ICE has created a “surveillance dragnet” for accessing the personal information of all US citizens

Kevin Reed

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal police body under the direction of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has built a digital surveillance infrastructure and is accessing the personal information of Americans. This operation has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and has no outside oversight.

This is a primary conclusion of a two-year investigation by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology into the contracting and procurement practices of ICE. An extensive report on the investigation was published on May 10 under the title “American Dragnet: Data Driven Deportation in the 21st Century.”

In its Executive Summary, the report states, “Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives.”

The report summary continues, “By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”

The report states that ICE conducts its work, “without any judicial, legislative or public oversight,” and that the “personal information about the vast majority of people living in the US” is ending up in the hands of immigration officials, “simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.”

The Georgetown Law investigation is based on hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a review of more than 100,000 ICE spending transactions. Nina Wang, a policy associate with the Georgetown center, told the Guardian, “I was alarmed to discover just how easily federal immigration agents can pull detailed records from the most intimate corners of all our lives. In its attempts to target an ever-growing number of people for detention and deportation, ICE has reached into the private homes and lives of almost every person in America.”

Wang went on to tell the Guardian that ICE has an unfettered ability to trace the movement of anyone’s vehicle on the road, look up an address from utility bills and conduct facial recognition searches of photos on government-issued ID cards such as driver’s licenses, all without needing a search warrant.

Since 2008, the Georgetown report says ICE increased spending on new surveillance infrastructure fivefold from $71 million to $388 million. During that timeframe, the agency spent $1.3 billion on geolocation technology, which included contracts with private companies that own license plate scanning databases.

The report also details that the federal police agency spent $96 million on biometrics, especially facial recognition databases, $97 million on data lists provided by private brokers that gather information on US citizens from a host of sources, including more than 80 utility companies. The report said that ICE spent more than $500 million dollars on data analytics that enable it to sift through the enormous amount of information that it maintains.

Special Response Team (SRT) within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) participates in a training exercise utilizing an armored vehicle at Fort Benning in Georgia [Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]

Another critical aspect of the Georgetown investigation exposes the way in which ICE has used surveillance tools to intensify its attacks on immigrant rights. The report says, “The federal government built its immigration enforcement system on top of already unjust systems of policing and punishment.”

ICE was created with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and the signing into law of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 by George W. Bush on November 25, 2002. The act established DHS and the cabinet-level position of the Secretary of Homeland Security, which both began operations in 2003 just before the launching of the US invasion of Iraq. The creation of DHS was the largest federal government reorganization next to the establishment of the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1947.

DHS incorporated 23 previous federal agencies and consolidated them into 16 sub-departments including ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the US Coast Guard and the US Secret Service.

The adoption of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 amounted to the domestic side of the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act, the law passed six weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 which authorized the various US federal law enforcement organizations—including the FBI, NSA and CIA, and later the DHS—to violate the democratic rights of Americans and foreigners with impunity under the aegis of the “national security” needs of the US government.

According to the official verbiage of DHS, the purpose of ICE is to “protect America from cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.” However, the Georgetown investigation says, “ICE began broadening the scope of its data collection in response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an overarching federal initiative to radically increase domestic surveillance under the auspices of the ‘war on terror.’”

As the Georgetown report explains, US Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia) was one of just nine senators to vote against the Homeland Security Act. At the time, Byrd called it an “enormous grant of power to the executive branch,” and he warned that DHS would function as “a massive chamber of secrets,” and “without any real mechanism to ensure those powers are not abused.”

Byrd added that the Homeland Security Act gave the Secretary of DHS, “almost unlimited access to intelligence ... without adequate protections against misuse.” On November 19, 2002, six days before President Bush signed it into law, Byrd said the White House “told us it is not planning to create a new domestic spy agency in the United States.”

The White House, as usual, was lying. The authorizations for domestic emergency “national security” measures led to the most extensive electronic surveillance program anywhere in the world. As detailed in 2013 by NSA and CIA intelligence analyst and whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the US government used the “war on terror” to move forward with a program to gather the electronic communications of everyone in the world. Meanwhile, with the use of specially designed software tools, as Snowden explained, security and law enforcement agencies are observing the online activity of targeted individuals in real time.

It is a fact that the imperialist wars launched by the Bush White House in the aftermath of 9/11, the continuation and extension of those wars by the Obama and Trump administrations and the present US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, have required an ever-deepening series of attacks on democratic rights within the US.

The revelations about the electronic dragnet operated by ICE are the latest in a series of reports that demonstrate—despite reassurances from Congress and the US judiciary that such programs either do not exist or function in accordance with constitutional protections—the US government is spying on the public continuously and preparing advanced electronic tools such as biometrics and facial recognition for repressive purposes.

Well aware of the popular opposition to war and expanding resistance to the criminal government response to the pandemic and the deepening economic crisis of the capitalist system, the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the state is preparing the surveillance infrastructure for mass repression. The working class can place no confidence in any section of the political establishment or the US government to defend its democratic rights. It must take up the fight with its own strength against the 24-hour electronic surveillance of the public by the government.

