Questions over May Day demonstration shootings in Santiago, Chile: Who ordered the attack on unarmed protesters?

Mauricio Saavedra

So brazen are the forces of repression in Chile—due to the infinitesimally small probability of being charged with human rights crimes—that Carabineros Special Forces nonchalantly provided protection to at least 11 gunmen and dozens of other right-wing gangsters, who in broad daylight shot at and threw projectiles at unarmed demonstrators commemorating May Day in Santiago, Chile.

Gunmen speaking with cops and shooting at demonstrators (source: Piensa Prensa)

The actions of the riot police and other state forces in protecting these criminals is all the more brazen given that hundreds of smart phones were there to capture these events.

Five people including three journalists from independent media organizations were shot at while reporting on the demonstrations. One reporter, Francisca Sandoval from independent media Señal 3 La Victoria, was rushed to the capital’s main emergency hospital after receiving a bullet to the face. She remains in critical condition. Another reporter, known as Aby, of Radio 7 Bajos de Mena, was also shot in the shoulder with live ammunition, and three others were taken to the same hospital.

In an interview for La Red, Benjamín Lillo, director of Señal 3, said that the gunmen “were shooting directly at us. Of the five people who were injured, three are from the independent press. The attack was premeditated.”

There is every reason to believe that this attack was premeditated and politically motivated. One of the recently identified assailants has connections to the fascistic Republican Party.

Authorities had granted permission for the Central Clasista de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Class-conscious Workers’ Central, CCTT)—an anarcho-syndicalist organization ostensibly created in opposition to the official trade union apparatus, the corporatist Central Unitaria Trabajadora (CUT)—to hold a counter-march to the CUT’s official rally.

The shootings occurred at midday as the CCTT rally away from the city on Bernardo O’Higgins Avenue, Santiago’s main thoroughfare, and had reached a spot known as Barrio Meiggs, a neighborhood that has become notorious because of its connection with organized crime. In that neighborhood hundreds of ambulant stores in blue tarpaulins are daily set up by desperate petty shopkeepers trying to eke out an existence. Here deeply oppressed, declassed and criminal layers comingle. From these elements cops hatch their informants and assets.

Although having earlier received permission and garnered a police escort until that point, the marchers found themselves unexpectedly confronted with being shot at by a throng of criminal elements that surfaced from the makeshift blue tarps on the north side of Bernardo O’Higgins Avenue, and on the other side with a thicket of Carabinero Special Forces, equipped with water cannon trucks and armored vehicles.

In the surreal situation that unfolded, which is possible only in a country where the police have complete license to commit crime with impunity, Carabineros not only did not arrest a single gunman but cracked down on the marchers with tear gas and water cannon.

In an interview, Aby, one of the injured journalists, explained that she and a member of a human rights brigade who came to her assistance had to beg the police to allow her to receive medical attention.

Another member of the independent media, photographer Manuel Iturra witnessed Sandoval being shot. He told Agencia Uno that he approached the Carabineros to warn them that the marchers were being fired at but was totally ignored. “Behind me came another colleague raising the same concerns, and they ignored him. The only thing we achieved at that moment was for the Carabineros to tear gas and drench us with contaminated water on the south sidewalk, where we and the demonstrators were. Meanwhile, we were being shot at from the north sidewalk.”

Special Forces had been mobilized to deal with disturbances that were occurring at exactly the same place and time as the column of marchers was passing through Barrio Mieggs. Dozens of hooded men uniformly dressed in black began breaking into the strip mall stores closed for the May Day public holiday and proceeded to erect barricades with the ransacked goods and furniture. It remains to be verified if they were agents provocateurs, but it created the intended effect of associating their actions with the march.

Christian Democrat-linked Cooperativa wrote, “Parallel to the march organized by the [CUT] which marched from Plaza Baquedano along the Alameda to the west, a second demonstration—or ‘counter march’—of the (CCTT) took place, which resulted in looting of commercial premises in Estación Central, in addition to the burning of the blue tarps installed in the Barrio Meiggs sector and confrontations with Carabineros personnel.” The other right-wing corporate and state-run media followed suit in the misinformation campaign.

In the three days since, demonstrators and independent media have uploaded on social media a mass of photos and videos showing just how closely the Carabineros worked with the anticommunist gunmen and criminals.

Gunmen speaking with cops and shooting at demonstrators (source: Piensa Prensa)

It can be safely said that without the independent media groups identifying at least 11 gunmen, not one would have been arrested. As it is, only three have been arrested: Marcelo Naranjo was booked and placed in preventive detention for shooting Francisca Sandoval; and Luis Flores and Yonaiker Fuenmayor were booked and placed under house arrest for illegally carrying and using firearms. The gunmen responsible for shooting the other four victims remain at large.

“The family expresses its rejection and repudiation of the actions of the Prosecutor’s Office, which did not request preventive detention for carrying, possession and shooting against the demonstrators,” declared the Sandoval family’s lawyer.

He continued: “The family wants to express its rejection of the opportunistic acts of the Minister of the Interior (Izkia Siches), who was present yesterday to talk with them, and other political operators of the government, who have sought to come here to lower the profile of the situation and not assume their responsibility for the actions of the Carabineros, who acted in collusion and protected the gangsters.”

