Kiev denies war plans against Russia as conflicts within the Ukrainian ruling class escalate

Jason Melanovski

Even as the US continues to ramp up its anti-Russia war preparations, the general commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces denied his country is planning a military invasion of Crimea and the separatist-controlled Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, despite the armed forces’ holding its own military exercises near the Russian-controlled peninsula.

Responding to a question over claims that Ukraine is planning its own offensive operations, General Ander Valery Zaluzhny stated that there had been “no orders, no conversations about a military operation to enter the currently occupied territories of Donetsk and Lugansk or currently occupied Crimea—such conversations and such plans have not been drawn up.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to the media, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)

Both the Kremlin and representatives of the so-called People’s Republics in Donetsk and Lugansk in East Ukraine have warned over the past month that the number of active combat operations near their borders has been increasing.

On Thursday, Ukrainian forces conducted military exercises with its Hurricane rocket launcher system and released a slickly produced video of the missiles pointed towards Crimea. Despite this, Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexey Reznikov backed Zaluzhny by stating, “The Ukrainian armed forces are not planning any offensive in Donbass.”

The Ukrainian officials’ denials cannot be taken at face value. Since early 2021, the “recovery” of Crimea and the Donbass have been part of the official military strategy of Kiev. The implementation of this strategy means preparations for a direct military conflict with Russia. Since the US-backed coup of 2014, which overthrew a pro-Russian government, the Kiev regime has waged a civil war with the aid of fascist paramilitary forces and Western arms and funding against separatists in East Ukraine.

Over the past weeks, NATO, with the US and UK taking the lead, have dramatically ramped up their war preparations, delivering Javelin missiles and other weaponry to the Ukrainian army. This has been accompanied by a press campaign glorifying the far-right paramilitary “volunteer” groups that have played a central role in the civil war for years.

The escalating war crisis has deepened divisions within the Ukrainian ruling class and state apparatus.

Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky confounded Washington recently when he denied its incessant warmongering claims that a Russian invasion is “imminent.” Clearly, the US ruling class was less than pleased with Zelensky’s comments. The Washington Post quoted a “senior US official” who stated, “We’re his most important ally and he’s poking us in the eye and creating daylight between Washington and Kyiv. It’s self-sabotage more than anything else.”

Zelensky’s calls to at least temporarily tamp down the hysteria emanating from Washington were in part motivated by the serious damage that the war propaganda has done to Ukraine’s economy and the stability of his government. With the Zelensky administration’s approval ratings at record lows, the war drive has already caused a 10 percent decline in the value of the country’s currency.

Foreign investors are leaving the country in droves, causing the Ukrainian bond market interest rates to soar. In such a situation, the Ukrainian state, which is already heavily indebted to the IMF, is finding it nearly impossible to borrow money to continue to function.

However, Zelensky’s appeals for calm do not signal a fundamental change in its march towards war. Even while calling upon Washington to not create “panic,” his government has continued its expansion of Ukraine’s military capabilities.

On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a decree to increase the size of the Ukrainian armed forces —currently numbering 250,000—by 100,000 over the next three years. On Thursday, Zelensky met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in Kiev. The two presidents signed a free trade agreement, and Ukrainian officials touted a deal to produce Turkish-designed Bayraktar TB2 aerial drones in Ukraine.

Ukraine first deployed the drones against Donbass separatists in October, despite their use being prohibited by a ceasefire and the 2015 Minsk Accords. The use of the weapon marked a significant escalation in the nearly eight-year-long civil war. Such drones were employed heavily by Turkish-backed Azerbaijan in its surprise victory over a Russian-backed Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

On his visit, Erdogan also attempted to present himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine, announcing plans to act as a host for three-way talks. Erdogan, who is hoping to use the talks to increase Turkey’s influence over the strategic Black Sea region, claimed negotiations were a certainty despite unclear stances from both Kiev and Moscow on the issue.

Zelensky had previously maintained that all discussions be held in Ukraine. After his meeting with Erdogan, he suddenly declared, “It doesn’t matter where the talks with Russia take place.”

Whether Zelensky has any real say over Ukraine’s stance on negotiations with Russia is highly questionable, as his statements are regularly walked back or contradicted by other Ukrainian officials as the warfare within the ruling class and state apparatus escalates.

On Tuesday, Zelensky’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, essentially sabotaged any basis for negotiations by stating that the Minsk Accords Agreement would never be implemented by Ukraine as it represented the “Russian viewpoint.” Kuleba also rejected any possibility of a special federated status for the breakaway regions as required by the Minsk accords. Speaking with Poland’s Rzeczpospolita newspaper, he said, “No Ukrainian region will have a right to national state decisions. This is set in stone! There will be no special status, as Russia imagines it, no voting power.”

Aside from his own foreign minister, the Ukrainian government and military contains within it far-right elements who would welcome the removal of Zelensky.

Arsen Avakov, Zelensky’s former interior minister and a man notorious for his close ties to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, recently called for both early presidential and parliamentary elections on national television. He obliquely suggesting he did not want to see Zelensky be ousted in another “Maidan,” the name of the right-wing protest movement that preceded the 2014 coup.

“The economic situation is tough, the energy situation is complicated and the mood of people is not good. The political situation is threatening the country, which should be resolved, in my opinion, not in a ‘Maidan’ and revolution, but in early elections, which would be the correct and civilized way,” Avakov declared.

In a thinly veiled appeal to the neo-fascist forces he helped build up as interior minister, Avakov called for opposition forces to support the country but in the meantime “consolidate our forces” in preparation for early elections and the potential end of the Zelensky presidency.

Petro Poroshenko, who became president after the 2014 coup, and suffered a massive popular defeat to Zelensky in the 2019 election, also recently returned to Ukraine to stand trial for treason. Upon his return, the state refused to detain him and he immediately began a press campaign attacking Zelensky for his alleged softness toward Russia and lack of war preparations.

The Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail recently revealed that the decision to not arrest Poroshenko was made after the personal intervention of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. According to the newspaper, Freeland spoke to Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, in the days before Poroshenko’s return to dissuade the government from detaining the “chocolate oligarch.” The US secretary of state also expressed official support for Poroshenko through a Twitter message.

In yet another sign of preparations to oust Zelensky, a plot to stage violent demonstrations and clashes with security forces was uncovered and prevented last week. The Russian outlet Kommersant suggested, based on the revelations by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, that the plans had likely originated with far-right forces embedded within the state security apparatus.

Portugal’s Socialist Party wins legislative election as Left Bloc collapses

Alice Summers

Portugal’s social-democratic Socialist Party (PS) was returned to power in the January 30 legislative elections, winning a surprise absolute majority.

The PS gained 117 seats in the 230-seat Assembly of the Republic, and just under 42 percent of the total vote. This is only the second time in the country’s history that a single party has been able to govern alone. The other was in 2011, when the right-wing Social Democratic Party (PSD) won over 50 percent of ballots.

Meanwhile, the petty-bourgeois Left Bloc (BE), the longstanding parliamentary ally of the PS, saw its vote collapse, going from the third-largest party in the Portuguese Assembly to the sixth. In the last election in 2019, the BE had won 19 seats and almost 10 percent of the popular vote, plummeting to only five seats and 4.5 percent of the vote on January 30.

The Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU), an electoral alliance between the Stalinist Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Greens (PEV), also saw a significant drop in its support, going from 12 seats and 6.3 percent of the vote in 2019 to six seats and 4.4 percent this year. All six of these seats went to candidates of the PCP, with the PEV losing all its parliamentary representation for the first time.

The election took place as the pandemic continued to rage in Portugal. As with the rest of the world, COVID cases have exploded in this country over the last two months, fueled by the much more contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The seven-day average reached an all-time peak of around 55,700 daily cases on the weekend of the election, with deaths rising to an average of 40–50 a day by the end of January, the highest since last February.

Around one million people were self-isolating due to infection with COVID or contact with a confirmed positive case on the day of the election, according to health authorities—almost 10 percent of Portugal’s population. Those in quarantine were permitted to leave their homes to vote in the election, however, due to fears that skyrocketing infection rates may lead to mass abstention, in what was already a widely unpopular election.

While abstention was ultimately the lowest since the 2011 elections, only 57.9 percent of eligible people cast ballots, in a country in which voter participation has continuously fallen since 2005. When turnout is factored in, the PS received the support of less than one quarter of Portuguese voters.

No party had been expected to obtain an absolute majority, with opinion polls in the run-up to the election predicting stagnating or falling support for the PS as compared to their 36.3 percent vote in 2019. Surveys had anticipated a close race between the PS and the PSD, which had been expected to increase its parliamentary representation.

This had prompted speculation about whether a minority PSD government could be formed with the support of the fascistic Chega party. The PSD’s leader, Rui Rio, however, had ruled out forming a coalition government with Chega, declaring in a debate, “I don’t want power at any price”, and that there are “fundamental differences [between Chega and the PSD] which hinder an agreement.”

The snap elections were called in early November after Prime Minister Costa’s six-year minority PS administration collapsed amid mass strikes. The previous week, Costa’s government had failed to pass its 2022 budget in parliament, as the BE and PCP unexpectedly voted against it. It was the first time that a budget had been rejected since the 1974 Carnation Revolution toppled the Estado Novo regime of fascistic dictator António Salazar.

Portuguese Prime Minister and Socialist Party Secretary General Antonio Costa delivers a speech during an election rally in Almada, outside Lisbon, Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

The vote against the budget by the BE and PCP was not an indication of any principled opposition to the austerity measures the PS government planned to impose and has already been imposing for years. Both parties have loyally supported every PS budget since the party came to power in 2015 and are fully complicit in the attacks on workers’ living standards that have come with them.

Between 2015 and 2019, the minority PS government ruled thanks to an alliance known as a geringonça (an “odd contraption” or “improvised solution”) with the BE, PCP and PEV—a confidence-and-supply arrangement whereby the pseudo-left and Stalinist parties agreed to support the government on all major votes. Since the elections of 2019, the BE and the PCP have continued to back the PS from outside the government, with no written agreement in place.

The last-minute decision of the BE and PCP to vote against the budget came amid a wave of strikes across Portugal, involving tens of thousands of workers from different industries. Rail workers, pharmacists, teachers, subway workers, firefighters, nurses, civil servants and prison guards all took part in industrial action between September and November, mostly calling for increased wages in the face of a significant increase in the cost of living. Terrified of the growing working-class anger at years of declining living standards, the BE and the PCP felt compelled to vote against the government they supported, to maintain the charade that they oppose austerity and to stifle social opposition.

During the election campaign itself, the BE had groveled before the PS government, pleading with Costa to bring them back into a formal coalition. “For five years, the BE made the budgets possible for the minority PS based on agreements to resolve the country’s problems,” BE leader Catarina Martins declared in November. “This is our willingness.”

Catarina Martins (Somos Bibliotecas/CC BY 3.0/Wikimedia)

While tactical voting to prevent a far-right coalition of the PSD and Chega may have played some role in the increased vote for the PS at the expense of its pseudo-left props, the roots of the disintegration of the BE and the PCP lie in broader processes.

The BE and PCP are deeply discredited after years of openly supporting the right-wing policies of the PS government. They no longer have any credibility as a supposed “alternative” to the PS, having worked hand in glove with the government to impose austerity and break strikes for seven years. Many voters would have seen no reason to cast a ballot for parties which are, in all but name, an appendage of the PS.

The other main beneficiary of the collapse in support for the pseudo-left parties has been the far-right Chega (Enough), which increased its seats from one to 12. Its share of the vote, while still small, increased by almost six times, from 1.3 percent in the last elections in 2019 to 7.2 percent this year.