Madrid doctors and nurses on indefinite strike against temp work, poor conditions

Alejandro López

For a week now, 11,000 doctors and health workers in Madrid, Spain’s capital and most densely populated region, have been striking in defence of staffing levels and services, as well as for better pay and conditions in the sector.

Around the world, strikes are erupting against conditions created by over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as decades of privatisations and subordination of health care to profit. In Los Angeles, thousands of health care workers have been on strike at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for safe working conditions, improved staffing and better wages. Throughout the United States, tens of thousands nurses have mobilised to defend nurse RaDonda Vaught from being jailed for a medical error in 2017.

In Germany, the strike by nursing staff at university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia has spread to university hospitals in Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne and Münster. In Turkey, 20,000 doctors went on a nationwide strike last week, demanding better wages and benefits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and other staff internationally have worked without proper personal protective equipment and under horrific conditions. The ruling class’s “profit before lives” policy jointly implemented by governments and trade unions led to constant overwork taking care of an endless stream of deathly ill patients, with no end to the pandemic in sight.

This criminal COVID-19 policy has led to close to 20 million deaths worldwide. Many health workers have contracted COVID-19 and died. Many more have endured the psychological and emotional trauma of witnessing death on a mass scale.

The Madrid strike was sparked by the decision of right-wing Popular Party (PP) Madrid regional government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso to unexpectedly call new civil service exams, allowing her to sack several thousand health workers. Many have worked for years or decades in health care, amply demonstrating their qualifications for the jobs they currently hold as temporary contract workers. Ayuso’s move would be unprecedented, leaving thousands of experienced medical staff jobless.

Last month, Ayuso refused to renew the contracts of over 6,000 health workers who had been contracted as reinforcement health personnel during the pandemic.

The PP Madrid regional government has for decades abused the temporary employment contracts for its public hospitals, using national labour reforms passed by successive Socialist Party (PSOE), PP and now PSOE-Podemos governments with the support of Spain’s main trade unions, the social-democratic General Union of Labor (UGT) and the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO).

Among the 12,000 doctors in public hospitals under the control of the regional government, 55 percent have been on temporary contracts for years, including 82 percent of the doctors in ICUs. More than 6,000 doctors in the Madrid region do not have a long-term contract and have been going on temp contracts for years. In some specialties, civil service examinations required to obtain greater job security have not been called for twenty years.

Last year, after years of protests and strikes, the PSOE-Podemos government passed the National Law 20/2021 on the Reduction of Temporary Employment in Public Employment. The aim was to reduce the temporary contracts of 800,000 civil servants who were at risk of losing their jobs after 10, 20 or 30 years of going on temporary contracts. The new law, however, allowed each region to choose how it wanted to proceed. Jobs, minimum working conditions and staffing levels, and professional development were never guaranteed.

Days before the law passed, the PP regional government called for civil service examinations for 4,726 positions. This is a reactionary measure. Applicants will have to fill in multiple choice questions, based on memorisation of general medical knowledge. Doctors are demanding that the PP-run regional government suspend the traditional civil service examinations and replace them with a merit contest.

The indefinite strike has been called by the platforms of Doctors United for their Rights, Non-fixed Doctors and Physicians of Madrid, Somos Urgencias (We are Intensive Care Units) and the Amyts medical union. The unions CCOO, UGT, CSIT and Satse called off the strike after the region’s Ministry of Health reached an agreement with them to make 1,600 health professionals permanent through a merit-based examination. Amyts considers this 'insufficient,' as' it does not cover the thousands of temporary doctors.'

The PP regional government has reacted by attempting to crush the strike with draconian minimal service requirements. In outpatient consultations, 50 percent of workers are required to go to work; in urgent care units, this rises to 100 percent. Such units include dialysis, emergency, resuscitation, critical care, hospitalization, operating rooms, pathological anatomy, oncology day hospital and AIDS, pharmacy, diagnostic imaging, laboratories, organ extraction and transplantation, radiotherapy, hemodynamics, and admission and filing.

Effectively, doctors’ right to strike has been de facto outlawed. The trade unions, including the smaller Amyts that has continued the call to strike, have refused to mount a struggle against the minimum services and to expand the struggle to other civil servants facing similar struggles, such as in education.

Nonetheless, strikers have organised large demonstrations and rallies in front of several hospitals in the city of Madrid. Last Tuesday, hundreds of doctors gathered in front of the Madrid Assembly shouting 'We take care of you, we are mistreated' and 'Professional dignity, permanent contracts now.'

At the Doce de Octubre Hospital in Madrid, large group of about 200 doctors, with green suits and white coats, occupied the entire wide entrance staircase and the doors of the hospital. There, they shouted against job instability, megaphone in hand, behind a large banner that reads “Professional Dignity”. These protests have been repeated in front of each major hospital in the region in recent weeks.

Another indefinite strike in Ciudad Real of “home help” workers who assist those with disabilities or complex health care needs living at home resumed again last week, after it was suspended by the CCOO and UGT last week “as a sign of good faith.” Workers are fighting low pay and widespread abuse by employers of part-time, precarious contracts. As in Madrid, minimum service requirements of 50 to 100 percent of staff during strikes were imposed.

