Rwanda’s Military is the French Proxy on African Soil

Vijay Prashad

On July 9, 2021, the government of Rwanda said that it had deployed 1,000 troops to Mozambique to battle al-Shabaab fighters, who had seized the northern province of Cabo Delgado. A month later, on August 8, Rwandan troops captured the port city of Mocímboa da Praia, where just off the coast sits a massive natural gas concession held by the French energy company TotalEnergies SE and the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil. These new developments in the region led to the African Development Bank’s President M. Akinwumi Adesina announcing on August 27 that TotalEnergies SE will restart the Cabo Delgado liquefied natural gas project by the end of 2022.

Militants from al-Shabaab (or ISIS-Mozambique, as the U.S. State Department prefers to call it) did not fight to the last man; they disappeared across the border into Tanzania or into their villages in the hinterland. The energy companies will, meanwhile, soon start to recoup their investments and profit handsomely, thanks in large part to the Rwandan military intervention.

Why did Rwanda intervene in Mozambique in July 2021 to defend, essentially, two major energy companies? The answer lies in a very peculiar set of events that took place in the months before the troops left Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.

Billions Stuck Underwater

Al-Shabaab fighters first made their appearance in Cabo Delgado in October 2017. For three years, the group played a cat-and-mouse game with Mozambique’s army before taking control of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020. At no point did it seem possible for Mozambique’s army to thwart al-Shabaab and allow TotalEnergies SE and ExxonMobil to restart operations in the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of northern Mozambique, where a massive natural gas field was discovered in February 2010.

The Mozambican Ministry of Interior had hired a range of mercenaries such as Dyck Advisory Group (South Africa), Frontier Services Group (Hong Kong), and the Wagner Group (Russia). In late August 2020, TotalEnergies SE and the government of Mozambique signed an agreement to create a joint security force to defend the company’s investments against al-Shabaab. None of these armed groups succeeded. The investments were stuck underwater.

At this point, Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi indicated, as I was told by a source in Maputo, that TotalEnergies SE might ask the French government to send a detachment to assist in securing the area. This discussion went on into 2021. On January 18, 2021, French Defense Minister Florence Parly and her counterpart in Portugal, João Gomes Cravinho, talked on the phone, during which—it is suggested in Maputo—they discussed the possibility of a Western intervention in Cabo Delgado. On that day, TotalEnergies SE CEO Patrick Pouyanné met with President Nyusi and his ministers of defense (Jaime Bessa Neto) and interior (Amade Miquidade) to discuss the joint “action plan to strengthen the security of the area.” Nothing came of it. The French government was not interested in a direct intervention.

A senior official in Maputo told me that it is strongly believed in Mozambique that French President Emmanuel Macron suggested the Rwandan force, rather than French forces, be deployed to secure Cabo Delgado. Indeed, Rwanda’s armies—highly trained, well-armed by the Western countries, and given impunity to act outside the bounds of international law—have proved their mettle in the interventions carried out in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

What Kagame Got for the Intervention

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda since 1994, first as vice president and minister of defense and then since 2000 as the president. Under Kagame, democratic norms have been flouted within Rwanda, while Rwandan troops have operated ruthlessly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A 2010 UN Mapping Project report on serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed that the Rwandan troops killed “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of Congolese civilians and Rwandan refugees between 1993 and 2003. Kagame rejected the UN report, suggesting that this “double genocide” theory denied the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He has wanted the French to accept responsibility for the genocide of 1994 and has hoped that the international community will ignore the massacres in the eastern Congo.

On March 26, 2021, historian Vincent Duclert submitted a 992-page report on France’s role in the Rwandan genocide. The report makes it clear that France should accept—as Médecins Sans Frontières put it—“overwhelming responsibility” for the genocide. But the report does not say that the French state was complicit in the violence. Duclert traveled to Kigali on April 9 to deliver the report in person to Kagame, who said that the report’s publication “marks an important step toward a common understanding of what took place.”

On April 19, the Rwandan government released a report that it had commissioned from the U.S. law firm Levy Firestone Muse. This report’s title says it all: “A Foreseeable Genocide: The Role of the French Government in Connection with the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.” The French did not deny the strong words in this document, which argues that France armed the génocidaires and then hastened to protect them from international scrutiny. Macron, who has been loath to accept France’s brutality in the Algerian liberation war, did not dispute Kagame’s version of history. This was a price he was willing to pay.

What France Wants

On April 28, 2021, Mozambique’s President Nyusi visited Kagame in Rwanda. Nyusi told Mozambique’s news broadcasters that he had come to learn about Rwanda’s interventions in the Central African Republic and to ascertain Rwanda’s willingness to assist Mozambique in Cabo Delgado.

On May 18, Macron hosted a summit in Paris, “seeking to boost financing in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” which was attended by several heads of government, including Kagame and Nyusi, the president of the African Union (Moussa Faki Mahamat), the president of the African Development Bank (Akinwumi Adesina), the president of the West African Development Bank (Serge Ekué), and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (Kristalina Georgieva). Exit from “financial asphyxiation” was at the top of the agenda, although in private meetings there were discussions about Rwandan intervention in Mozambique.