Chega emerged as the third-largest party after the PSD, which obtained 76 seats (three fewer than in 2019) and 29.3 percent of the vote. While Chega won a smaller percentage of the ballots than in last year’s presidential elections—when their candidate and the party’s leader André Ventura received almost 12 percent and over 100,000 more votes—it has made significant gains in the three years since its founding.

Ventura celebrated the party’s surge in votes, declaring in a speech on the night of the election “What a great, great, great night.” He continued: “António Costa, I’m going after you now”, stating that he wants to build a “great right-wing alternative to replace the PS in power… We will be the opposition in Portugal.”

Chega’s ability to posture as the only “opposition party” in Portugal is due to the reactionary role played by the Left Bloc and PCP. The example of numerous petty-bourgeois “left populist” parties across Europe shows the bankruptcy of any perspective oriented to pressuring the ruling class to adopt “progressive” policies.

China-Russia summit forges quasi-alliance against Washington

Peter Symonds

Amid the acute danger of a US war against Russia over Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping last Friday, coinciding with the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. While Russia and China are not formal military allies, the summit affirmed what is in essence a quasi-alliance in the face of Washington’s escalating threats against the two countries.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, China, Friday, Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

The Biden administration has dramatically ramped up the danger of conflict with Russia with an extraordinary campaign of lies and disinformation, touting an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has flatly rejected guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a NATO member—a move that would put NATO forces on the Russian border. Instead, it has provided war materiel to Ukraine and dispatched US troops to Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Biden, following on from Trump, has heightened the aggressive US confrontation with China, which can be traced to the “pivot to Asia” initiated by the Obama administration in which Biden served as vice-president. Indeed, US propaganda that Russia is about to invade Ukraine is paralleled by the fiction that China could take advantage of conflict in Europe to invade Taiwan.

The transparent objective of US imperialism is the subordination and fracturing of both China and Russia in its bid to maintain global domination. In its reckless pursuit of this goal, fuelled by mounting social, economic and political crises at home, the Biden administration has driven together what it regards as its two main rivals, ensuring any war that breaks out will rapidly become global.

In their lengthy joint statement, Xi and Putin repeatedly condemned the US and its allies, while not always naming them. Some actors, they declared, “advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation.”

In an unusually blunt declaration of mutual support, the statement committed Russia and China to “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” “counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext,” “oppose colour revolutions” and “increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”

The statement, despite its diplomatic language, represents a clear challenge to the United States and was centrally focussed on security concerns. Xi and Putin dispensed with vague appeals for international collaboration, world peace and the need for a multipolar world as opposed to a unipolar world—that is, one dominated by the US. They listed grave concerns “about serious international security challenges.”

* Russia reaffirmed “its support for the One China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.” Over the past year, Biden, following Trump, has deliberately undermined the One China policy, which recognises Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, by strengthening ties with Taipei and placing US troops on the island. The policy was the basis for US-China diplomatic relations established in 1979.

* In a repudiation of US actions over Ukraine, China supported Russia in opposing “the further enlargement of NATO” and “calls on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologised Cold War approaches, [and] to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries.” In the 2014 crisis that followed the right-wing US-backed coup in Ukraine, China maintained a far more equivocal stance and did not strongly support Russia.

* The two countries took a stand against “the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.” The statement explicitly named Australia, the United Kingdom and the US in expressing “serious concern” about the formation of their AUKUS security partnership in September and “in particular their decision to initiate cooperation in the field of nuclear-powered submarines.” It warned of “the danger of an arms race in the region” and “serious risks of nuclear proliferation.”

* China and Russia expressed fears about the mounting danger of nuclear war, calling for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons deployed abroad and the elimination of global anti-ballistic missile systems. The US alone has such deployments. The statement opposed the US withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and called on Washington “to abandon its plans to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range ground-based missiles in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe.”

The statement condemned that manner in which the US hypocritically exploits “human rights” to further its strategic objectives, including the fomenting of separatist tendencies within Russia and China with the aim of fragmenting the two countries. Putin and Xi emphasised closer economic collaboration, including the signing of a new energy deal and the boosting of annual bilateral trade to $250 billion.

The summit clearly sent a shudder through the military and political establishments in the US and its allies. An immediate concern in Washington is the potential for China to undermine US efforts to impose another round of punitive economic measures on Russia in the event of conflict. On the day before the Xi-Putin summit, US State Department spokesman Ned Price declared that the US and its allies “have an array of tools” that can be used against “foreign companies, including those in China” that try to evade US sanctions.

The fears, however, run deeper. A central preoccupation of US policy has been to prevent the domination of the strategic Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. President Nixon, together with his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, engineered a rapprochement with China that culminated in Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. That established an alliance with US imperialism to undermine the Soviet Union in which Mao Zedong’s regime sided with reactionary pro-US regimes, such as that of Iran’s Shah and General Pinochet in Chile.

Over the past decade, however, one US administration after another has torn up the deal with China. US threats, provocations, military build-up and strengthening of alliances have intensified, both in Europe and the Asia Pacific. The ongoing debate in American strategic circles over whether to tackle Russia or China first, and how to manipulate disputes between the two powers, has in effect been resolved by the two targets coming together.

The recklessness of Washington’s foreign policy is a measure of the depth of the economic and social crisis at home, which has been greatly worsened by its criminal “let it rip” pandemic measures. Far from causing US imperialism to pause in its build-up to war, Washington will only redouble its efforts, spurred on by the fear that in its historic decline time is running out.

Wild swings on Wall Street

Nick Beams

The wild swings in the price of major tech stocks on Wall Street last week point to continued turbulence in financial markets as central banks start to lift interest rates in response to rising inflation.

The gyrations were highlighted by the movements in the price of the shares of Meta (the parent company of Facebook) and Amazon. On Thursday, Meta lost 26.4 percent of its market value, $230 billion, the biggest single-day loss by any company in history.