Such attempted union sabotage must be taken as a warning by health care staff and broader layers of workers in Spain and internationally. A powerful, international movement of health care workers is emerging. Fighting for its demands requires, however, breaking with the trade union bureaucracies and opposing reactionary pseudo-left parties such as Podemos, which in government has pursued a policy of accepting mass infection with COVID-19.

Spanish unions have isolated and allowed police forces to violently attack mass strikes by steelworkers in Cadiz and by truckers across all of Spain. Politically affiliated to the two ruling parties, they are implicated in all the policies that have needlessly made health workers’ lives intolerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

German government extends combat mission in Mali and Sahel

Johannes Stern

Berlin is playing an increasingly aggressive role in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. Almost daily, the federal government announces new sanctions against Moscow and the delivery of more heavy weapons to Kiev. Now it is also pushing ahead with German imperialism’s offensive in Africa. On Wednesday, the cabinet approved a massive expansion of the German war mission in Mali and throughout the entire Sahel region.

MINUSMA deployment in Mali

The government’s proposal, which will be voted on in the Bundestag (parliament) next week, increases German participation in the UN mission MINUSMA by 300 soldiers. The additional personnel are to be used primarily to take over tasks from French combat troops, who are expected to be withdrawn from Mali in the next few months and redeployed to neighbouring countries.

The WSWS described this drawdown, announced by French President Emmanuel Macron on February 17, as driven by “explosive popular opposition to French imperialism, notably in the aftermath of NATO’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan last year and after repeated massacres committed by French troops or local militias set up with tacit French backing in the Sahel region of Northern Africa.”

Germany is now responding to the end of the infamous French-led “anti-terrorism” missions “Barkhane” and “Tabuka” in Mali by increasing its own presence in the geostrategically important and resource-rich country.

“The personnel ceiling will increase from 1,100 to 1,400 soldiers in order to do justice to the envisaged German contribution to compensate for capabilities previously taken on by France…” the German government’s motion states. This concerns medical services, support forces for the continued operation of the airfield in Gao, as well as “an additional security company for property protection” and efforts “to support the operations of our ground-based reconnaissance forces.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that Berlin is preparing, behind the backs of the population, a massive combat operation in Mali—and increasingly throughout the Sahel—for which more and more soldiers are being mobilised. “For redeployment phases as well as in the context of troop rotations and in emergency situations,” the mandate text states, “the personnel ceiling may be temporarily exceeded.”

In this context, MINUSMA is “authorised to take all necessary measures, including the use of military force, in order to fulfil the mandate…” Although “German participation” in Mali is for air transport, air refueling and “logistical and other support,” the Niamey military base in Niger is also “part of the area of operations.”

European police missions are also being extended to the whole region. “Another pillar of Germany’s engagement” would be “support for the further development” of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions EUCAP Sahel Mali and EUCAP Sahel Niger. Germany would participate in these with a total of 30 soldiers and “thus complement the police participation in MINUSMA.”

In addition, the EU mission EUTM will focus on Niger and other Sahel states. According to the corresponding government proposal, up to 300 Bundeswehr soldiers are to help improve the “operational capabilities of the security forces of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Niger and of the Joint Task Force of the G5 Sahel states.” This involves “military advice and training, including pre-deployment training” and “escort duties.”

Massacres carried out by the Malian regime, which came to power in a coup in June 2021 in alliance with Russian forces, are cited as official justification for the relocation of EUTM. “The reports of human rights violations by Malian and Russian troops, which we read in the newspapers here and have of course also heard about on the ground, are terrible,” complained Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the Bundestag. It was now a matter of “standing with the people on the ground against these forces that care nothing for human rights, nothing for democracy and nothing for a rule-based order.”

This is nothing but absurd propaganda. Berlin is in a pact with the Malian coup regime against the “people on the ground” who oppose the occupation of their country by the imperialist powers. The German government’s mandate states that it wants to “exert pressure on the Malian transition government on the one hand, but at the same time keep channels of dialogue open and offer support in a spirit of partnership.”

The massacres are being committed by the very forces that the Bundeswehr has trained over many years. Parliamentarian Katja Leikert, who sits on the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee for the Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) parliamentary group, had to admit that the perpetrators were “Malian troops—it has to be said here—who were trained by German officers with good intentions and who are now murdering alongside Russian troops.”

And even that is not the whole truth. In fact, the imperialist powers and their troops on the ground have no “good intentions” but are the main perpetrators of terror and massacres of civilians.

Mali, in particular, is a tragic example of this. The country was plunged into the abyss by the NATO war against Libya in 2011. After an influx of weapons and militias into Mali in the wake of Libya's destruction, Tuareg fighters and Islamist forces began an uprising in the north of the country against the central government in Bamako in early 2012.

When the official Malian army was on the verge of collapse, after fierce fighting and a military coup in March 2012, the former colonial power France intervened in early 2013 to secure the north of the country, which is particularly rich in raw materials. The mission was presented as a “fight against terror”. In reality, it was part of a renewed scramble for Africa by the imperialist powers.

Germany was involved from the beginning and supported the French intervention—initially with logistics and personnel. At the end of April 2013, the Bundeswehr began training the first soldiers on the ground. Since then, mandates have been repeatedly extended and expanded—and with them the brutalisation of the war.