A week later, Macron left for a visit to Rwanda and South Africa, spending two days (May 26 and 27) in Kigali. He repeated the broad findings of the Duclert report, brought along 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines to Rwanda (where only around 4 percent of the population had received the first dose by the time of his visit), and spent time in private talking to Kagame. On May 28, alongside South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, Macron talked about Mozambique, saying that France was prepared to “take part in operations on the maritime side,” but would otherwise defer to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and to other regional powers. He did not mention Rwanda specifically.

Rwanda entered Mozambique in July, followed by SADC forces, which included South African troops. France got what it wanted: Its energy giant can now recoup its investment.

The Gritty Reality of Solar Power

Priti Gulati Cox & Stan Cox

Time is fast running out. The world’s affluent nations, with their abundant greenhouse emissions, have to finally drag themselves across the starting line and begin phasing out fossil fuels at the accelerated pace that the climate emergency demands. And if they can manage to do that, they clearly will need to quickly build up wind and solar electric capacity to partially compensate for the shrinkage of oil, gas, and coal supplies while addressing the prospect of energy shortages by securing production of essential goods and services for everyone.

Unfortunately, mainstream climate visions have strayed far from confronting the existential necessity to banish fossil fuels. They simply assume that the buildup of renewable energy will automatically chase fossil fuels out of our lives and fully replace them, watt for watt and Btu for Btu. These visions hold out the promise of a world in which a pristine, Sun-powered economy fulfills any and all of our material desires far into the future—a delicious, guilt-free cornucopia. But the green-growth promise is a mirage, and the realities of a high-production, wind- and solar-powered world will be much less tasty.

Any industrial installation, including solar and wind farms, profoundly disrupts the landscape on which it sits. If it were possible to fully satisfy the bloated energy appetites of affluent nation by covering hundreds of millions or billions of acres of the Earth’s surface with power-harvesting hardware, the result would be irreparable ecological damage.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing booms to supply such a sprawling proliferation of solar arrays, wind power plants, battery-backed electric grids, electric-vehicle fleets, and other hardware would require outrageously large inputs of metals such as lithium, cobalt, silver, copper, aluminum, nickel, iron, and a host of exotic rare earth elements.

The global rush to mine these metallic ores is on, and the dire ecological and humanitarian consequences that always follow have spurred growing concern. But the mining and processing of a much more mundane, often overlooked mineral resource—sand—is also critical to renewable-energy expansion and terrible for the Earth and its human and non-human inhabitants.

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The solar-energy industry, like digital electronics, is built on a foundation of silicon. Number 14 in the periodic table of the elements, silicon is abundant in the Earth’s crust. But the industries that mine and process sand, quartzite rock, and other sources of silicon dioxide to obtain pure silicon for use in solar equipment belie the popular, sunny green conception of an alternative-energy economy.

Manufacturing a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells requires very high-quality silicon. Before the rapid growth in solar panel production took off, manufacturers could satisfy their need for the element by recycling flawed computer chips cast off by computer makers. As the solar industry’s demand for silicon exploded, however, they had to start producing their own supplies, by extracting pure silicon from sand and other minerals.

Sand headed for solar uses must go through energy-intensive, and often toxic, processing. It begins with heating sand or quartzite rock, along with a carbon source like wood chips or charcoal, to 3,500 degrees F, resulting in a chemical reaction that produces metallurgical grade silicon. Both the energy for heating and the combustion of the carbon sources contribute to greenhouse warming. Producing one pound of this form of silicon generates an estimate pound and a half of carbon dioxide emissions.

Further refining the metallurgical grade silicon, in order to achieve the 99.9999% purity required in photovoltaic wafers, requires additional heating and chemical treatment. That process produces four tons of the highly toxic compound silicon tetrachloride for every ton of the desired product, polysilicon. And the ultrathin wafers that are sliced from polysilicon blocks for use in photovoltaic cells must be cleaned and smoothed, typically with extremely dangerous hydrofluoric acid.

Sand’s central role in solar energy and its ecological impacts doesn’t end there. The glass sheet that covers and protects a solar panel must have higher transparency than ordinary window glass, to maximize light capture. That requires starting with sand that carries minimal impurities. Most desirable is sand mined from river beds—causing severe disruption of local and downstream ecosystems. Then even the highest quality sand must be deep-cleaned, which involves further energy- and chemical- intensive industrial techniques.

And there’s more to solar energy’s footprint than silicon—for example, the panels’ requirements for large quantities of pure silver and the exploding demand for aluminum frames and supports. In sum, the broad ecological impacts of manufacturing, installing, operating, and, finally dismantling and disposing of a solar installation at the end of its life span include global warming potential (mostly from the silicon processing), ozone depletion, eutrophication of water bodies, and toxicity to humans and non-humans. The lifetime energy consumed is equivalent to a year and a half to three years of the solar farm’s energy output. And photovoltaic panels last only 25 years on average. Their power output declines year by year, and then they have to be replaced—and the cycle of ecological damage begins again.

The chief reason for recent, much-touted decreases in the cost of solar-generated electricity is the increasing share of solar component manufacturing being performed in China, with its low-wage labor force and cheap coal-fired power supply. A whopping 80% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced in China, with 45% in the northwestern province of Xinjiang alone.

Recent news reports show how China’s solar-energy industry is having dire consequences not only for the environment but also for human rights and well-being. In Xinjiang, members of the persecuted Uyghur ethnic minority make up most of the labor force in the hazardous quartz mining and polysilicon manufacturing industries. And most of the Uyghurs are employed through the government’s so-called “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” programs.