While the parliamentary left sectors of the government have made empty noises calling for an investigation into the police, calling for the resignation of the director of Carabineros, and even dredging up the call to “refound” or “democratize” the institution, the pseudo-left administration of Gabriel Boric has felt no compunction to follow suit.

Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches, announcing strengthening Carabineros Wednesday 3rd May (source: Ministry of the Interior)

On the contrary, this Wednesday the Ministry of the Interior seized on Sunday’s shooting spree to fully back the Carabineros and its chief and to announce measures to increase police presence in the Metropolitan Region and in the regions. This, they reason, is necessary to strengthen the National Intelligence System “in order to have a State with information that will allow us to anticipate conflicts.”

Sri Lankan workers defy curfew, government-organised violence

Peter Symonds

A government-organised attack yesterday by armed thugs on Sri Lankan protesters encamped on Galle Face Green in central Colombo was meant to set the stage for a far broader crackdown on the month-long anti-government protest movement. It has backfired.

Medical students joined by workers protesting at Ragama on May 9, 2022 against the attack at Galle Face [Photo: WSWS]

Using the violent attack as the pretext, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse imposed an indefinite nationwide curfew and mobilised the military, sending armed troops to Galle Face Green to bolster the heavy police presence already on hand.

Far from suppressing the opposition, thousands of people angered by the violent attack defied the curfew and heavy police-military build-up to flood into Galle Face to demonstrate their solidarity with the anti-government protests. Across the island, hundreds of thousands reportedly took to the streets to do the same.

Sections of workers, including health workers at the National Hospital in Colombo and postal workers, stopped work spontaneously to take a stand against the government’s actions.

Mass protests have been taking place across Sri Lanka over the past month demanding the resignation of the president and his government and an end to the social disaster facing working people due to skyrocketing prices, lengthy power outages, and shortages of essentials, including basic food items, fuel and medicines.

People line up to buy kerosene at Kandana, a Colombo suburb, on May 9, 2022. [Photo: WSWS]

Working people are compelled to wait in queues for hours and even days. Many are having increasing difficulty in providing food for their families and are reducing the number of meals each day. There is a worsening breakdown of essential services. Hospitals are running out of medicines and equipment. Transport is becoming prohibitively expensive.

The groundswell of opposition in the working class has compelled the trade unions, which initially did nothing, to call one-day general strikes on April 28 and again last Friday. The strike on Friday—supplemented by what is known as a hartal, a general shutdown of small businesses—brought the economy to a halt. Millions of workers throughout the island stopped working, including in the free enterprise zones, hospitals, schools, public administration, and transport.

The strike was especially significant as working people unified across communal lines—Sinhala and Tamil, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists—around their common class interests. For decades, especially in times of crisis, Colombo politicians have whipped up anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim chauvinism and organised communal provocations and pogroms to divide workers against each other.

The powerful support for the general strike and hartal sent a shiver of fear through the entire political establishment—government and opposition alike as well as the trade unions, which were clearly shocked at the extent of support.

Late on Friday night, President Rajapakse, who already has the extensive powers of the executive presidency, imposed a state of emergency enabling him to mobilise the military, impose curfews and censorship, make arbitrary arrests and ban strikes and protests.

As the government prepared to mobilise the military, the trade unions called off an indefinite general strike due to start this Wednesday, replaced with limited lunch-time protests by workers. By demobilising the working class, the trade unions only encouraged a desperate government to act.

The prime minister, Mahinda Rajapakse, the president’s brother, yesterday assembled hundreds of ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) supporters, many of them bussed in from other parts of the island, to his official residence in central Colombo. After a deliberately inflammatory speech, they were sent out armed with sticks and clubs, firstly to attack protesters outside the residence and then those occupying Galle Face Green about a kilometre down the road.

The police, although armed with tear gas and water cannon, did nothing to stop them until the rampage on Galle Face Green was complete. More than a hundred people were hospitalised with injuries caused by the thugs.

Masses at Galle Face after the attack on May 9, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

What the Rajapakse brothers did not count on was the angry reaction of broad layers of the population who were prepared to defy the curfew and the security forces. As the extent of the opposition became apparent, Mahinda Rajapakse tendered his resignation as prime minister, effectively dissolving the cabinet.

President Rajapakse has now called on all parliamentary parties—government and opposition—to form a “national unity government” to find solutions to the country’s unprecedented economic and political crisis. The country faces an acute foreign exchange crisis, meaning it has very limited funds to buy imports including fuel, and has declared “a temporary default” on its large foreign loans. The International Monetary Fund has insisted on draconian austerity conditions for an emergency bailout loan that will only worsen the social crisis facing working people.

The entire Colombo political establishment—the opposition parties, the trade unions, corporate representatives and media commentators—is pinning its hopes on the formation of an interim or national unity or all-party government to find some way to demobilise or suppress the protests of workers, youth and rural masses.

To date, the main opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—have insisted that the president has to resign before they will consider joining or supporting an interim government to prepare for early elections. Under the impact of the events of the past few days, they may well reconsider. Undoubtedly behind closed doors, frantic discussions are taking place in ruling circles to patch together such a government.

Children’s Lives in a Dangerous World

Cesar Chelala

Several studies over many decades show that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) negatively affect the cognitive development of children, and their physical and mental health. Children suffer several threats to their wellbeing, from being victims of sexual and physical abuse to being isolated from their family environment. Children that are separated from their families become prone to being abused and trafficked.