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021 as stocks are opening slightly lower on Wall Street. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

This was followed on Friday by a move in the other direction when Amazon shares rose 13.5 percent, adding $190 billion to its market capitalisation, to record the biggest-ever single day market gain by a company.

Summing up the sense of bewilderment among market pundits, Wall Street Journal columnist James Mackintosh wrote: “Uncertainty about the future of the economy in general and the tech sector in particular are (sic) extremely high. In short, nobody knows anything.”

The immediate cause of the dramatic Meta decline was the revelation that Facebook is losing subscribers to TikTok among younger people. As well, changes by Apple in the use of its apps, making it more difficult for Facebook and others to target ads, were expected to cost it $10 billion in 2022.

The loss of Meta’s market value was equivalent to the total market value of the leading chip maker Intel and greater than that of McDonald’s.

After rises in the first three days of last week, the S&P 500 index fell 2.4 percent, its biggest drop since February last year, taking its decline for 2022 to 6.4 percent. The market then rose marginally on Friday to record its best week for the year but could well slump again this week.

Last week’s swings were not confined to Meta. Another social media company, Snap, also fell 23 percent on Thursday because of the changes in Apple’s policy. It then bounced back 50 percent in after-hours trade after it announced its first-ever quarterly profit and said it was making progress in devising ways in overcoming the effects of the new Apple policy.

The changes by Apple were introduced last April when it altered iPhone software to require apps to ask users whether they wanted to be tracked. The effect of the move is to limit the ability to gather data through apps that are used to target advertising.

Other companies to have been hit with major swings in their stock prices include Netflix, due to the rise of other online streaming services, and PayPal.

A major reason for the violent swings in the hi-tech companies, produced by relatively small changes in their economic environment, is because so much of the investment in them is highly speculative. Their share value is not based on present returns—often they are making only small profits or even a loss—but on expectations of what they will make in the future. So small changes in their outlook can produce major swings in their stock price.

Conversely, one of the reasons for the rise in Amazon shares, after it had experienced a significant decline of 8 percent, was the lift in the subscription rate for its Prime streaming service and the belief it could contain rising costs for labour and other inputs.

A major factor in the rise and rise of tech stocks over the two years of the pandemic has been the continuous flow of ultra-cheap money from the Fed, which has more than doubled its asset holdings since March 2020 from the already record level of $4 trillion to just under $9 trillion.

But with inflation on the rise—it is now around 7 percent in the US and over 5 percent in the UK and the eurozone—the central banks are moving to tighten monetary policy. This is to try to suppress wage demands by workers to compensate for the major losses in real income suffered over the past two years and the further losses to come as inflation accelerates.

The shares of tech companies, having been among the major beneficiaries of the flood of cash, are now highly sensitive to indications that it may be withdrawn, even to a limited degree.

This has implications for the market as a whole. As an article in the Financial Times over the weekend asked: “Heavy hitting tech stocks have marched investors all the way to the top of a very big hill. Are they about to lead them back down again?”

It pointed out that together the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500 index, most of them hi-tech based, accounted for about one-third of the entire market capitalisation of the index, “far above the concentration observed in the previous tech bubble peak of 2000.”

There are other signs of growing instability. The FT has reported that the “huge swings” in stock such as Meta, PayPal and Snap indicate “what investors say has been a dramatic decline in the capacity to transact large batches of shares.”

This tendency is a sign of declining liquidity—the ability to buy and sell an asset, sometimes in large amounts, without having a major impact on the price because of the size of the market.

Patrick Murphy, a partner at the global trading firm GTS, told the FT: “Intraday liquidity has dried up so much. I haven’t seen anything like it since March 2020.”

At that time, financial markets went into their most significant crisis since 2008, with the market for US Treasury bonds undergoing a total freeze that led to the massive intervention by the Fed.

Rocky Fishman, a Goldman Sachs strategist, told the newspaper that liquidity had weakened “substantially” and “weak liquidity ... leaves the potential for outsized market moves.”

Another indication of growing nervousness is the rise in the purchases of credit default swaps, which allow investors to take out insurance against companies defaulting on their debts. They reached $197 billion in January, up from $123 billion in December, to hit their highest level since March 2020.

Corporate debt, along with the stock market, will be heavily affected by the monetary tightening by central banks now underway.

Inflation data for the US this week are expected to show prices continuing to rise at more than 7 percent. Last week, the Bank of England lifted its base rate by 0.25 percentage points, with four of nine members of the governing council voting for a 0.5 percentage point increase, amid predictions that UK inflation will top more than 7 percent in April.

The European Central Bank did not lift its base interest rate at its meeting last Thursday, despite inflation running at more than 5 percent. But ECB president Christine Lagarde adopted what was described as a “hawkish” tone at her press conference, refusing to repeat earlier assurances that interest rates would not rise in 2022.

In an editorial at the weekend, headlined “Interest rates may have to rise sharply to fight inflation,” the Economist noted that with the world’s debts now standing at 355 percent of GDP “firms and households were more sensitive to even small rate rises” and “fighting inflation could put the world in a slump.”

Ford, GM report massive 2021 pandemic profits

Marcus Day

Ford and General Motors both reported double-digit billion-dollar profits for 2021 in their annual earnings statements released last week. Even while the pandemic continued to rage, sickening and killing untold numbers of workers and accelerating with the emergence of the Omicron variant, the auto companies reaped massive amounts of money for their large investors.

Ford reported $17.9 billion in net income for the previous year, its highest since 2011, and up from a net loss of $1.3 billion in 2020. GM broke its previous record set in 2015, reporting $10 billion in net income, up 55 percent from the previous year. Stellantis, the transnational conglomerate formed from Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, will not report its 2021 earnings until February 23.