A 2021 investigative report from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK concluded, based on strong evidence, that these initiatives “are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment” and are “tantamount to forcible transfer of populations and enslavement.” The researchers found that the supply chains of at least ninety solar energy companies worldwide included polysilicon produced by this forced-labor system.

We must be pragmatic, of course. If the world is going to start leaving oil, gas, and coal in the ground forever, an expansion of wind and solar energy capacity will indeed be necessary. (Some industry insiders turn to a reliable if rusty old saw in advising us that to make a “renewable omelet”, you have to break—and “melt”—some ecological eggs.)

New energy development, however, must be pursued judiciously, minimizing ecological impacts and aiming for a much more modest energy capacity and less industrial production than we have today. Affluent societies worldwide will need to adapt to life with a much smaller and much more equitably shared energy supply; otherwise, we will keep extending our plunder of the Earth, jogging along on the same old ecologically destructive industrial treadmill.

Covid-19 and Right-Wing Business in Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young

German coronavirus conspiracy theories are available for just €24.99. Germany’s right-wing media are cashing in on the fear of the pandemic. It is good business when selling snake oil and right-wing ideology. At the top is Germany’s right-wing extremist and loosely AfD-affiliated Compact magazine. It is among the clear winners of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Compact marches on undeterred by the fact that Germany’s secret police – Verfassungsschutz – has classified Compact as a case of right-wing extremism. Compact remains a leading publication heavily advocating Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, the AFD, its voters, supporters, and adjacent racist, nationalistic, and chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic causes.

Compact also delivers ideological support and conspiracy fantasies to Germany’s so-called anti-vaxxers, general right-wing natters, tin-foil hat wearing so-called hygiene people, believers in a Jewish world plot, mythical conspiracy advocates, etc. Yet, Compact has turned its ideologically motivated resentment of the government’s current Corona protection regulations into a lucrative business.

In March 2021, Compact published a so-called “special edition” on what Germany’s authoritarian populism calls Merkel’s Corona Dictatorship. Compact’s so-called “report” (sic) starts with a picture of three police officers in protective gear in front of a dystopian disaster scene showing a bombed-out skyscraper.  And, with menacing drones hovering around, the right-wing setup looked like a cheap advertisement for a bad 1970s disaster movie.

Riding the vaccine rejection wave, Compact agitates against vaccinations claiming –falsely– that Angela Merkel was preparing the compulsory vaccination of children. No such plan has ever been discussed or put in place. Yet, it creates fear which is, after all, the key operative ideology of authoritarian populism.

Yet, Compact’s 45,000 monthly subscribers not only subscribe to the magazine, they foremost subscribe to its right-wing ideology. Beyond simple subscriber numbers, German web traffic monitoring website Similarweb, lists Compact’s online version as having about 600,000 visitors per month. To those people, Compact is happy to hype-up distrust in the state’s Covid-19 guidelines. Beyond that, Compact is also offering semi-medical health advice.

Overall, Compact offers the usual conspiratorial ideology claiming, for example, that the coronavirus is actually harmless. Simultaneously, it feeds the hallucination that the pandemic was invented by power-hungry elites to enrich themselves. At the same time, Compact warns against the impending Corona Dictatorship.

Apparently disjointed, the magazine published the following warning on its website, Don’t panic about Corona! Yet, contradictory messages have never deterred any ideology or conspiracy fantasy. It runs under the time-honored maxim, never let the facts and contradictions get in the way of a good ideology.

Compact also tells its readers and believers to improve their immune system offering various food supplements. It recommends, for example, vitamin supplements, antioxidants and the Co-enzyme Q10. Again and again, this is linked to an online shop that offers Nine Lives in an article that is not marked as advertising. There are several hundred such “articles” on the Compact webpage. They suggest to readers that these are written by independent journalists and they are not advertisements.

These so-called articles are published under various authors. Yet, they all promote the same online-shop. Surprisingly, this is not just any online company. The boss of 9-Leben-GmbH or Nine Lives is Kai Homilius. Homilius is also co-founder and shareholder of Compact-Magazin-GmbH – Compact’s owner. In other words, the right-wing magazine advertises an online company of its own shareholder. Owning a magazine and a supposedly independent online shop makes good business and it sells right-wing ideology as a little sideshow.

To con naïve people and fill the pockets of its right-wing owner, Compact advertises Astaxanthin – a vegetable substance for €29.99 ($35). This is where, you get your best protection against Corona and other viruses, the magazine promises. Already in the Spring of 2020, Germany’s Ministry of Food warned against such advertising. The ministry clarified, advertising that sell dubious supplements that suggest to be protective against viruses is prohibited.

Undeterred, Compact plays with people’s fear and cashes in. In addition to Ataxanthin, Compact- magazine is not only a right-wing publisher, it is also in the business of selling dietary supplements. Yet, the link between right-wing ideology, dubious supplements and authoritarian populist publishers reach way further than Compact.

For years, Germany’s right-wing Kopp publishing house has been one of the top dogs. Right-wing publisher and UFO-believer Jochen Kopp publishes books about, well, UFOs, aliens, world conspiracies, alternative medicine, and the myth of an allegedly widespread cover-up hiding the supposed violence of migrants in Germany. Beyond that, Kopp considers scientific medicine a great fraud and a fake.