 Child trafficking

Child trafficking is a widespread phenomenon. Children make up 27 % of the 40 million victims of trafficking worldwide. Two out of every three identified child victims are girls. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report states that the number of child victims of sex trafficking in the United States increased 55% compared to 2019.

Children who are trafficked are forced or persuaded under false pretenses to leave their homes. They are moved to an unknown location -frequently in other countries- to work as sex workers; work under abusive conditions; marry men who are much older and also may be abusive; or commit crimes. These children are also used as drug couriers or dealers, and frequently ‘paid’ in drugs, so that they become addicted and are further entrapped.

The reasons underlying trafficking include poverty; unemployment; low status of girls; lack of education (including sex education) of children and their parents; inadequate legislation; lack of or poor law enforcement; and the commercial sexual exploitation of children by the media, a phenomenon increasingly seen worldwide.

Children exploited for sex work are prone to sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS. In addition, girls can have multiple pregnancies and frequently they are forced to abort. Because of the conditions in which they are placed, children can become malnourished, and develop feelings of guilt, inadequacy and depression. They usually have no access to education and lack opportunities for social and emotional development.

In South Asia, traditional practices that perpetuate the low status of women and girls in society are at the core of the problem. More than 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are brought annually to the United States and forced into sex work or work as indentured servants. The US government has prosecuted case s involving hundreds of victims. In other countries which face this problem, the prosecution rate is low.

Child sex tourism

Child sex tourism is another form of trafficking. It is concentrated in Asia and Central and South America. According to UNICEF, 10,000 girls annually enter Thailand from neighboring countries and end up as sex workers. Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reports that child sex workers make up 40% of prostitutes in Thailand. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls are transported across the border to India each year and end up as commercial sex workers in Mumbai, Bombay or New Delhi.

Although the greatest number of children forced to become sex workers is in Asia, children from Eastern European countries, such as Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic, are increasingly vulnerable. Child sex work does not show signs of abating. In many cases, individual traffickers and organized groups kidnap children, take them across national borders and sell them for sex work, with border officials and police serving as accomplices.

There are special social and cultural reasons for children forced into entering the sex trade in different regions of the world. In many cases, children from industrialized countries enter the sex trade because they are fleeing abusive homes. In countries of Eastern and Southern Africa, children who became orphans as a result of AIDS frequently lack the protection of caregivers and become more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.

Impact of sexual exploitation of children

Besides the moral and ethical implications, the effect that sexual exploitation has on children’s health and future development demands urgent attention. Throughout the world, many individuals and non-governmental organizations are working intensely for the protection of children’s rights.

The work of international non-governmental organizations and U.N. agencies should be a complement to national governments’ actions to solve this problem. Those actions should include preventing sexual exploitation through social mobilization and awareness building, providing social services to exploited children and their families and creating the legal framework and providing resources for psychosocial counseling and for the appropriate prosecution of perpetrators. The elimination of the abuse and sexual exploitation of children around the world is a daunting task, but one that is achievable if effective programs are put in place.

Sinn Féin wins Northern Ireland Assembly election

Steve James

Sinn Féin have won the largest number of first preference votes in the May 5 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and will hold the largest number of seats.

This is the first time since Ireland was brutally partitioned in 1921-2 that an Irish nationalist party has won an election in the six counties, which remain part of the UK and whose political structures have been designed to ensure pro-British, unionist dominance. Sinn Féin, the one-time political wing of the disbanded Irish Republican Army, is committed to securing a border poll on Irish unification within five years.

Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O'Neill in 2018 (Credit: Kelvin Boyes / Flickr)

Sinn Féin polled 250,388 first preference votes (29 percent) against 184,002 (21.3 percent) for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Sinn Féin’s vote increased by 1.1 percent from 2017, while the DUP’s share fell by 6.7 percent. Sinn Féin won 27 seats in the 90-seat assembly, while the DUP took 24. Although Sinn Féin’s final seat tally did not increase, the DUP’s loss of 3 seats means Sinn Féin can nominate a First Minister to the Northern Ireland Executive. The party is currently led in Northern Ireland by Michelle O’Neill, the party’s vice president, a republican since her teens.

Although Sinn Féin won the poll, the unionist share of the overall vote largely held up and much of the working population remains politically polarised along nationalist/unionist and Catholic/Protestant lines.

Under the sectarian rules of government power sharing in Northern Ireland, established by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a new executive has to be agreed with the largest parties of both the unionist and nationalist “communities”. Northern Ireland has not had a functioning government since the DUP’s Paul Givan resigned as first minister in February as part of the party’s attempt to undermine the Northern Ireland Protocol arrangement for Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU).

Northern Ireland is currently ruled by caretaker ministers, who are not able to pass new legislation or budgets. Should a new government not be formed within six months, either new elections must be held, or some new arrangement cobbled together by the British government’s Northern Ireland Minister, Brandon Lewis.

As well as hostility to its right-wing sectarian outlook, the DUP’s losses are bound up with its support for Brexit. The DUP worked closely with Tory Brexiteers in Westminster to extract the most hardline Brexit terms, while propping up the government of Theresa May. After May’s downfall and Boris Johnson’s landslide victory of 2019, the DUP were dumped and the implausible promises made to them, the most ludicrous of which was a tunnel to Scotland, dropped.