The anger in the population escalated after imperialist crimes—such as the French airstrike on a wedding party in Bounty in early 2021, in which 22 people were killed—and numerous massacres that occurred under the eyes of the occupying forces. In May 2021, the military carried out another putsch, significantly, after the Malian trade unions had called off a planned general strike in the capital Bamako.

A declared war aim of the imperialist powers is to suppress the impoverished masses in the region and prevent them from fleeing to Europe. The Sahel is characterised by “a high level of instability..., combined with a massive increase in flight and migration, which may also affect Europe”, the German government warns in its mandate text.

At the same time, the aim is to pursue economic and geopolitical interests and to push back the influence of other powers—first and foremost Russia. “If MINUSMA were to withdraw from Mali, the vacuum would be filled even more by other forces,” Baerbock warned in the Bundestag. This would apply “to Islamist fighters”, but “also to Russian forces”.

As in the NATO war against Russia, the Bundeswehr's overt display in Africa is part of German imperialism's return to the world stage. On behalf of the entire ruling class, Baerbock proclaimed that they were not only “concentrating on what is happening on our own doorstep” but were “continuing to assume our responsibility in the world”. This was also “the message we are sending by supporting this MINUSMA mandate”. Germany was “the largest Western troop contributor in Mali” and was “not withdrawing from the world”.

NATO, G7 threaten military escalation against Russia and beyond

Alex Lantier

The NATO alliance is preparing a vast escalation of its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and of imperialist wars and intrigue around the globe. This emerged from two summits this weekend in Germany by the foreign ministers of NATO and of the G7 group of the world’s wealthiest countries: the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan, France, Italy and Canada.

Yesterday, Finland and Sweden confirmed that they would join NATO against Russia. Sweden’s ruling Social-Democrats said they will apply to join NATO, after Finland declared it would do so this week. “Today the Swedish Social Democratic Party took a historic decision to say yes to apply for a membership in NATO,” Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted, as Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson pledged to “assure that there is broad parliamentary support in the Riksdag for a Swedish membership application.”

At the same time, NATO military exercises unfolded all along Russia’s western border. “Defender Europe” exercises involve 18,000 NATO troops in Poland and other Eastern European countries; “Hedgehog” exercises, 15,000 NATO troops in Estonia; “Wettiner Heide” exercises, 7,500 in Germany; and “Iron Wolf” exercises, 3,000 in Lithuania. In Finland, the Arrow 22 exercise involves Finland’s Armored Brigade and tanks from the United States, Britain, Latvia and Estonia.

The official fairy tale that NATO is helping innocent Ukraine against an unprovoked invasion by Russia is dissolving, as NATO uses Ukraine to justify a drastic reshaping of global geopolitics. Indeed, the remarks of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg closing the NATO summit made clear that, long before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine this February, NATO was arming Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.

“NATO is stronger than ever. Europe and North America are solidly united. Ukraine can win this war,” Stoltenberg claimed. He added that NATO “Allies have committed and delivered security assistance to Ukraine worth billions of dollars, and over the years, NATO and Allies have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces. All of this is making a real difference on the battlefield every day.”

Stoltenberg was echoing former US Army-Europe commander Ben Hodges, who has said Washington should declare that in Ukraine, “We want to win.” Hodges also called for “breaking the back of Russia.”

Stoltenberg said this was part of a global expansion of NATO operations: “Ministers also discussed our upcoming Madrid Summit. We will make important decisions to reinforce NATO’s deterrence and defense to reflect the new security reality in Europe; to further support and engage with like-minded partners, near and far; and to adopt our next Strategic Concept, NATO’s blueprint for an age of strategic competition.”

Beyond current NATO member states, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Ukraine and Georgia are also expected to attend the June 28-30 NATO summit in Madrid. Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government will respond to mass protests that are expected by deploying 25,000 riot police to lock down Spain’s capital.

A preview of the new NATO strategic concept came in the G7 foreign ministers’ communiqué on Saturday. This gigantic 30-page document is not in fact a summary of summit discussions, but a sprawling list of demands from the most powerful imperialist countries to virtually the entire globe. It addresses Russia, ex-Yugoslavia, the Indo-Pacific area, China and the East and South China Seas, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, the Sahel, Gulf of Guinea countries, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran and North Korea.

On the Ukraine war, the G7 communiqué especially targets, beyond Russia itself, China and Belarus. It denounces Belarus as “complicit” in the war by “enabling Russia’s aggression” and warns that Belarus has failed “to abide by its international obligations.”

The G7 demands China cut off trade with Russia, which faces sweeping US financial sanctions, and abandon its claims in the South China Sea. It orders China “not to undermine sanctions imposed on Russia” and to “desist from engaging in information manipulation, disinformation and other means to legitimize Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” It also tells China to give “immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang and Tibet,” two strategic regions of western China, to UN officials and other observers.

On Russia, the G7 declares: “Russia has violated the UN Charter ... and will have to face consequences for its actions. We reject any notion of spheres of influence and any use of force that is not in compliance with international law. We will never recognize borders Russia has attempted to change by military aggression, and will uphold our engagement in the support of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea, and all states.”