Kopp’s publishing house features as a double business by not only selling right-wing ideology, but also selling a comprehensive range of supplements on the company’s very own wellness site. You can get 120 capsules of barley grass juice for just €24.99. Of course, there are also crystals and stones and vitalizing waters.

Since decades, Kopp also offers emergency food rations, filters to sanitize drinking water, gas masks, and military style protective gear for €140.00. There are also pepper spray pistols, telescopic batons, and stun guns.

Right-wing Kopp’s press also relies on other authoritarian populist online outlets such as, for example, the extremely conservative Journalistenwatch, which constantly uncovers Germany’s communist-run media. Kopp is also in ideological cahoots with the Deutschland Korier – another the AfD stooge. Like Murdoch, Kopp also loves self-invented mini-celebrities of Germany’s right-wing conspiracy establishment.

Kopp’s advertising machine always welcomes new business like Chlorella algae powder telling its readers, TO PREVENT CANCER (spelled in capitals). In the mix is also former Tagesschau (Germany’s most watch public TV news) presenter and conspiracy fantasist Eva Herman. Herman remains Germany’s most high-ranking conspiracy operative.

She advertises Kopp’s products like a manual on self-treatment with chlorine dioxide. The disinfectant and bleach is used as an alleged miracle cure fighting against HIV, autism, cancer, and of course, Covid-19.

Compact magazine and Kopp are just two of the many companies cashing in on the fear of the Coronavirus pandemic selling supplements, miracle cures, and survival equipment for the expected day X – the end of the world, Dante’s Inferno. Many self-appointed alternative media activists are also on an ideological mission which they finance by selling snake oil. Seemingly unsuspecting companies service conspiracy believers, Christian fundamentals, and people expecting the imminent collapse of society. This is a lucrative business.

Yet, all of this also has real consequences as innocent people turn away from real medicine, refuse vaccinations and increasingly leave society and the democratic discourse. Behind their backs, right-wing profiteers fight on the maxim, fear is a great motivator. Right-wing ideologists and very resourceful and cashed-up businessmen with an ideologically determined entrepreneur spirit have proven the “fear is motivator” maxim.

In the end, Germany’s right-wing not only rides the wave of the Coronavirus pandemic – it also cashes in while simultaneously not just selling snake oil to the innocent. Beyond that, it also converts innocent people to the right-wing cause and away from a democratic society. Through a matching of business, right-wing ideology and the skillful exploitation of Covid-19 fears, Germany’s right-wing continues to undermine democracy.

Johnson government announces “pushback” policy in stepping up of anti-immigration agenda

Robert Stevens

The UK government is stepping up its anti-immigration agenda by rolling out a “pushback policy” to turn away migrant boats attempting to enter the UK via the English Channel.

The Home Office has utilised a spell of good weather, and consequent increase in the number of migrants and asylum seekers seeking to enter the UK, to announce it will intercept and turn around migrants’ small boats from France mid-Channel to prevent them reaching the UK. Around 1,500 migrants arrived on the UK’s shores this week, with the right-wing media dedicating blanket coverage to demands to stop the “flood”.

People thought to be migrants who made the crossing from France are brought into port after being picked up in the Channel by a British border force vessel in Dover, south east England, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

According to the Telegraph, “The Home Secretary has secured legal advice for Border Force vessels to start redirecting migrant boats away from UK waters and back towards France, where the French will have to return them to shore.”

Turning back migrant boats has “already been extensively trialed for months by Border Force at sea,” notes the newspaper, “overseen by the Royal Marines, [and] is due to conclude this month, weather permitting. Sources said that the tactics were ready to deploy as soon as practical and safe.”

Due to the fact that the “refoulement” that Patel proposes is illegal under the international law of the sea, she has commissioned, according to the Telegraph, “robust and detailed” legal advice from Michael Ellis, the Attorney General, and expert QCs”. The Times reported, “She told law officers to rewrite Britain’s interpretation of international maritime law to allow the Border Force to intercept boats as they tried to enter British territorial waters. Officers would then contact the French coastguard to inform it that vessels in French territorial waters were in need of rescue, which would put the legal responsibility for the migrant boats on France.”

According to the Times, the government is proceeding on the basis that “There would be a ‘limited’ legal window to deploy the tactics and only if certain conditions were met. These would include ensuring that the migrant boat in question was not in danger of sinking or capsizing, was not over capacity and was able to return to the French coast.”

No-one should believe that such legal niceties will be adhered to. Given the perilous nature of the Channel crossings, with many migrants often crammed onto small unsafe boats, the policy must result in more deaths.

The Home Office announcement was timed to coincide with a meeting in London Wednesday between Patel and her French counterpart Gérald Darmanin. Patel insisted in “very tense” talks that France had been lax in preventing migrants reaching Britain from its shores and must step up the enforcing of a previously agreed policy of stopping them at the French coastline. It emerged that Britain has even offered to provide the French state a plane to increase its shoreline monitoring.

On Monday, Patel told Tory MPs that she was ready to cut or withdraw the tens of millions of pounds the UK gives to France to prevent migrant crossings. A further £54 million in funding was agreed between London and Paris in July.

Patel said, “We’ve not given them a penny of the money so far and France is going to have to get its act together if it wants to see the cash. It’s payment by results and we’ve not yet seen those results. The money is conditional.” The Times reported that Patel committed to withdrawing funding “if they [France] failed to stop three in four crossings by the end of this month.”