The border between the north and the Republic of Ireland is now an EU frontier, albeit still invisible. To avoid a “hard border”, under terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiated with the EU, certain goods, particularly some foodstuffs and medicines being transported from the British mainland to Northern Ireland, are required to be checked and documented at considerable expense.

This trade barrier down the Irish Sea is viewed by unionists as a mortal threat to their position in the UK, despite their own role in creating it, and has forced a hardening of unionist opinion.

The DUP’s current leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who joined the Ulster Defence Regiment at the age of 18, has linked any revival of the assembly to the removal of the protocol and Irish Sea trade barriers.

Last year, DUP leaders, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party signed a joint anti-protocol declaration. Donaldson participated in a series of anti-protocol rallies and shared a platform with TUV leader, Jim Allister, far-right loyalist commentators such as Jamie Bryson and leaders of the Protestant Orange Order.

Some election candidates were subjected to loyalist intimidation and violence. People Before Profit (PBP) candidate Hannah Kenny was grabbed by the neck and abused by three men in East Belfast. Elsie Trainer, a Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) candidate, was assaulted after she chased and filmed two youths who had ripped down her election posters.

The UUP lost 1 seat, leaving it with nine, winning only 11.2 percent of first preferences. The TUV still only won one seat, although its share of first preference votes increased to 7.6 percent, mostly at the expense of the DUP.

The Johnson government may yet include legislation to unilaterally scrap the protocol in its next Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech, as part of its ongoing feud with the EU over Brexit.

Other major shifts include a surge towards the Alliance Party, which took 116,681 first preferences, 13.5 percent, an increase of 4.5 percentage points. Unlike Sinn Féin or the DUP, the Alliance does not define itself as representing one or other of Northern Ireland’s “communities” under the sectarian designation scheme built into the Good Friday Agreement. It appears to have picked up votes both from business and middle-class supporters of both main unionist parties and the nationalist SDLP, who also lost votes to Sinn Féin.

The Alliance opposed Brexit, puts forward a pro-business liberal image, and has more than doubled its representation in the assembly to 17 seats. The SDLP, with seven seats, has lost four. The Alliance also won at the expense of the Greens, who lost both their seats.

Sinn Féin’s success also partially expressed the deepening class tensions gripping the entire island. Its election pitch was focused primarily on social questions. In this way, Sinn Féin benefited from profound hatred for the Johnson government in Westminster, intensified by the pandemic.

Sinn Féin, however, offers no way forward to any section of workers. It is increasingly viewed as a viable coalition partner of the main right-wing bourgeois parties in the South and was the largest party at the last election. In power in the North since 2007, Sinn Féin has worked closely with the DUP in imposing the austerity measures demanded by the British government. Its proposed border poll, a call for a united capitalist Ireland, provides no means of combating sectarian divisions between Catholic and Protestant workers, based on a socialist appeal to their shared class interests and opposition to the bourgeoisie, north and south of the border.

Sinn Féin also gained at the expense of the pseudo-left People Before Profit. Although PBP stood their largest number of candidates, its share of first preference votes declined. Their manifesto was only a slightly more left version of Sinn Féin’s own Stormont-oriented policy. In line with much of the pseudo-left in Britain, however, PBP supported Brexit while criticising the DUP’s “Tory Brexit”. Only their current assembly member, Gerry Carrol, was elected.

The last weeks in Northern Ireland have seen a dramatic intensification of the class struggle. Thousands of workers in transport, local government, manufacturing, education and the gig economy have recorded large strike votes. Many, including Caterpillar and education authority workers, have been on strike against sub-inflation pay offers, while the largest transport strike in 20 years, at Translink, was called off at the last minute by the Unite and GMB trade unions.

Council workers protested across the road from the Belfast election count centre against their miserable 1.75 percent pay offer. PBP’s manifesto made no criticism of the trade unions’ main role in suppressing the class struggle.

UK government military spending for Ukraine reaches almost £3 billion

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Conservative government is ramping up military spending for NATO’s proxy war against Russia.

Last week Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed Ukraine’s parliament by videolink, pledging the dispatch of an additional £300 million of military equipment. Within days that has been increased by a further billion pounds to £1.3 billion.

This followed the previous week’s announcement that, in one of the largest deployments since the Cold War, it was sending, from May, 8,000 army troops across Europe to participate in a slew of military exercises.

Tanks uploaded on military truck platforms as a part of additional British troops and military equipment arrive at Estonia's NATO Battle Group base in Tapa, Estonia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Sergei Stepanov)

The new funding brings the UK’s financial commitment to nearly £3 billion. It comes on top of the existing £1.5 billion support to Kyiv, which included at least £200 million of military equipment, around £400 million in aid and grants to the Ukrainian government and unlocking over £700 million in additional World Bank lending through loan guarantees.

Announcing the funding in a Mail on Sunday article, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said, “We are unwavering in our support for the people of Ukraine—and this extra £1.3bn will ensure we continue to provide the necessary military and operational support they need to defend themselves against Putin.”      

Speaking for one of the main powers enabling the 30-year NATO encircling of Russia which provoked the war, he added cynically, “we are working tirelessly to bring an end to this conflict.”

With millions thrown into poverty after over a decade of austerity, and a cost-of-living crisis fueled by the pandemic and war in Ukraine, Sunak offered no respite. The priority was militarism and the defeat of Russia. Sunak boasted, “This new funding means that the scale of our support for our Ukrainian friends is now second only to the United States. It also means that the rate of our spending on a military conflict is now as high as it was in 2009 at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan when we had 43,000 troops actively deployed in combat.”