Mary Barra (GM Media)

Despite the banner profits, however, Wall Street reacted coolly, pushing down Ford’s share price over 9 percent on Friday, on news that the company fell well short of analysts’ earnings-per-share forecasts.

In an indication of the unstable and even illusory character of the economic recovery in the auto industry, both Ford and GM sold fewer cars in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, than they did in 2020. GM sold 2.2 million vehicles, down 13 percent from 2020, while Ford sold 1.9 million, a 6.8 percent drop.

In each case, however, revenue rose year-over-year despite declining sales, climbing to $136 billion from $127 billion for Ford, and to $127 billion from $122.5 billion for GM.

The rise in revenue was facilitated by steep price increases, with the Consumer Price Index showing an 11.8 percent increase in new vehicle prices in the US for the 12 months ending December 31, 2021. At the same time, the automakers have sought to redirect scarce semiconductors and other parts to their top-selling, highest margin products, including pickups and SUVs, pushing factories which make them to run virtually nonstop.

For Ford, a significant chunk of its net income was made up of financial, i.e., nonproductive, activities, primarily an $8.2 billion investment gain realized through the initial public offering of Rivian, the electric vehicle startup that Ford and Amazon both hold stakes in.

The United Auto Workers union responded to the earnings reports with a predictable mix of groveling before management and cold-blooded indifference to workers’ suffering. UAW Vice President for Ford Chuck Browning wrote in a statement: “UAW Ford members worked diligently and remained dedicated to produce the finest built products in the world during a year that presented great challenges due to the pandemic and unprecedented supply chain issues. Their contributions to Ford Motor Company’s profits under such conditions are to be commended and our members should be very proud of this great accomplishment.”

To present Ford’s multibillion-dollar profits—extracted while countless workers became infected with COVID-19 at the company’s factories—as a “great accomplishment” is nothing short of obscene, revealing once again that the UAW functions as an arm of corporate management. The full human cost of running full production with ever-diminishing safety measures is unknown because the UAW ceased acknowledging when its members died of COVID just a few months into the pandemic in 2020.

While Browning touted average “profit-sharing” checks of around $7,000, these will not be distributed to Ford’s many temporary workers, who pay dues to the UAW but have essentially no rights. The corporatist “profit-sharing” scheme has long been used by the UAW to promote speedup and increased productivity. Meanwhile, the UAW has enabled real wages to decline or stagnate, driving down newer workers’ pay, freezing those of legacy workers, and cutting cost-of-living raises.

GM and Ford have both sought to present a rosy picture for 2022, with GM projecting vehicle deliveries to rise between 25 to 30 percent this year. However, there are a number of storm clouds on the horizon.

Supply chain disruptions have continued to erupt even as the earnings reports were being released. Last week, Ford announced that it would be implementing temporary shutdowns or slowdowns at eight plants across North America, attributing the downtime to microchip shortages. Stellantis also announced that production at its Windsor, Ontario, plant would be impacted by lack of chips.

In a report released in January, the US Commerce Department warned that manufacturers’ median chip supply had dropped to just five days’ worth as of late last year, down from approximately 40 days in 2019.

While Ford cited chip shortages to explain recent slowdowns, workers at its plants have spoken out about the rapid spread of coronavirus in recent weeks. To what extent labor shortages caused by widespread infection or exposure to COVID have played a role in the production downtime is unknown, given the information blackout on the number of infections and exposures among autoworkers enforced by the companies and the UAW.

Ultimately, the chaos in the supply chain—which has presented considerable uncertainty for autoworkers faced with recurring layoffs—is a product of the breakdown of the world economy as a result of the criminal response to the pandemic by the financial elite, who have continued to rake in trillions in profits and increased share values even as wave after wave of infections have caused global supply chains to buckle. At the same time, a globally coordinated, rational approach to ending the pandemic has been blocked by the accelerated growth of national antagonisms, led by the United States, as each of the major imperialist powers attempts to offload the cost of the crisis onto its rivals and seek to deflect social tension outward through reckless military aggression, mainly against Russia and China.

Financial analysts are also warning that a potential rise in federal interest rates this year could substantially impact automakers’ profits. J.D. Power, the consumer data and intelligence firm, recently projected that an increase in rates by the Fed could lead to $22 billion in lost sales, as well as hundreds of thousands fewer used vehicle sales.

As competition and financial headwinds gather strength, and the scramble to dominate the markets for electric vehicles accelerates, the major automakers are drawing up plans for new attacks on workers’ jobs, wages, and working conditions. Ominously, Ford noted in its outlook for 2022 that “underlying assumptions” for its projection for higher earnings this year were “significantly higher profits in North America, along with collective profitability in the rest of the world as the company benefits from its extensive global redesign.”

The brutal reality of this “extensive global redesign” is revealed by Ford’s demands for major concessions at its plants in Saarlouis, Germany, and near Valencia in Spain. Dangling promises of investments in electric vehicles, the company has pitted the two plants in a bidding war, pressing for cuts to wages and break time, among other givebacks, with the facility offering fewer concessions facing closure. To enforce these attacks, Ford is relying on the trade unions and union-controlled “works councils” in both Germany and Spain.

GM, for its part, is expanding its use of lower-paid subcontract workers as it builds out its EV and battery production capacity.

Ford, GM and Stellantis are all undoubtedly preparing new attacks on their workforces in every country, including in the US, where they will seek to once again demand major concessions from autoworkers in the 2023 contract negotiations, with the support of the UAW, under the lying pretext that these will “save jobs.”

Over half of all US teachers consider leaving the profession due to pandemic-related stressors

Chase Lawrence & Renae Cassimeda

More than half of all teachers in the United States, or 55 percent, plan to leave education sooner than expected due to major stressors caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted in late January by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the National Education Association (NEA).