What NATO is proposing is a global eruption of imperialist militarism. In the 30 years since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union eliminated the main military counterweight to NATO, it has gone on a neo-colonial rampage. It has bombed, organized coups against, invaded or militarily occupied the territory or officials of virtually every country listed in the G7 communiqué. NATO wars like those that shattered Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali altogether cost several million lives.

Putin’s decision to respond to NATO’s arming of Ukraine by a pre-emptive invasion is reactionary, but one must make one obvious point: NATO’s condemnations of Russia for violating international law reek of hypocrisy. From the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 to its unilateral bombing of Syria in 2017, NATO has dispensed with the pretense that its wars are governed by international law.

Workers must take NATO’s military escalation against nuclear-armed Russia and the megalomania of its geopolitical ambitions as an urgent warning. As the war in Ukraine drags on, and the Russian army consolidates its military hold over largely Russian-speaking areas in the south and east of Ukraine, the danger of an uncontrolled military escalation between NATO and Russia, ending in all-out nuclear war, is mounting by the day.

It is ever clearer that for NATO to “win” the Russia-Ukraine war, as Stoltenberg and Hodges demand, it will have to attack Russia directly. The integration into NATO of Finland, with its large army and 1,300-km border with Russia, and the constant drumbeat of NATO war games along Russia’s borders show that preparations for such a suicidally reckless policy are well advanced.

The force that must be mobilized against the mounting danger of a nuclear Third World War is the international working class. This includes, in particular, the Russian and Ukrainian working class, mobilized on the basis of the Bolshevik revolutionary traditions that led to their unification, a century ago, in the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of the Soviet Union.

The massive hardship and suffering caused by the NATO war on Russia is preparing revolutionary eruptions of the class struggle internationally. The G7 foreign ministers called to build a “Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance,” declaring, “The geopolitical landscape has fundamentally changed. Russia’s unprovoked and pre-meditated war of aggression has exacerbated the global economic outlook with sharply rising food, fuel and energy prices.”

Around the world, strikes and anti-government protests like the mass movement in Sri Lanka demanding the toppling of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse are mounting. The G7 statement on the food crisis is, however, another political fraud: it blames Russia for the food crisis, threatening hundreds millions of lives, which NATO played a central role in creating.

The central banks of the United States, Japan, Britain and the European Union are freezing hundreds of billions of dollars of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, making it impossible to pay Russia in dollars for its products on world markets. While the Russian invasion keeps much of Ukrainian grain from reaching world markets, draconian NATO sanctions have thus made it impossible to export Russian grain and fertilizer inputs. Lithuania, a NATO and EU member state, has likewise blocked the export of potash from Belarus through its ports.

Cryptocurrency market in turmoil

Nick Beams

The cryptocurrency market was thrown into turmoil last week as the market value of bitcoin, the most widely used cryptocurrency, continued to fall and so-called “stablecoins” are collapsing.

An advertisement for Bitcoin cryptocurrency is displayed on a street in Hong Kong, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. [AP Photo/Kin Cheung]

The use of stablecoins has increased over the past two years because they are supposed to provide some protection against the wild swings in the cryptocurrency markets, above all for bitcoin which has experienced several plunges in its history.

Stablecoins have been likened to chips in a gambling casino. They can be used to buy cryptocurrencies without the use of government-backed currencies, principally the US dollar, enabling the user to make more rapid transactions. Deals involving regular currencies often take days to complete.

Stablecoins are supposed to provide a degree of security because they can be cashed in, like a chip in the casino, at their face value, dollar for dollar.

There are two types of stablecoin: those that are backed by holdings of financial assets, including cash, government bonds, corporate debt and those that seek to maintain their dollar-for-dollar peg through financial engineering based on the use of algorithms.

But last week one of the latter type, TerraUSD and its associated stablecoin, Luna, collapsed. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) their demise “saddled investors with billions of dollars in losses and ricocheted back into other cryptocurrencies.”

Seven days ago, Luna was trading at $81. It is now worthless, and Terra has been delisted from major exchanges meaning it is effectively finished after once being valued at $40 billion.

The Financial Times (FT) reported that, according to the research firm, CryptoCompare, the Luna episode was “the largest destruction in this amount of time in a single project in crypto’s history.”

Another trader and enthusiastic supporter of crypto told the FT Luna’s failure was “one of the greatest catastrophes crypto has ever seen” and a “real wake-up call” that it is possible crypto prices can fall to zero.

The FT commented that while Terra’s demise was not systemic to the broader crypto market, it had far-reaching implications.

“What matters more is that the episode has renewed concerns potential cracks in other stablecoins, including the biggest of them all, Tether, calling into question the foundations behind the crypto industry.”

These cracks became evident when Tether, which is regarded as crucial to the functioning of the crypto market, “broke the buck” for a period and was at one stage trading at 95.11 cents, well below the $1 peg. It recalled a key episode in the 2008 financial crisis when a mutual fund went the same way.

Tether operates on a different basis from Terra. It claims to maintain the dollar peg by holding reserves of traditional financial assets such as government and corporate bonds. It is the biggest player in the $180 billion stablecoin market and is supposedly worth $80 billion.

But money flowed out last week.