Over a million people were killed in those wars, as well as hundreds of UK military personnel. According to the Ministry of Defence, by 2015 these illegal adventures had cost over £21 billion—paid for by crushing austerity measures, the slashing of health and education budgets and gutting of public services.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left) listens as Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak briefs the Cabinet at the Prime Minister’s weekly Cabinet meeting before delivering his Spring Statement to the House of Commons. 23/03/2022. (Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

The UK’s arms firms are licking their lips in anticipation of war profits. Sunak announced, “The funding will also help drive a major boost in the UK’s cutting-edge defence industry, creating high-quality jobs across the country.” He continued, “The Prime Minister and Defence Secretary will host a meeting of arms manufacturers this month to discuss ramping up production in response to the increased demand created by the conflict.”

The vast upscaling of spending on the war follows concerted lobbying by MPs.

This week the Times revealed that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace demanded that Sunak increase the military budget in his March “spring statement”. It reported, “Wallace told Sunak earlier this year that inflation and the expense of sending arms to Ukraine meant that Britain risked falling short of its Nato spending commitments by 2025, according to a leaked letter. Sunak did not treat Wallace’s letter as a formal request for additional defence spending.”

This prompted Tobias Ellwood, chairman of Parliament’s defence select committee and one of Johnson’s main Tory critics from the right to intervene in the pages of the newspaper. Last Friday, just days after Johnson announced the additional £300 million in Ukraine war spending and before Sunak announcing the extra £1 billion, Ellwood told the Times, “It should not take a memo from the Ministry of Defence to appreciate how European security is deteriorating… The swathing cuts made to our troop numbers as well as our tanks, fighting vehicles, ships and planes need to be reversed if we are to play any serious role in bolstering Nato’s eastern flank.”

Ellwood, along with Wallace and other senior Tory figures closely connected to the military top brass, have demanded that Johnson increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP from the current 2 percent.

Wallace’s and Elwood’s interventions were a barely disguised bid for Johnson’s job, should he be forced to stand down prior to the Tory Party’s conference in October. Another leadership contender, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, declared that the 2 percent target should be a “floor, not a ceiling”.

These concerns are shared throughout the ruling elite. A Financial Times reporting team asked in March, “Does the UK need to change its defence strategy after the Ukraine war?” They noted, “The army is set to lose its entire fleet of more than 700 Warrior infantry fighting vehicles earlier than planned and a third of its Challenger II main battle tanks. Operationally, British land forces are now their smallest since the 18th century, with just 72,500 regular soldiers.”

The Times reported, “Johnson is said to have spoken repeatedly to Wallace about the letter and argued that it was the wrong time to increase defence spending. He highlighted the fact that the Ministry of Defence had received a significant settlement in the spending review five months earlier.”

Sunak has already handed over £24 billion over four years in extra military spending, the largest increase by any government since the end of the Cold War. Johnson is also committed to building four new submarines to carry the UK’s nuclear weapons at a cost of £31 billion.

When Sunak announced his spring statement with no new military spending, it was amid speculation that he had as much as £10 billion in spending reserves being primed for the military. The WSWS noted, “With the corporate media and retired senior figures in the armed forces demanding a rapidly expanded military force, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Tories are preparing for a seismic uplift in money spent on preparations for war in Europe with Russia in the immediate future.” This assessment has been confirmed.

Those within government circles insisting that militarism and war must be prioritised find their foremost allies in the Labour Party. Advancing itself as the “party of NATO” Sir Keir Starmer’s MPs stand in alliance with the Tories as a single party of war. Last week Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey told the i news web site, “When [Labour MP] David Lammy and I went to Kyiv, ahead of the Russian invasion, we were able to say there is united UK support and solidarity for you in the face of this build-up of Russian aggression.”

John Healey, Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, tells the RUSI think tank in March 2021, “Labour’s support for nuclear deterrence is non-negotiable. The matter is settled. From Kinnock to Corbyn—with Blair, Brown and Miliband in between—this has been, and will remain, Labour policy.” (Credit: John Healey-Facebook)

Healey, wrote the i, “is calling for a rapid rewrite of [the governments’] defence and foreign policies known collectively as the Integrated Review (IR) that was published only last year.” The IR was now getting in the way of Russia’s defeat said Healey, “It was meant to be threat-led but made no mention of the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan or of the Russian threat to Ukraine. It largely overlooked Europe. And it got carried away with itself, with Boris Johnson trumpeting this tilt to the Indo-Pacific...

“It’s fine to send a new aircraft carrier on a gap-year tour of the Pacific. But its real job has got to be in the Atlantic and in the Med. It’s marginal to any balance of power in the Indo Pacific, in the Atlantic, in the Arctic, as far as the northern European security is concerned it’s pivotal,” Healey stated.

He boasted of Tony Blair’s Labour government, “We delivered the largest sustained increase in defence spending for two decades after the Twin Towers. [The Ukraine invasion] requires that sort of response from government. If they’re willing to do that they will have our support.”

The i commented, “Labour is also writing the Government what amounts to a blank cheque on political support for new defence spending if the review that he wants to be completed by July identifies a need for it.”