Teachers identified concerns over COVID-19 and lack of safety protocols at their schools as the primary reasons behind their desire to leave their jobs. Only 38 percent of teachers said their schools had improved ventilation during the pandemic, and just 28 percent said they felt their school’s ventilation systems provided enough protection to help lower transmission.

Classroom with in-person instruction (Credit: Conestoga Valley School District Facebook page)

Highlighting the immense levels of stress and disillusionment teachers now experience, 90 percent of those surveyed said that burnout is a serious problem, and 91 percent said pandemic-related stress is a serious problem.

The percentage of teachers compelled to leave the profession sooner than expected has steadily risen throughout the pandemic. A RAND corporation study found that in January and February 2021, one in four teachers said they were likely to leave, whereas previously one in six teachers were likely to leave. In August 2021, a separate NEA poll found that 37 percent of teachers expected to leave the profession early.

Contrary to the lies promoted by the Biden administration and corporate media that the pandemic is over, that schools are the safest places for children and that the population can now return to normalcy, the opposite is the case. The criminal response by the ruling elite to the pandemic has completely transformed society, inflicting lasting trauma on the population due to ongoing mass death, infection and disability. The decades-long attack on public institutions such as healthcare and education has been qualitatively deepened during the pandemic.

The official death toll in the US has now surpassed 900,000 deaths. According to Worldometer, an average of 2,500 Americans are dying every day from COVID-19, with deaths continuing to rise. Efforts to keep open the schools, no matter the human cost, have resulted in an explosion of new cases among children. In January alone, more than 3.5 million official child cases were recorded. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 1,239 children have died since the start of the pandemic in the US, with 144 of those deaths recorded in the past three weeks alone.

More than 200,000 children in the US have lost a parent or caregiver during the pandemic. In-person instruction in schools, amid the present surge of the Omicron variant and lack of safety mitigation measures, has placed ongoing stress on children who not only worry about themselves, their peers and their teachers getting sick, but also that they might unwittingly infect their loved ones.

In addition to the increasing percentage of teachers wanting to leave the profession early, a mass exodus of teachers has already taken place over the past two years. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data as of February 1 shows that there are presently 567,000 fewer educators in public schools in the US than there were before the pandemic, more than doubling the government’s 10-year projections. Prior to the pandemic, BLS predicted that an estimated 270,000 public school teachers would leave the profession during the 10 years from 2016 to 2026.

Since the start of the spring semester in January, K-12 districts across the country have reported mass staffing shortages due to employees being sick from COVID-19, exacerbating an already crisis situation in the schools. According to Burbio’s School Closings Tracker, at least 20,725 schools have closed temporarily as of January 3, many due to severe staffing shortages.

Viewing the staffing crisis as an economic setback rather than a public health emergency, the Biden administration has doubled down on its homicidal policy of mass infection by ensuring schools and businesses remain open.

With dozens of states recently ending contact-tracing requirements, school districts across the US are now being encouraged to stop individual contact-tracing efforts. CDC K-12 COVID-19 safety guidelines reflect the entirely unscientific reduction in quarantine and isolation times from 10 to 5 days for both staff and students. Now, infected students and staff can return to classrooms as long as their symptoms are “improving” or they remain asymptomatic.

Teachers and students are increasingly conscious that they are being sacrificed, or at least neglected, in the interests of profits. In opposition to open mass infection policies in the schools, a revolt by students and educators against in-person instruction has erupted across the country and internationally. Thousands of students and teachers have expressed opposition through walkouts, sickouts and strikes in multiple cities throughout the US, Canada, Greece, Austria, France and elsewhere.

In addition to temporary school closures and the implementation of wholly unscientific CDC guidelines to keep schools open, further reactionary and desperate measures have been taken by school districts, as well as state and local governments, to keep schools open.

Districts experiencing bus driver shortages have resorted to calling on teachers and other school staff to drive buses while others are giving stipends to parents to drive kids to school or call Uber. Some districts have utilized charter bus companies at great expense. Massachusetts even deployed the National Guard to drive school buses. Many drivers launched wildcat strikes without union sanction across the US in response to unbearable working conditions and paltry pay.

Various police-state measures have also been used to keep schools open. Oklahoma recently allowed unmasked and armed police officers to substitute in classrooms. Arizona has enlisted the National Guard to fill in for sick teachers. In Broward County, Florida, security forces were used to block exits in the schools to prevent students from engaging in a district-wide walkout, protesting unsafe conditions in the schools.

One district in St. Louis, Missouri, is using the students themselves to deal with the staffing shortage. In December, the Northwest District hired 20 students part-time to fill nine open positions in maintenance, food service and child care. One child worker, 15, was paid below Missouri’s minimum wage, prompting anger from community members, with one commenting on the Facebook advertisement for the job fair, “It is slave labor.”

In Michigan, where schools are the number one source of COVID-19 cases, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a bipartisan bill effectively providing a legal mechanism to keep children in school even without teachers by decreasing requirements for substitute teaching from 60 college credit hours to just having a high school diploma. Missouri, Oregon, Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii and other states have similarly decreased substitute requirements.

In Arizona, mirroring the rest of the country, teachers are being forced to cover classes, many with subjects different from their specialization, while losing time otherwise spent on already immense workloads. One Arizona teacher tweeted, “I have covered classes 24 times. There were 62 school days in this time period. I have lost 39% of my planning/grading/collaboration time because we cannot find substitutes.” Many replied to the Tweet detailing similar circumstance. Support staff and administrators across the state are also being forced to cover classrooms as a result of acute shortages.

The mass exodus of educators and the reactionary measures taken by schools to ensure classes stay open exposes the fraudulent claims by the Biden administration, unions and the corporate media that the reopening of schools has to do with concerns over children’s welfare, mental health and “learning loss.”

As Omicron cases continue to surge, the teachers unions have played a despicable role in suppressing the opposition of teachers and reopening the schools. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, recently noting that over 98 percent of schools are now open as opposed to 45 percent last winter, said, “That shows remarkable strength and courage and fortitude on behalf of teachers and paraprofessionals.”