“We had pretty much $3 billion [in] redemptions, and they were liquidated pretty quickly through our banking channels,” Tether’s chief technology officer Pail Ardiono revealed in a live audio Twitter conversation on Thursday. Redemption requests ranged from $100,000 to as much as $600 million.

In an interview with the FT, Ardiono committed to maintain the dollar peg and claimed the company had bought a “ton” of US government debt which it could sell to meet that objective. But he refused to give details of the holdings of government bonds because he did not “want to give out our secret sauce.”

He said Tether was not a public company and would keep that information to itself “but we are working with many big institutions in the traditional financial space.”

The FT report noted that last year the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million because it said the company had made “untrue or misleading” statements about its reserves.

The fall of Terra and the failure of Tether to maintain dollar parity, even if only for a short period, has sent a shock wave through the crypto markets raising major concerns.

“Cash is supposed to be cash. When it’s not, like when money markets froze during the financial crisis, sheer panic ensures,” Andree Beer of the US investment firm Dynamic Beta told the FT.

And because Tether and other stablecoin firms have large holdings in the short-term credit market efforts to maintain dollar parity by selling their assets could have spillover effects.

Last year the rating agency Fitch warned that if Tether holders were to seek to turn their tokens into cash it could destabilise short-term credit markets where the company holds much of its assets.

“The rapid growth of stablecoin issuance could, in time, have implications for the functioning of short-term credit markets,” it said, pointing to the “potential contagion risks linked to the liquidation of stable coin reserve holdings.”

Since that warning was issued, credit markets have become more fragile because of the rise in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve and the prospect that further significant rises are to come.

If Tether were forced to unload a significant portion of its holdings of $24 billion worth of commercial paper, its $35 billion of Treasury bonds or $4 billion worth of corporate bonds it could cause reverberations in these markets.

Calling for increased regulation of the crypto market, an FT editorial noted that if Tether did have $80 billion of assets this would place it among the world’s biggest hedge funds.

“If a fire sale of these assets ensues as Tether tries to retain its dollar peg, or faces a wave of redemptions, the sheer size of such moves could make already jittery financial markets even more volatile,” it said.

The crypto crisis also attracted the attention of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Testifying at a Senate hearing last week, she pointed to the run on TerraUSD.

“I think that simply illustrates that this is a rapidly growing product and that there are risks to financial stability.

“I wouldn’t characterize it at this scale as a real threat to financial stability but they’re growing very rapidly. They present the same kind of risks that we have known for centuries in connection with bank runs.”

FT journalist Katie Martin warned that while the stable coins TerrasUSD and Tether did not operate in the same way the differences were small.

“Either these things can maintain the one-for-one peg with the dollar or they can’t. If they can’t, then the belief system underpinning crypto is in trouble.”

The fall in the main cryptocurrency, bitcoin has been dramatic. After reaching a record high of almost $69,000 last November, it went down to as low as $25,000 last week before moving up again slightly. The decline means that anyone who got into the market after the end of 2020 and stayed there is now under water and the losses could extend to hedge funds.

According to the WSJ over the past six weeks at least $1 trillion in supposed crypto currency value has simply evaporated.

It remains to be seen how the crypto turbulence will play out this week and in the coming period. But whatever ups and downs may take place, it is yet another indication of the deepening crisis of the financial system as the massive inflow of trillions of dollars from the Fed and other central banks over the past decade has promoted new and ever more arcane forms of speculation and outright swindling and criminality in some cases.

Chile’s pseudo-left government sends police to break strike, arrest refinery workers

Mauricio Saavedra

Last Monday at least 180 subcontract workers manning five entrances of the Hualpén oil refinery and the San Vicente maritime terminal in the Bíobío region, 500km south of Santiago, were attacked by dozens of riot police with shields, water cannon, pepper spray and tear gas. Eleven workers were arrested. The recently elected Chilean pseudo-left administration of ex-student radical Gabriel Boric ordered Carabineros Special Forces to break up the picket line at one of Chile’s main oil refineries.

Carabineros attack striking ENAP refinery subcontract workers on May 9 (Credit: Cristofer Espinoza, Cooperativa)

Preparations for the repression were made by the government over the weekend after the state-owned company, the National Petroleum Company (ENAP), falsely claimed on May 6 that southern Chile from Biobio to Araucania regions would suffer supply shortages of gasoline, diesel and kerosene in less than a week if the strike continued.

In a communiqué, ENAP said it was obliged to stop “100 percent” of logistical operations and fuel distribution in the southern part of the country and claimed that it had been pushed into “the extreme situation” by the “unwillingness of [the union] FENATRASUB to engage in dialogue…”

Only weeks before, however, Julio Aranis, the newly appointed general manager informed the media of programmed maintenance to be carried out at the more than 20 plants at the Hualpén refinery in Biobio. In other words, the planned disruptions obliged the refinery to stockpile several months worth of fuel.

“This is the largest and most necessary maintenance that ENAP has carried out in its more than 70 years of life,” Aranis explained, adding that the US$87 million two-month operation “will generate, at its peak, a job opportunity for close to 2,000 external workers.”

The scaremongering provoked panic buying and queues at service stations several blocks long in the south of Chile over the weekend.