Serological testing suggests nearly half of Canadians and two-thirds of children under 10 have had COVID-19

Malcolm Fiedler & Roger Jordan

Serological testing by the British Columbia Centres for Disease Control (BC CDC) and Life Labs revealed that over 40 percent of the province’s population tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies in March. This staggering figure, up from 10 percent during a previous study in October, underscores how the more infectious Omicron variant and the ruling elite’s deliberate policy of letting the virus run rampant produced mass infection on an unprecedented scale.

Perhaps the most concerning finding was the widespread infection of children. It found that over 60 percent of children surveyed tested positive for COVID antibodies, discrediting the often repeated lie that schools aren’t drivers of transmission. This lie, coupled with fraudulent claims that children are less likely to get infected, was used to keep schools open through successive waves of massive infection and death over the past two years, so parents could be freed from child care responsibilities and forced to work pumping out profits for big business.

August 2021 protest against the Alberta UCP government's attempt to scrap virtually all anti-COVID measures, an action that made the province the centre of Canada's fourth wave of the pandemic. (Twitter)

British Columbia, together with Alberta and Manitoba, are the three provinces with the highest serological test positivity rates, according to separate figures released last month by the Canadian Blood Service and Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. The data showed that over 36 percent of young people aged 17 to 24 had had a COVID-19 infection by the end of February. These figures are revealing in that they show how British Columbia, a province governed by the supposedly “left” NDP, and Alberta, led by hard-right Premier Jason Kenney, who as late as June 2020 was describing COVID-19 as “the flu,” have pursued similar ruthless policies of mass infection and death throughout the pandemic.

Given the continuing rampant spread of the virus in the two months since these figures were gathered, it is reasonable to assume that the true rate of infection is now approaching 50 percent. As Danuta Skowronski, an epidemiologist at the BC CDC who led its research, told CBC in late April, “It’s about one in two, almost, of our population that have had evidence of infection.”

Official figures from Ontario suggest that 40 percent of the population was infected by COVID-19 since December. Meanwhile, Quebec’s hard-right Coalition Avenir Québec government recently admitted that the initial Omicron wave infected some 3 million of the province’s 8.5 million people.

In the six months since December 1, 2021, Canada has officially recorded nearly additional 10,000 COVID-19 deaths in two waves of Omicron, bringing the total since the pandemic to more than 39,800.  

CIDRAP, an internationally renowned center for infectious diseases based in Minnesota, recently conducted a meta-analysis of 31 independent studies and found that upwards of 49 percent of COVID-19 survivors experienced persistent and lingering illness from a variety of symptoms four months after their diagnosis. Assuming that close to 19 million people in Canada, approximately half of its 38 million population, have suffered a COVID-19 infection, this study suggests that over 9 million people could have suffered, or are now suffering, from Long COVID.

This mass tragedy was not principally due to Omicron’s unprecedented infectiousness and immune-evasive capabilities. Properties the virus was able to develop only because the ruling elites of every country, outside China, refused to pursue an elimination strategy, thus allowing the virus to continue to propagate and mutate spinning off new variants.

If millions of Canadians have been infected with COVID-19 just since last December, it is above all because the federal Liberal government and its provincial counterparts have abandoned all efforts to contain the pandemic’s spread. Indeed, in Canada, as elsewhere, the advent of the more infectious Omicron variant was used to declare that attempts to stop the virus’ spread were futile.

In line with this, the devastating increase in COVID infections over the past six months and the nearly ten thousand additional needless deaths have been positively welcomed by the political establishment and its media hangers-on as part of their homicidal campaign to make COVID-19 “endemic.”

When Omicron was first detected in southern Africa in late November 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited three weeks before bothering to address the population on what his government planned to do about it. By then, Omicron was already spreading rapidly across the country, breaking daily infection rates. Rather than investing social and financial resources to combat the looming disaster, Trudeau and the provincial premiers allowed the testing and contact tracing systems to all but collapse. As of late April, just 3.7 million infections had been officially recorded in Canada since Omicron’s advent, approximately one-fifth of the total suggested by serological research.

Following the emergence of the far-right Freedom Convoy in late January, which was incited and built up by the Conservative Party to break popular support for COVID-19 protection measures, the Trudeau government, with the support of the NDP, oversaw the implementation of the Convoy’s fascistic pandemic program in all but name. Mask mandates, test requirements, limits on social gatherings, and all other remaining public health measures were scrapped in the weeks following the occupation of downtown Ottawa by far-right thugs threatening political violence.

A critical role in facilitating this bonfire of COVID-19 regulations was played by the New Democrats and trade unions. They responded to the emergence of the Freedom Convoy by using their vast resources to block any independent protests by workers to oppose the Convoy’s fascistic agenda, instead underscoring their firm loyalty to the Canadian capitalist state. The unions applauded Trudeau’s invocation of the draconian Emergencies Act to break up the Convoy, while the NDP ensured Trudeau got a parliamentary majority to confirm and extend the Act’s enforcement. One month later, with the vast majority of COVID-19 protections already scrapped by the provinces with the approval of the federal government, the NDP concluded an alliance with the Liberals to keep Trudeau in power through June 2025.

The initial Omicron wave, which claimed close to 6,500 lives in Canada, has since given way to a sixth deadly wave of the virus. Infections and deaths have skyrocketed across the country, with many hospitals once again overwhelmed. Children’s hospitals are facing a particularly drastic crisis due to COVID-19’s ravaging of schools.