The mood among Tory MPs was, if anything, even more vociferous, with the Guardian reporting that Craig Mackinlay called for the “immediate removal back to France of all who arrive via this illegal route” and for the UK to “disregard diplomatic niceties.” Lee Anderson agreed, declaring, “I said we should drop these illegal immigrants, not migrants, off on a French beach and send the French government a bill for the cost of the journey.”

The following day, Darmanin sent Patel a letter declaring that the existing system could be enforced and boasting that “the rate at which small boat crossings are thwarted stands at 57.3%, i.e. a higher level than that recorded over the same period in 2020.”

He complained that the increase in migrants landing in the UK “is mainly due to a new strategy by people smugglers of using larger boats which can now hold up to 65 people”. While admitting disappointedly, “These groups of migrants are made up of particularly vulnerable people (infants, young children and elderly or disabled people), which limits our means of action,” Darmanin made the sinister accusation that their “behaviour is increasingly violent.”

He “noted the use of military-style detection technology you [Patel] are proposing” and insisted “All available intervention capabilities are permanently mobilized along the Channel coastline”, promising that the number of security personnel on the French Channel coast would be doubled.

Darmanin emphasised that his main concern was stopping migrants getting into France via the Mediterranean in the first place. He wrote, “Migration pressure at our internal borders has never been greater… The mobilization of our forces at our southern borders, as well as at the EU’s borders through the Frontex Agency, must not weaken, when we know the risks of migratory movements which the crises in Afghanistan and Belarus are likely to generate.”

The French minister of the interior made a contemptible effort to cloak this falling out among Gestapo officers in a claimed concern for human rights, declaring, “Safeguarding human lives at sea takes priority over considerations of nationality, status and migratory policy”. He tweeted Thursday, “France will not accept any practice that goes against maritime law, and will not accept any financial blackmail… The UK must hold up its commitment.”

What passes for Britain’s liberal media responded with extraordinary complacency to Patel’s proposals, essentially writing them off as unworkable. This is despite the fact that her Nationality and Border Bill, which is presently going through Parliament, contains, as the Guardian noted, “provisions to set up offshore processing centres and turn suspected migrant boats away from the UK.”

The newspaper cited the comments of Lucy Moreton, a professional officer at the right-wing Immigration Services Union—a splinter union founded to campaign for stricter immigration and border controls. Moreton claimed, “In practical terms, if this happened even once I’d be surprised… There are understandably a lot of constraints around it and you cannot do this with a vessel that is in any way vulnerable and more importantly you need the consent of the French to do it.” Another cited by the Guardian was Conservative MP Tim Loughton, who said, “It sounds good pushing them back but it’s not going to work in practice.”

The fact is that pushback policies are routine at the borders of “Fortress Europe” and internationally. Patel is basing much of her anti-immigration policy on that being enforced by Greece’s conservative New Democracy government, which she visited only last month to learn from its latest brutal measures. Greece has just completed the sealing off its northern border with Turkey with a massive 40km (25-mile) steel fence and new electronic monitoring system.

This is why the Telegraph, among the firmest backers of Patel’s border strengthening policies, could write Thursday, “UK is only following EU's lead on controversial migrant pushback policy”. The government’s “announcement that it will push back migrant boats trying to cross the Channel has striking parallels with tactics used by both Greece and Italy.”

The article cited Felipe González Morales, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, who said recently that Greece has engaged in “the summary and collective expulsion of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers.”

Italy, notes the newspaper, “has essentially adopted pushback by proxy. Along with other EU countries, it gave training, financing and equipment to the Libyan coast guard, which essentially carries out the dirty work of intercepting migrant boats and driving them back to the coast.”

Australian Labor Party helps push through “extraordinary” surveillance laws

Mike Head

Late last month, the opposition Labor Party again assisted the Liberal-National Coalition government to rush through parliament far-reaching bills that expand the already vast spying powers of the police and intelligence agencies.

AFP officers patrolling Australian airport (Credit: afp.gov.au)

In the space of several days, three bills were rammed through both the House of Representatives and the Senate, accompanied by guillotine motions to gag debate, in the same week that Labor and the Coalition combined to drive through anti-democratic electoral laws.

Under the misleading banner of fighting “serious crime,” the most extensive bill allows the police and intelligence forces to secretly hack into online devices, collect, alter or delete data, and take over social media accounts.

The Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill hands agencies, including the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), three new powers, which can be activated without informing those affected:

• Data disruption warrants give the police the ability to “disrupt data” by modifying, copying, adding or deleting it.
• Network activity warrants allow the police to collect intelligence from devices or networks.
• Account takeover warrants permit the police to take control of an online account (e.g., social media) to gather information.

Currently, agencies can only take over a person’s account with that person’s consent. This power facilitates covert and/or enforced takeovers.

None of these powers are confined to use against people alleged or suspected of committing an offence. They can be invoked against any “third party” whose accounts police say could generate material for investigation.

Such people and system administrators can be compelled to assist the hacking operations, including by accessing passwords and cracking open encryption programs. Anyone refusing to comply can be jailed for up to 10 years.

All the police have to assert is that they “suspect on reasonable grounds that” an offence is “likely to be” committed, and that the disruption of data “is likely to substantially assist in frustrating the commission of offences.”