Knowing full well that there wasn’t a remote possibility of shortages, Minister of the Interior and Public Security Izkia Siches nonetheless took up the refinery’s talking points. She declared fuel transportation a “strategic” area for the country, vowing to take whatever measures necessary to “maintain supply and keep the roads clear for ENAP which is a strategic industry.”

“Our delegate has been in talks with the different teams of contract workers (and) we hope that this has a prompt solution,” she continued, “but undoubtedly our government has the duty to ensure free transit and obviously supply for the whole country.”

This was reported in the media as meaning that the pseudo-left Stalinist government would apply the State Security Law, a police state instrument closely identified with the military dictatorship to criminalize all manner of social opposition to its rule.

Boric answered that this was precisely what he was threatening: “We are working first on the path, which is the spirit of our government, which is precisely dialogue,” he said.

“But, of course, as a State, we have the duty to guarantee the supply of, in this case, fuel, to all areas of the country. I hope that through dialogue we will reach an agreement, otherwise the government, of course, will have to proceed accordingly.”

In his two months in office, it has become clear to masses of people that Boric’s endless appeals for “dialogue” is a euphemism for suppressing the class struggle. The working class, youth, indigenous peasant communities and popular sectors, mistakenly believed that the election of a front of supposedly left-wing parties—Frente Amplio, the Communist Party and others that make up Apruebo Dignidad— would welcome and even encourage an active fight to improve their social position.

This was the illusion sold to them in this case by FENATRASUB (the National Federation of Subcontracted Workers), which last September invited the then-presidential candidate Boric to speak to the workforce and requested his commitment to intercede on their behalf in return for their vote.

“This is how the government pays us,” said Victor Sepulveda the president of the union. “The same government for which you voted today is paying us with this, with repression. All those who voted for Boric today are receiving this in return so that they will have it in the memory of the workers of Chile. This is the payment of this government. A government of workers with a false discourse, instead of supporting us, represses them.”

Yet in the same breath the union continues to make appeals to the government to participate in tripartite negotiations.

Despite the crackdown, the workers have refused to back down and remain on strike.

Workers on picket line before police repression (credit: FENATRASUB)

The thrust of their demand is to eliminate the gap between subcontracted and plant workers through the renegotiation of a framework agreement, which stipulates the benefits that contractor companies have to include at the beginning of the bidding process. In 2021, the refinery imposed an agreement that froze existing conditions indefinitely.

Like so many other free market policies that stripped the working class of its rights and conditions, the military dictatorship opened the door to subcontracting in 1975. But it was under the center-left governments of the Concertación that this form of employment became ubiquitous in all areas of the economy including mining, agriculture, fishing, construction and retail.

Some subcontracted employees have been at the company since the 1980s, and incomes, benefits and conditions have not improved in 15 years. They even lack comprehensive health insurance coverage, grants for schooling, adequate Christmas bonuses and vacation leave.

This was made worse during the pandemic when ENAP, citing financial difficulties, furloughed subcontractors for three months, forcing these workers to live off their own savings. Moreover, the entire workforce was denied Christmas bonuses, an indispensable payment that gets them through the holiday period.

The unions however, have done everything in their power to keep the strike isolated.

The National Federation of Subcontracted Workers is an umbrella of several unions representing hundreds of subcontracted workers in ENAP, which, besides Hualpén, has refineries in the Magallanes and Valparaíso regions. Yet these workers have not been called out.

Nor have the unions representing permanent employees at ENAP supported the strike. After remaining silent for the first few days of the strike, which was called on May 2, Nolberto Díaz, president of the National Federation of Petroleum Workers' Unions (FENATRAPECH), all but condemned the picket on the grounds that it “put at risk the delivery of the fuels that the population needs…” A more right-wing argument could not be found.

Since the police crackdown, in an act of cynicism, the government’s own coalition, Apruebo Dignidad, composed of the pseudo-left Broad Front and the Stalinist Communist Party, have issued various statements condemning the action. The union bureaucracies have similarly come out to make mealy-mouthed statements supporting the workers, knowing full well that remaining silent would constitute consent to police repression by a government they promoted.

Yet neither the official Central Unitaria Trabajadora (CUT) nor the anarcho-syndicalist opposition union bureaucracy, the Central Clasista de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (CCTT), has called out their members to defend their class brothers and sisters. To do so would be to jump out of their own skins.

It has taken two months for the Boric government to virtually rip to shreds not only an agreement, but its political credibility among increasing sections of the working class.

11 die, dozens rescued from capsized migrant boat off coast of Puerto Rico

Alex Johnson

Eleven people died and at least 38 have been rescued after a boat carrying migrants capsized on Thursday about 10 nautical miles north of Desecheo Island and northwest of Puerto Rico, the US Coast Guard reported on Friday. The group was spotted Thursday morning by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) helicopter.

This photo released by the Seventh U.S. Coast Guard District shows people standing on a capsized boat, left, as some of its passengers are pulled up on to a rescue boat, top, in the open waters northwest of Puerto Rico, Thursday, May 12, 2022. [AP Photo/Seventh U.S. Coast Guard District]

Although search and rescue operations were ongoing as of this writing, authorities have indicated that the death toll could rise higher as it is not immediately clear how many people were in the boat. The passengers had been spotted in the water and did not appear to be wearing life jackets, the Coast Guard reported.