The staggering conditions facing teachers and students in K-12 schools point to an entire breakdown of public education under the weight of the pandemic. Public education, a longstanding institution of American democracy and society, has been under bipartisan attack for decades. The ruling elite sees the present situation as an opportunity to deepen the assault, further cut funding for public schools and promote school privatization.

Recently, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey has allowed families to sign up for school vouchers if their schools pause in-person learning. Other proponents of school privatization, such as former US Secretary of Education Betsy Devos and Alabama state senator Del Marsh, are actively promoting legislation to implement school choice and voucher programs, which would undermine public education in favor of privately-run charter schools.

Federal funding provided for schools through Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act is entirely insufficient to make up for the loss of funding at the start of the pandemic and due to declines in enrollment. Major districts across the country are beginning to see drastic budget deficits lead to further cuts to programs and jobs. Oakland Unified School District in California confronts a $90 million budget deficit, with officials pursuing draconian cuts that include the shuttering of a dozen schools, cutting vital programs and mass layoffs.

US combat troops arrive in Eastern Europe as Washington steps up war hysteria

Patrick Martin

As the first US combat troops ordered in by President Biden arrived in Poland and Germany Sunday, the campaign of warmongering mounted by the American government and media reached a new peak of intensity.

Some 1,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division landed in Poland Sunday, following the arrival of their commanding general, U.S. Army Major General Christopher Donahue, the previous day. The troops will be deployed in southeastern Poland, near the borders with Belarus and Ukraine.

U.S. Army soldiers from the 18th Airborne Division walk out to a C-17 aircraft as they deploy to Europe on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022 from Fort Bragg, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)

At a ceremony to welcome the troops, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said proudly that this was the first group of American soldiers “from an elite unit” to be stationed in his country.

General Donahue declared, “Our national contribution here in Poland shows our solidarity with all of our allies here in Europe and obviously during this period of uncertainty we know that we are stronger together.”

Another group of about 300 soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps arrived in Wiesbaden, Germany on Friday, with the Pentagon saying they would establish a headquarters to support the paratroopers being deployed in Poland.

Some 1,000 US troops already stationed in the German town of Vilseck, a squadron equipped with Stryker armored vehicles, is being redeployed to Romania.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan appeared on several Sunday television interview programs to warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could take place “at any moment.” On ABC, he said that the US was prepared to respond “in a united, swift, and severe way with our allies and partners should he choose to move forward with a military escalation.”

Virtually all US newspapers led their Sunday editions with reports commissioned by the Pentagon and CIA that Russia would have assembled by mid-February about 70 percent of the military forces required to conquer Ukraine, and that such a war could kill 50,000 civilians and create 5 million refugees.

There was no effort to explain the conflict between the headlines about Russia approaching “70 percent of an invasion force” and the month-long campaign of hysterical pronouncements by the White House and the American media that an invasion had been fully prepared and was awaiting only a final decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, the two lies peddled by the military-intelligence apparatus were combined without even acknowledging the contradiction.

The press accounts cited information delivered to Congress last Thursday in briefings by top Biden administration officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A long-planned Russian military exercise with the military forces of Belarus, to be held in that country February 10-20, is now being portrayed as a staging ground for a possible invasion of Ukraine. The American media notes, as though it represented proof of Russia’s intentions rather than a fact of geography, that Belarus shares a long border with Ukraine and the Ukrainian capital Kyiv is less than 100 miles away.

The barrage in the American media has allowed only a handful of facts to slip through that undermine the screams about imminent war, some of them attributed to the Ukrainian government itself, which has some reservations about an effort by Washington to fight Moscow to the last Ukrainian.

The New York Times reported Saturday, “Under Ukraine’s assessment, Russia would be unable to sustain an invasion across different points of attack for more than a week because of a lack of supplies including ammunition, food and fuel deployed to front line positions, nor does it have sufficient reserve forces.”

General Philip Breedlove, former NATO commander, told the newspaper that the satellite images of rows of tanks, regularly shown on television and in US newspapers, were not a force ready for invasion. “That is not in tactical or offensive formation,” he said. “That’s a formation for show.”

And in a report Sunday from the Ukrainian capital, ABC correspondent Terry Moran admitted there was no fear of imminent war, and people were going about their daily lives undisturbed. “Here in Kyiv, in Ukraine, on the knife’s edge, things feel very different,” he said. “The Ukrainian government continues to say that they don’t read this situation the same way. They don’t see and analyze the Russians as ready to invade. And in fact, Ukrainian government officials suggest that the U.S. may be alarmist.”

Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy responded to the latest round of US accusations on Twitter. “Madness and scaremongering continue,” he wrote. “What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300K civilian deaths? All this based on our intelligence sources that we won’t disclose. Would it feel right for Americans and Brits? It’s as wrong for Russians and Ukrainians.”

But the overall position of Putin and the Russian capitalist class, which he represents, has been to seek an accommodation with the imperialist powers, if not with the US, then with France and Germany. Both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are to travel to Moscow in the next weeks for talks on the Ukraine crisis.

Putin has reiterated insistently that his government cannot accept Ukraine joining NATO and demands a guarantee to that effect. At the same time, he has called for NATO to return to its 1997 boundaries, before the US-led alliance expanded into Eastern Europe and even into the Baltic States, formerly part of the Soviet Union. At that time, Washington gave repeated assurances that it had no desire to bring NATO to Russia’s doorstep, only to violate them as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Within the establishment media, there is hardly an ounce of criticism of US moves to provoke a war in Europe which could rapidly engulf the world, and lead to the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A statement last week by the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board warned:

The American ruling class has shown that it is impervious to mass death. Over 900,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 in less than two years, but the Biden White House does not even speak of it. The evening news anchor discusses the daily weather and not the daily dead. There is not a shred of a conscience that will prevent Washington from starting a catastrophic global war.