No judicial approvals are required. Most warrants can be issued by an Administrative Appeals Tribunal member, even by “telephone, fax, email or any other means of communication.” An “emergency authorisation” procedure also allows these activities without any warrant at all.

During the token parliamentary sessions, both government and Labor representatives sought to justify the bills as intended to fight child exploitation and terrorism. But the bill authorises “disruption” of anyone linked to a suspected crime that is subject to imprisonment of three years. That covers a wide range of offences, notably “foreign interference” and other political offences, and even theft and tax evasion.

In effect, the legislation makes the expanded powers available to the entire Australian intelligence network and its US partners. The bill’s official explanatory memorandum notes that the AFP and ACIC share information and “facilitate joint operations” with “other members of the National Intelligence Community.”

Also, “it is anticipated that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) may provide assistance to the AFP and the ACIC in relation to data disruption.” The ASD is the electronic eavesdropping agency that operates in close partnership with the US National Security Agency, as part of the US-led “Five Eyes” global mass surveillance operation exposed by imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The bill adds to the immense online surveillance powers imposed over the past two decades in the name of the “war on terrorism,” contained in the Surveillance Devices Act and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act.

The second law, the Foreign Intelligence Amendment Act, allows the domestic political spy agency, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), to intercept foreign communications and collect overseas intelligence on Australian residents who are suspected of “foreign interference.”

The third measure, the Counter-Terrorism Sunsetting Act, extends a range of police-state powers that were due to expire, including preventative detention, control orders and stop, search and seizure powers.

In parliament, Labor’s shadow home affairs minister, Senator Kristina Keneally, emphasised Labor’s determination to keep partnering with the Coalition on such measures, despite describing them as “extraordinary.”

Keneally said Labor’s backing for the bills “serves as another example of how seriously Labor takes its commitment to constructive, bipartisan cooperation on national security legislation in the national interest.” She publicly thanked Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews for working with Labor “to deliver much-needed reforms and powers.”

The shadow minister professed to be concerned about the danger of “surveillance creep.” In reality, Labor has backed every law to permit mass political spying. That included the 2015 metadata retention legislation, which allows the agencies to collect and retain online data, such as a person’s email contacts and web searches; a 2018 law that forces internet companies to facilitate the cracking of encryption, passwords and other privacy-protected communications, including WhatsApp and iMessage conversations, and the 2018 “foreign interference” legislation that expands the scope and penalties of the secrecy laws, and criminalises links with China or other “foreign entities.”

Since the declaration of the “war on terrorism” in 2001, Labor has joined hands with the Coalition to pass more than 125 “national security” bills, containing over 14,500 amendments to previous laws.

Greens Senators voted against the “identify and disrupt” bill, but said they would be prepared to support it if the government accepted amendments to insert “safeguards.” Senator Lidia Thorpe said: “The Australian Greens will support it, in terms of keeping children safe and keeping our country safe, but there are innocent people who could be targeted through this bill.”

None of this legislation is about the “safety” of the population. The bipartisan drive to protect and bolster the police and intelligence apparatuses is aimed at preparing for political and class convulsions.

A 2017 “intelligence review” pointed to the global and domestic concerns wracking the ruling elite. It warned that Australia’s “national security environment” was being reshaped by the decline in the global influence of the US, “heightened tensions and instabilities” and “a growing sense of insecurity and alienation.”

That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has intensified these social and political tensions, and triggered growing working-class struggles.

These bills are part of a deepening assault on basic democratic rights, including privacy, free speech and the right to organise, especially against the corporate and political establishment. Their purpose is to suppress dissent and social unrest.

Ukrainian government looks to intensify exploitation of IT workers

Jason Melanovski

The Ukrainian government is moving forward with plans to exploit the country’s IT workers as it faces an uncertain economic future due to both the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the reorientation of American foreign policy.

A person working at a computer (hippopx.com)

Following his disappointing meeting with US President Joe Biden last Wednesday, Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky headed west to San Francisco where he met with leading investors, representatives of venture funds and Silicon Valley accelerators in an attempt to attract foreign investment to Ukraine’s IT sector.

“Our meeting here in Silicon Valley is a great opportunity to discuss the prospects for the development of the IT sector and innovations in Ukraine. Our country is rapidly transforming and adopting innovations. Over the past year, we have managed to make a real breakthrough in the digital sphere. At the same time, we still need to do a lot,” Zelensky said.

He went on to state that his government had hoped to raise the income of Ukraine’s IT sector from $6 billion to $16.5 billion per year within three to five years and expand the IT sector to account for 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

Ukraine’s IT sector currently employs approximately 200,000 workers and the Zelensky government is hoping to increase that number to approximately 450,000 by 2025.

For the Ukrainian ruling class, the country’s educated and talented IT workers—themselves a legacy of the Soviet Union’s educational emphasis on science and math—represent a potentially lucrative source of foreign exchange in an economy that saw its GDP decline by 4.4 percent and saw exports decline by 4.6 percent in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further undermining the country’s economic situation, in July the Zelensky government learned via the press that the Biden administration had reached a deal with Germany not to oppose the completion of the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Its completion is expected to significantly undercut Ukraine’s importance to European energy markets and potentially deprive it of approximately $2 billion in annual gas transit fees.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s IT exports grew by 20.4 percent in 2020, according to the National Bank of Ukraine. They now account for 8.3 percent of the country’s total exports.