Governments at all levels are doing even less to fight the sixth wave than all previous ones. On Saturday, May 14, Quebec will become the last province to abolish its indoor mask mandate, creating a situation where essentially no pandemic public heath restrictions will remain in force anywhere in Canada.

Last Saturday, the Trudeau government, again with the support of the trade union-sponsored NDP, allowed the few remaining COVID-19 financial supports available for working people to expire. Consequently, workers will no longer receive financial aid if they need to self-isolate after a positive test or to take time off to care for an infected child or relative. As well as underscoring the indifference of the Liberal government to the well-being of working people, the decision will further accelerate COVID-19 transmission, as infected workers will be forced to choose between remaining on the job or facing increased financial distress, even ruin.

Germany supplies self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine for war against Russia

Johannes Stern

Just days after the official decision by the German government to supply “heavy weaponry” to Ukraine, Germany is massively expanding its support for the war.

On Friday, the Ministry of Defense announced via Twitter that Germany will supply seven self-propelled 2000-model howitzers to Kiev. This was “determined” by Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (Social Democrats). With the addition of five Dutch self-propelled howitzers, the total delivery will amount to a dozen. Training for the use of the howitzers in Germany is also “ready” and will begin “next week,” the Ministry confirmed.

The self-propelled howitzer is an extremely destructive weapon. “Nobody survives within 50 metres” of the impact point of its shells, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung in an article with the militarist headline “The Fist That Strikes.”

Several thousand fragments “would destroy everything,” and the soldiers can “set the projectiles to explode over the heads of the enemy.”

“The crews can use special ammunition against” enemy tanks, “which automatically detects the vehicles with its sensors and is able to break through their steel.”

With the delivery of howitzers and the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, Berlin is now clearly an aggressive party to the US-NATO war against Russia.

According to an opinion released by the Scientific Service of the German parliament on March 16, the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil constitutes participation in the war under international law. “Only if, in addition to the supply of weapons, the briefing of the conflicting party or training in such weapons were also in question, would one leave the certain ground of non-warfare,” it stated.

In other words, 81 years after the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union, in which nearly 30 million people died, the ruling class is once again waging war against Russia. Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine and the official propaganda do not change the fact that German foreign policy is again developing along similar lines as in 1941.

Significantly, the ruling class did not use the anniversary of the surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8-9, 1945 to commemorate its terrible crimes but to dispatch tanks and other heavy weaponry to the East again. In doing so, it is pursuing the declared goal of defeating the Russian army militarily.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) announced after a government conference at Schloss Meseberg that the issue now had to be to repel the Russian offensive in the Donbas and equip the Ukrainian army accordingly. “That’s why it was said that we will supply up to 50 suitable Cheetah tanks. We have also said that together with our allies we want to provide support for the use of artillery.”

Since then, one announcement has followed another. On Thursday, at a joint press conference with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Scholz announced a so-called “ring exchange” of heavy weapons. Specifically, this means that the Czech Republic is supplying weapons of Soviet design, including tanks, to Ukraine. In return, Germany undertakes to replace the weapon systems of the Czech army with corresponding modern Western weapon systems.

Scholz said that as far as support with weapons is concerned, “we will work closely together and cooperate.” He added, “The Czech Republic can provide weapons that originate in Russian production and are directly useful for Ukraine. We can help ensure that the Czech army retains the necessary strength that it requires.”

A similar “ring exchange” is being prepared between Germany and Slovakia. This was confirmed by Minister of Defence Christine Lambrecht during a visit to the Slovakian airbase Sliac on Friday. The base is less than 300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and is currently undergoing major upgrades by the German army.

According to a report on the official website of the Ministry of Defence, Germany has moved Patriot anti-aircraft systems to the base with FlaRak Group 1 from Husum “within a very short time.”

“Together with the US and the Netherlands,” the report said, “Germany is now taking over the protection of Slovak airspace at the invitation of Slovakia within the framework of NATO’s Integrated Air Defence.” Germany is “the lead nation” in this operation.

Currently 240 German soldiers are stationed in Slovakia. But that is just the beginning. “On 4 May, the Slovak Parliament approved an interim increase in NATO troops from 2,100 to 3,000,” the Ministry of Defence’s report states. “A total of up to 1,200 German forces can now be transferred to Slovakia. This makes Germany the largest troop deployer in the country.”

German tanks arriving at Sestokai station, Lithuania, Feb. 24, 2017, for the deployment of the German-led NATO battlegroup (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

Germany has been leading the NATO Battlegroup in Lithuania since 2017, which originally comprised 1,000 soldiers. In March, 350 additional German soldiers were sent to Lithuania with heavy military equipment. With the transfer of more soldiers and the formation of a new NATO battlegroup in Slovakia, Germany will become one of the largest NATO troop deployers in Eastern Europe after the US.

The federal government is well aware that with the massing of German troops in Eastern Europe and the delivery of heavy weapons and the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, it is increasing the risk of a nuclear Third World War. As late as April 22, Scholz stated in a Der Spiegel interview that everything had to be done “to avoid a direct military confrontation between NATO and a highly armed superpower such as Russia, a nuclear-armed power.” The issue is “preventing an escalation that leads to a third world war.”