There is a madness in this policy, but it is a madness with objective causes. The drive to war is fueled by an utterly toxic mixture of deranged geopolitical ambitions and insoluble internal crisis.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the manufactured crisis, or its ebbs and flows, the great danger is that the working class is being systematically lied to and excluded politically while the capitalist ruling elite plunges humanity recklessly into the cauldron of war.

Pegasus: The new Cyber Weapon for dismantling democracy

George Abraham

Pegasus

The New York Times recently reported that India had purchased the Pegasus software from an Israeli company, NSO, as part of the multi-billion-dollar armaments deal that included sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear. The report also said that the purchase was finalized during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel and cleared by the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017.

Once again, the Government officials in India kept their silence on the New York Times story. Earlier, the Supreme Court in India has ordered an independent probe into Pegasus upon a ruling that came after petitions were filed which sought an investigation into allegations of unauthorized surveillance. The Court stated while ordering the inquiry that “the mere invocation of national security by the State does not render the Court a mute spectator.”

The Court also listed several compelling circumstances that were weighed before issuing an order. The right to privacy and freedom of speech are alleged to be impacted, and the entire citizenry is affected by such allegations due to the potential chilling effect. The bench went on to say that the “right to privacy is directly infringed when there is surveillance or spying done on an individual, either by the State or by an external agency” and “if done by the State, the same must be justified on constitutional grounds .” During the hearing, the Centre had filed a brief affidavit “unequivocally” denying the allegations and said the matter involved national security concerns. The Indian Express recently reported that two Cybersecurity experts had told the Supreme Court-appointed committee on the Pegasus issue that there is concrete evidence that the application was used to spy on the petitioners.

The NSO group claims that the product it sells to government clients is intended to collect data from the mobile devices of specific individuals suspected to be involved in serious crime and terror. However, contrary to their assertion, it has been reported that this spyware has been widely misused. In response, a global consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 media outlets in 10 countries came together under the ‘Pegasus project’ coordinated by Forbidden Stories with the technical support of Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Their findings shed light on the fact that at least 180 journalists across the globe have been selected as targets in countries like India, Mexico, Hungary, Morocco and France, and others. Potential targets also included human rights activists, academics, business people, lawyers, doctors, union leaders, diplomats, politicians, and several heads of state.

In a recent column, Siddharth Varadarajan, of ‘The Wire’ wrote further on his interaction with Ronen  Bergman of the New York Times stating that the Indian leadership showed ‘specific interest’ in and ‘specific emphasis’ on acquiring the controversial spyware. The column went on to say that the forensic tests by Amnesty International’s tech lab revealed the presence of military-grade spyware on the smartphones of several journalists, including two of the publication’s founding editors, investigative journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Sushant Singh and the leading opposition strategist Prashant Kishor. Their numbers were part of a leaked database of probable Pegasus targets, including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, and former CBI director Alok Verma.

What is Pegasus? Pegasus is a spyware that can be covertly installed on mobile phones running most versions of iOS and Android. Pegasus can be installed on the phone through vulnerabilities in common apps such as SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, or by tricking a target into clicking a malicious link. Once installed, Pegasus can theoretically harvest any data from the device  (SMS, Emails, WhatsApp chats, photos, videos, calendar, or contacts) and transmit it back to the attacker. It could also activate a camera or a microphone, record calls, and scan the GPS data. When iPhone is compromised, it’s done in such a way that allows the attacker to obtain so-called root privileges, or administrative rights, on the device. Pegasus could easily do more than what the device owner can do.

For a long time, Israel has used the sale of sophisticated weapons as part of its broader efforts to win diplomatic successes abroad or at the United Nations. Subsequently to this agreement, India voted in favor of Israel by denying observer status at the UN’s Economic and Social Council to a Palestinian human rights organization. India has maintained a commitment to the Palestinian cause for decades, and its records at the United Nations speak for itself. This sudden about-face by India is viewed as a betrayal of the Palestinian people, and Pegasus may have a lot to do with it. It is not only India that has changed its attitude towards Israel after a Pegasus deal; a few countries, including Mexico and Panama, also appeared to have done the same. After installing Pegasus spyware in Panama City in 2012, Panama’s Government voted to oppose the United Nations decision to upgrade the status of the Palestinian delegation.

The story of Khadija Ismayilova’s story is available in the public domain. In Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation nestled next to the Caspian Sea, has increasingly stifled free speech and dissent in the last decade. Ismayilova’s investigation into the ruling family had made her a prime target of her own Government. The authorities had thrown the book at her arresting her: surreptitiously filming her during sex, accusing her of driving a colleague to suicide, and eventually charging her with tax fraud and sentencing her to seven years in prison. However, she was released on bail after 18 months and banned from leaving the country for five years. So, in 2021, at the end of the travel ban, when Ismayilova packed away all her belongings boarded a plane to Ankara, Turkey, she may have thought she was leaving all that behind.

Little did she know the most invasive spy was coming with her. For nearly three years, Khadija Ismayilova’s phone was regularly infected with Pegasus. “All night, I have been thinking about what I did with my phone. I feel guilty for the messages I have sent. I feel guilty for the sources who sent me information thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure, and they didn’t know my phone was infected,” she told reporters. “My family members are also victimized. The sources are victimized, and private secrets of the people I have been working with are victimized,” she added.

There is little doubt that the use of Pegasus is an assault on the right to privacy everywhere and specifically an attack on the very fabric of Indian democracy. Undoubtedly, the Government is responsible for monitoring people involved in criminal wrongdoings, and there are established procedures involving the judiciary laid out for it. However, targeting opposition leaders, journalists, and regular citizenry for surveilling for their God-given right to express themselves is tantamount to undermining the democracy itself. This Pegasus scandal exposes the mindset of the current leadership, and it does not bode well for the future of India.