accelerate the spread of the virus.

Along with the surge in cases, hospitalisations and deaths are both rising. The 284 deaths over the last week were a rise of nearly 50 percent on the previous week’s 192. Around 600 people a day are being hospitalised. On July 15, 3,964 people were in hospital with Covid, with 551 (almost 14 percent) requiring ventilation. According to research by the Daily Mail, four-fifths of NHS hospitals in England are now seeing a spike in COVID patients being admitted.

So widespread are the infections that the authors of the criminal ditching of COVID regulations are being infected. Health Secretary Sajid Javid, despite being double vaccinated, is ill. Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who contracted COVID last year and nearly died as a result) and Chancellor Rishi Sunak were contacted by NHS Test and Trace as contacts of Javid and instructed to self-isolate for 10 days.

Both tried to dodge the requirement, saying they would take part in a “daily contact testing” pilot scheme. A storm of protest forced a U-turn. This was under conditions in which over half a million people, including key workers from all sectors, have been forced to self-isolate over the last week after being “pinged” by the NHS test and trace phone app. Moreover, 821,000 children (11.2 percent) in England’s state school were not in class on July 8 because of COVID—the highest level since March and a 31 percent increase on the week prior. Of those off school, 39,000 pupils had tested positive and 35,000 had a suspected infection.

There is no constituency within any section of the political establishment to halt or even delay the ending of restrictions. All that has been done is the release of a muted statement by the heads of the National Health Service in England, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland, calling for “caution”.

To comprehend the scale of the criminality being perpetrated, one needs only look at the statements of health professionals associated with the signing of a letter to the UK’s premiere medical journal, The Lancet. More than 1,200 experts signed the letter titled, “Mass infection is not an option: We must do more to protect our young”.

On Friday, an online “Emergency international summit on UK’s ‘freedom day’” was held. Hosted by The Citizens, a UK NGO, it brought together world-leading experts from 10 countries including scientists and physicians.

Introducing the meeting was Gabriel Scally, the Regional Director of Public Health in England and a member of Independent Sage, an alternative scientific advisory panel to the UK government’s official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

Dr Gabriel Scally speaking at the online summit (credit: Citizens's TV/YouTube channel)

Scally spoke as a “representative of the group of scientists who wrote to The Lancet recently calling the government's plans ‘a dangerous and unethical experiment’,” he said. “The Westminster government has failed to bring the virus under control and is now preparing to remove the last few measures that inhibit the virus spreading even more widely amongst our only partially vaccinated population.”

The summit opposed the statement at a July 12 Downing Street press conference last week by the UK’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty that there was “widespread agreement across the scientific community” with the government’s ending restrictions.

“A blind man on a fast horse can see that this is a strategy that doesn’t have the support of scientists, universally at all,” said Scally. “And I personally was amazed at some of the comments, the idea that it was a good idea to have the virus spread widely through the population and infect people, make them ill, and have them die, so that we got that over with before the autumn. To ‘go in the summer’, as it was described [by Whitty].

“I’ve been a public health doctor for 40 years and I’ve never heard of a public health strategy like this. As you have heard from some of the experts from around the world this is not any concept of public health that any public health physician would really recognize I don’t think.”

Professor Stephen Duckett, Health Programme Secretary of the Grattan Institute and former secretary of the Australian Health Department, said, “There is no reputable public health advisor of any kind who would recommend opening up at a time when the virus is spreading rampantly. It just defies any logic, any science of any kind, and it is a recipe to just accept that 40,00, 50,000, 80,000 cases a day is somehow acceptable.”

Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, said, “The world is watching the current avoidable crisis unfold in the UK.” She warned, “only about half of our population are fully vaccinated and we have been told to expect that millions will get infected over the summer with case rates reaching about a hundred thousand per day. Our government has chosen this path despite having safe and effective vaccines available that could have protected the millions who will now be exposed to a novel virus and its long-term consequences leaving a generation with chronic illness and disability.”

Professor Christina Pagel, director of University College London’s clinical operational research unit, explained, “Because of our position as a global travel hub, any variant that becomes dominant in the UK will likely spread to the rest of the world. We saw it with Alpha. I’m absolutely sure that we contributed to the rise of Delta in Europe and North America. The UK policy doesn’t just affect us. It affects everybody and everybody has a stake in what we do.”

Pagel drew attention to a letter from UK clinical virologists published in the Financial Times July 15, stating that “complete relaxation of behavioural measures designed to reduce the spread of infection, before robust and sufficient levels of vaccine-induced immunity in the population have been achieved, is potentially a recipe for disaster, with the risk of negating the long-term benefits of the early UK rollout of vaccines.” The virologists insisted, “Removal of precautions should happen only when infection rates are decreasing, not increasing.”

The Labour Party and trade unions have no fundamental disagreements with the homicidal ditching of restrictions. Backing the reopening in a July 8 statement, Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady said, “We all want working life to get back to business as usual,” with the TUC complaining only that it had not been consulted as it had been at the end of the first lockdown in May 2020.

No nationalist factions of the ruling elite, including the Scottish National Party government, has an opposed strategy. As a proportion of the population, even more people are infected with COVID in Scotland (one in 90) than in England. Yet First Minister Nicola Sturgeon could only muster a plea for “caution” in announcing that Scotland will move to Level 0 today and ditch a raft of restrictions.