Junior software engineers in Ukraine earn just $600 a month. While this exceeds the average Ukrainian’s poverty wages of approximately $350 a month, it is a pittance in comparison to the average salary of a junior software engineer in the United States of approximately $90,000 a year.

Like many IT workers globally, the bulk of Ukrainian IT workers are employed as independent contractors. As a result, they are not subject to the same labor laws regarding hours, conditions, vacation and benefits as workers employed as regular workers. IT workers all over the world are often forced to work exceedingly long hours to meet critical deadlines imposed upon them by employers.

Zelensky’s appeal to Silicon Valley coincides with his government’s ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s existing labor laws in favor of the capitalist Ukrainian oligarchy.

In March 2020, the Ukrainian parliament was forced to withdraw Draft Law No. 2708 after worker protests. Among other measures, the law’s passage would have allowed companies to fire workers without reason, reduced overtime payments and permitted companies to institute a 12-hour workday.

Since the draft labor law’s failure, such labor “reforms” have been introduced as separate incremental proposals in order to avoid a direct confrontation with the Ukrainian working class.

Zelensky’s moves to restructure the Ukrainian labor market in favor of foreign capital has elicited support from the imperialist powers, and especially from Washington. Speaking with the right-wing American think tank the Atlantic Council, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, Andy Hunder, commented on Ukraine’s growing IT sector but urged further pro-market “reforms.”

“What helped achieve this year’s impressive results? Minimum red tape, the professionalism of Ukraine’s IT specialists, and a stable industry-wide tax policy,” Hinder stated. “It is vital to ensure sustainable and transparent conditions for the IT sector to stimulate further growth and development. Namely, this means preventing increased regulation. It is also essential to guarantee IT companies freedom of their activities, business models and forms of interaction with human capital. IT companies must be safeguarded from unlawful interference in legitimate business activities.”

While in California, Zelensky also met with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Apple is well known for its exploitation of workers all over the world, particularly through its partnership with the sweatshop electronics manufacturer Foxconn.

Zelensky spoke glowingly of being granted the privilege to meet the billionaire Apple CEO. Following the meeting, he tweeted: “Ukraine is already a global IT hub. We are interested in expanding Apple’s presence in Ukraine and implementing new ambitious joint projects.”

The attempts to intensify the exploitation of the working class, including IT workers, are the response of the Ukrainian the ruling class to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The economic crisis has hit Ukraine particularly hard due to its large number of migrant workers and crumbling health care system.

Over 57,000 people have officially died from COVID-19 in Ukraine while hospitalization rates are climbing again due to the spread of the Delta variant and the low vaccination rate of just 10 percent of the country. With a population of less than 40 million, Ukraine has already officially recorded over 2.4 million COVID cases.

Throughout the pandemic, medical workers in Ukraine have worked in desperate conditions with outdated and missing supplies. To make matters worse, Ukrainian medical workers have often gone for months without receiving pay and the National Health Service has continued to cut hospital staff and wages.

Defying the Zelensky’s government push to both reform the labor market and push workers back to work, during the summer a number of medical workers went on strike, demanding unpaid wages and COVID-19 hazard pay. In August, doctors and nurses in the eastern city of Kupyansk went on strike despite intimidation and threats of layoffs from hospital administration. Earlier in the month, 150 medical workers in the city of Valkov went on strike and blocked a major highway over unpaid wages. Similar strikes took place throughout the summer in Kiev, L’viv, Suma and Slovyansk.

Biden, Democrats prepare to gut their own social welfare bill

Barry Grey

With deadlines looming this month on key items in the Biden administration’s domestic agenda, the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package, the process of corporate manipulation and watering down of the already inadequate social welfare measure is moving into high gear.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., meets with reporters to discuss President Joe Biden's domestic agenda including passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer set a September 15 deadline for the various committees in each chamber to draft their pieces of the budget bill, which, in its present outline form, modestly expands benefits for working people and increases taxes on corporations and the rich to partially offset the cost. Unlike the physical infrastructure bill, which is broadly backed by big business and passed the Senate with 19 Republican votes, there is no Republican support for the budget proposal, and corporate America is for the most part lined up against it.

The Democrats are seeking to bypass a filibuster in the Senate which could be overcome only by obtaining the votes of 10 Republicans in the evenly divided chamber, by moving the bill under the budget reconciliation process, whereby the legislation can be passed by a simple majority. That means, however, the Democratic leadership has to secure the votes of all 50 Democratic senators. Vice President Kamala Harris would then cast the tie-breaking vote.

Last month, Pelosi agreed to bring the infrastructure bill up for a vote in the House by September 27. That was a concession to a group of right-wing Democrats, who said they would not vote to move forward on the budget reconciliation bill if Pelosi continued to insist that the House not act on the infrastructure bill until after the Senate had passed the broader measure. As a result, Schumer has been compelled to set a September 27 deadline for the Senate passage of the social spending bill.

The process of drastically shrinking the social improvements contained in the “human infrastructure” bill, slashing its cost and blocking any significant increase in corporate taxes began in earnest last week, when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia published a column in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.”

Manchin, a multimillionaire owner of coal companies in West Virginia, cited the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Admiral Mike Mullen, as his authority on the danger to national security from too much debt. The senator called for a “strategic pause” in consideration of the budget bill, in effect delinking passage of the corporate-backed infrastructure bill from passage of the broader social legislation.