Rescue crew members had initially pulled 31 survivors from the water after the boat tumbled over, a spokesperson with the US Coast Guard's 7th District told CNN. The Coast Guard increased the total number of survivors to 38 in a Friday update. 'We always look for the possibility of finding survivors,' said Coast Guard spokesman Ricardo Castrodad, adding that crews worked through the night.

A CBP spokesman said 36 of those rescued are Haitian nationals, while the remaining two were from the Dominican Republic. The boat had reportedly departed from the Dominican Republic and was traveling across the tumultuous stretch of water in the Mona Passage, a strait that lies between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti. At least eight Haitian nationals have been hospitalized. 

According to CBP spokesman Jeffrey Quiñones, the boat was taking on water and the occupants were trying to shovel water from the boat. Quiñones noted this was not uncommon for such voyages since the unsafe ships are often not built for tumultuous seas. “It appears that the boat broke because it’s not a boat that’s made for such a voyage,” Quiñones said. “With a lot of people inside the boat, of course this could happen.”

An autopsy performed by Puerto Rico’s Forensic Science Institute found that all 11 victims were female. The institute announced it was forming a special team to perform autopsies Friday on the bodies recovered. María Conte Miller, the institute’s executive director, said her agency has been talking with Dominican consular officials to the family members of the deceased. 

Authorities in recent months have noted a sharp increase in migrants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic making dangerous voyages aboard makeshift boats that are often overturned or drop people off on uninhabited islands. Despite the perilousness of the journey, these trips are the cheapest methods for migrants to flee from countries that are seeing soaring costs in basic goods, double-digit inflation and severe gas shortages.

Gang violence in Haiti has shuttered hundreds of schools and businesses and prompted some hospitals and clinics to temporarily close. Dozens of gangs now occupy the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, forcing many to flee in search of safety and stability.  

Almost the entire political and social fabric of the country has been upended since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July of last year. A flood of evidence has emerged implicating powerful sections of the country’s venal ruling elite, and many of those that now occupy positions in government and police posts were involved in the plot to murder Moise, including incumbent President Ariel Henry. 

The social and economic crises wrecking the Caribbean nations have spurred a massive surge in migration, particularly over the past two years as a result of entrenched food insecurity and joblessness that have accompanied the coronavirus pandemic. From October 2021 to March 2022, 571 Haitians and 252 people from the Dominican Republic were detained in waters around Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, according to CBP. The majority of those Haitians, 348 of them, landed in Puerto Rico’s uninhabited Mona Island and had to be rescued.

According to the US Coast Guard, the fiscal year that ended September 30 saw state officials apprehend 1,527 Haitians, 838 Cubans and 742 people from the Dominican Republic in the region, which includes Florida and the Caribbean. In January, the Coast Guard searched for at least 38 people missing off Florida’s coast after a suspected human smuggling boat that had left the Bahamas capsized in a storm, with one survivor reported.

Recently, as many as 68 migrants were rescued Saturday along the Mona Passage. One woman believed to be from Haiti died. Earlier this month, CBP detained 60 Haitian migrants that the agency said had traveled through southwest Puerto Rico. On May 4, another 59 Haitian migrants were detained in northwest Puerto Rico. In late March, officials said they detained more than 120 migrants in three separate maritime smuggling incidents.

These marine disasters come amid a surge in seaborne migration on both coasts and expose the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, which campaigned on promises for a softer approach to immigration than Trump and Obama. In fact, the Biden administration has upheld and argued in court for the continuation of the most inhumane Trump era immigration policies: pandemic-related border restrictions and the separation of migrant families at the border.

Central responsibility for the crisis in immigration lies with the barbaric and criminal policies of the Biden administration, which has maintained Trump era immigration policies of rejecting asylum cases and repatriating migrants on bogus pandemic-related health restrictions and separating children from their families. More than 20,000 Haitian immigrants have been deported in recent months. 

The Democrats have made no serious attempts to rescind the Trump’s Title 42 restriction, a section of the Public Health Service Act that allows the US government to ban noncitizens from entering the country in the interests of public health.

A coalition of Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit against any lifting of the pandemic-related restrictions. Lawyers for the 24 states have argued for a nationwide injunction to maintain the swift expulsion of migrants under the pandemic-related public policy, and a federal judge said he planned to issue an order before the policy is set to be rescinded on May 23.

While Judge Robert R. Summerhays of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has not said explicitly how he would rule, he has previously been supportive of the arguments brought by the states to force Title 42 to remain in place. Scott St. John, Louisiana’s deputy solicitor general, said after the hearing that he was “confident” based on the judge’s comments during the hearing that the states that had sued were “in a good position.”

The reactionary Title 42 measure is in defiance of the health recommendations of public health experts, who have repeatedly argued against the policy and said there is no scientific reason for its implementation. Proper safety precautions make it entirely possible to process asylum seekers at the border without spreading COVID-19 and other communicable diseases. The Biden administration, however, has capitalized on Title 42 and the fascistic politics of the Republican Party to justify the continued rounding-up and expulsion of immigrants while doing nothing to actually confront the pandemic.