These warnings are now being ignored by the government. In a recent interview with Die Zeit, the Green Minister for Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck, replied dismissively to the question of whether he was “actually not afraid of a third world war.

“No, I’m not,” he said. “We are at a time when you can have a lot of worries. But the fear of the Third World War, which is haunting some, is also fueled by the fear that Germany will become a war party.”

In fact, Germany is a war party and Habeck and the Greens are among the leading warmongers. He defended the delivery of deadly weapons by the German government with the comment: “With the weapons that I, Robert Habeck, have sent to Ukraine ... people will most likely be killed.” The decision was “nevertheless necessary compared to the alternatives.”

The next arms deliveries are already being prepared behind the backs of the population. The chairman of the parliamentary Committee on European Union Affairs, Anton Hofreiter (Greens), demanded on the TV station Welt that after the howitzers Germany must “also supply Leopard 1 and Marder tanks.” Industry applications for this need to be “approved quickly.”

One hundred million coronavirus cases in the US predicted for fall and winter surge

Bryan Dyne

The Biden administration announced Friday that it expects the US to record 100 million new cases of COVID-19 during the coming fall and winter months. According to the Washington Post article that broke the story, the administration also warned of a “significant wave of deaths.”

The projections came from a currently unnamed White House official at a private press briefing, the details of which have yet to be made public. The most the Post states is that the administration made its estimate based on “outside models of the pandemic,” all of which assume that Omicron and its subvariants continue to remain dominant.

The projections become even more dire if new and more virulent variants emerge, as has happened repeatedly since the Alpha variant was first detected in the United Kingdom in late 2020.

The implications of such a level of mass infection are staggering. One hundred million new cases would more than double the official case count of the pandemic, which stands at more than 83 million. One hundred million new cases suggests, based on a study published in April by the Oxford University Press, 43 million new cases of Long COVID. One hundred million new cases implies, using the accepted infection fatality rate of the virus of 0.5 percent, 500,000 new deaths.

Registered nurse Bryan Hofilena attaches "COVID Patient" stickers on a body bag of a patient who died of coronavirus at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

A report by ABC News on the projections, which included an interview with White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, painted a dire picture. Jha confirmed to ABC’s David Muir that “between now and the fall and winter, [it is] very possible we’re going to see new variants” that will be more contagious. At the same time, he noted that when the new wave hits, “we’re not going to have vaccines … we’re going to run out of treatments … we’re not going to have diagnostic testing.”

Jha, however, had nothing to propose aside from the White House mantra that vaccines are the panacea to end the pandemic. “If you’ve been vaccinated and boosted, you have a very high degree of protection against severe illness,” said Jha, making no mention of even basic mitigation measures such as masks.

Vaccines are one of the necessary tools to fight the pandemic. Vaccination rates in the US, however, have stalled out with only 67 percent of the population having gotten a full initial course and less than 31 percent having received a booster shot. Such low rates are only possible in an antiscientific social and cultural climate promoted by both the Republicans and Democrats. As a result, the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker estimates that at least 234,000 people have died since June 2021 that would have otherwise lived if they had been fully vaccinated and boosted.

Moreover, the coronavirus variants have proven increasingly capable of evading immunity granted by the vaccines, especially the Omicron variants. In January and February, 42 and 40 percent, respectively, of all deaths from COVID-19 in the US were among fully vaccinated people, including 12 and 15 percent who were boosted with a third shot.

This means that if there are 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 this year, more than 200,000 will be among those who have had at least two shots of the vaccine. And with every passing month, the effectiveness of vaccines already administered diminishes.

There is also every possibility that the prediction by the Biden administration proves to be an underestimation of the coming waves of the pandemic. While the official case counts stand at an average of nearly 70,000 a day, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington estimates that there are currently more than 492,000 new infections each day, the vast majority of which go undetected amid the lack of testing and ongoing massive coverup of COVID-19 data.

At such a rate, there will be more than 115 million new infections by year’s end, even without another surge. The threat posed by the pandemic continues to be so dire that even one of the leading representatives of capitalism, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, commented to the Financial Times, “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal.” Gates continued, “It’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it.”

The Biden administration now openly acknowledges that the coronavirus pandemic is not “over” or “endemic,” as has been presented by ranking officials and the corporate media. Rather, it is developing into a tsunami of new cases and deaths that has the potential to exceed even the colossal scale produced by the Omicron wave in December, January and February.

The media, however, is treating this largely as a nonissue. The pandemic has been largely dropped from the television news and print media. The ABC News report was more notable for being the network’s first significant report on the pandemic in months than for any new details presented on the looming public health disaster.

As for the White House, it has announced its projections but proposes no measures to stop it. It has not held a press conference to warn the American people of the looming danger or provide any guidance on what must be done to avert it. On the contrary, the Biden administration has overseen the elimination of virtually every even minimal mitigation measure to lower transmission, including mask mandates.  

The policy of mass infection is alive and well under the Democrats, just as it was under the Republicans. One hundred million cases and the resultant hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of Long COVID are seen as merely the cost of doing business to keep Wall Street coffers overflowing.

The White House briefing again makes clear that any level of death is acceptable to the American ruling elite so long as it does not impinge on its ability to extract surplus value from the working class. Various pandemic trackers continue to surpass an official death count of 1 million and barely a mention has been made of such a colossal loss of life in the press. Now the federal government has admitted that deaths will rise to at least 1.5 million.