An unabashed flack for the fossil fuel industry, Manchin has repeatedly opposed environmental regulations on mining and energy in general. He previously called certain provisions in the budget bill aimed at modestly restraining carbon emissions, such as repealing tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, “very disturbing.” He has also made it clear he is opposed to raising corporate taxes and would like to “means test” measures such as tuition-free community college, universal preschool, child care tax credits and an extension of the enhanced child tax credit.

Other Democratic senators who have publicly opposed the budget bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag (spread out over 10 years) include Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia, a former tech entrepreneur worth $200 million and now chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

On Tuesday, press reports emerged that Manchin had let it be known he was prepared to support a bill costing from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Back in June, Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, was claiming he would oversee passage of $6 trillion in social welfare measures, calling it the most far-reaching reform since the New Deal. Sanders was chosen by Biden to lead the effort to pass his budget in order to give his conservative domestic economic agenda a “progressive” gloss.

The Vermont senator, who at times calls himself a “socialist” and is relentlessly promoted by the pseudo-left as “proof” that the Democratic Party can be pressured to carry out progressive and even socialist policies, has said nothing about Biden’s termination of federal jobless benefits in the midst of the widening COVID-19 pandemic, or the drive to reopen the schools amidst soaring infections, hospitalizations and deaths of children, teachers and school staff.

The response by the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership has made clear that the $3.5 trillion package of social measures will be drastically cut back before any bill is brought up for a vote. The same applies to Biden’s promise to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

On Tuesday, Biden told the press, referring to Manchin, “Joe at the end has always been there. He’s always been with me. I think we can work something out, and I look forward to speaking with him.”

Pelosi has said she will only bring before the House a budget measure that can be passed in the Senate, i.e., one that accommodates the most right-wing factions in the Democratic Party.

Yahoo News cited a “lobbyist familiar with internal deliberations on Capitol Hill” as saying “there was optimism among congressional Democrats that a bill would get passed and sent to Biden for signing into law. But such a bill is likely to be in the range of about $2 trillion…”

The article continues: “While the various House committees are likely to approve bills that would total $3.5 trillion, that number would get whittled down before the legislation is sent to the full House for debate and passage, the source said. That could mean that any proposed tax increases on the wealthy and corporations would not have to be as steep as initially envisioned.”

Even were the infrastructure and budget bills passed with the current proposed spending levels, they would be hopelessly inadequate to address the catastrophic levels of poverty and social crisis and decades-long degradation of social infrastructure. This was revealed in the response of the ruling class to the pandemic and the social disaster unfolding in the Gulf Coast and New York City as a result of Hurricane Ida.

Capitalism is incapable of addressing these existential public health and environmental issues, both because of the total subordination of all questions to corporate profit and the accumulation of private wealth by the ruling elite, and the division of the world economy into rival nation states. The measures dictated by science and made possible by the development of technology to eradicate the coronavirus and resolve the climate change crisis are blocked by the economic and geo-political interests of a corporate-financial oligarchy that accounts for a miniscule portion of the world population.

The infrastructure bill includes only $550 billion in new money, spread out over eight years. The current funding figure in the budget bill, $350 billion per year, pales in comparison to the vast increase in wealth of the US financial elite just in the course of the pandemic.

According to a recent report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality, US billionaires have seen their wealth surge $1.8 trillion in just the first 18 months of the pandemic. Their collective fortune has skyrocketed by nearly two-thirds (62 percent), from just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, 2020, to $4.8 trillion on August 17, 2021.

Elon Musk has seen his wealth increase by $150 billion during the pandemic, a gain of over 600 percent.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to pump $120 billion every month into the financial markets and maintain near-zero interest rates to fuel the stock market frenzy.

The minor tax increases on corporations and the rich proposed by Biden and the Democrats, should they see the light of day, would do little to reverse the ongoing plundering of society by the oligarchy. Government tax revenues from US corporations have declined by 40 percent just since the enactment of the Republican tax bill in December of 2017, and Biden is only proposing to restore half the 14 percent cut in the 35 percent corporate tax rate that prevailed prior to Donald Trump’s “reform.”

In any event, corporate America will not tolerate any significant increase in its taxes or reduction in its profits, and these are the class interests that control both parties. The pharmaceutical giants (Pfizer, AbbVie, AstraZeneca), energy monopolies (ExxonMobil), entertainment monoliths (Walt Disney Company), tech titans, major retailers, manufacturers and banks are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bribe lawmakers, target them with negative ads and mobilize right-wing organizations they have funded to determine the final shape of any spending bills that might emerge from this sordid process—which is carried out largely behind the backs of the American people.

The Washington Post reported last month that “the pharmaceutical industry has embarked on its own wide-ranging campaign to combat Democrats’ drug pricing proposals, another potential revenue source in the bill. Conservative outfits previously backed by the sector’s top trade group, known as PhRMA [Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America], have run recent ads claiming lawmakers’ plans would have worsened the coronavirus pandemic.”

The Post noted that the RATE Coalition (Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably), “which counts support from Capital One, Disney, FedEx, Lowe’s and Lockheed Martin,” is preparing a seven-figure digital ad campaign to oppose any increase in the corporate tax rate. One of its top spokesmen is Blanche Lincoln, a former Democratic senator from Arkansas who served with Biden in the Senate.