Pentagon confirms deployment of active-duty military personnel in Ukraine

Andre Damon

US Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder acknowledged during an official briefing yesterday that active-duty US military personnel are not only deployed inside of Ukraine, but are operating far away from the US embassy in Kiev.

The day before, an unnamed US Department of Defense official said at a background briefing that “U.S. personnel” had “resumed on-site inspections to assess weapon stocks” in Ukraine.

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder Holds A Briefing

Reporting on this announcement, NBC News noted that “these inspectors in Ukraine appear to be some of the first members of the U.S. military to re-enter the Eastern European country since the start of the war, outside of military guards posted at the U.S. Embassy...”

During Tuesday’s on-camera briefing, Travis Tritten of military.com asked, “The military has personnel inside of Ukraine, who are doing weapons inspections now. I’m wondering what the rules of engagement for those personnel are if they are fired on by the Russians or they are targeted by the Russians.”

Ryder replied, “We do have small teams that are comprised of embassy personnel that are conducting some inspections of security assistance delivery at a variety of locations.”

“My understanding is that they would be well far away from any type of frontline actions, we are relying on the Ukrainians to do that, we are relying on other partners to do that…. They’re not going to be operating on the front lines.”

He continued, “We’ve been very clear there are no combat forces in Ukraine, no US forces conducting combat operations in Ukraine, these are personnel that are assigned to conduct security cooperation and assistance as part of the defense attaché office.”

To this, Tritten replied, “But this would be different because they would be working outside the embassy. I would just ask if people should read this as an escalation.”

Ryder claimed that the US action was not escalatory, and simply refused to answer Tritten’s question about what the US would do if any active-duty US troops were killed. 

Especially over the past weeks, Russia has expanded its targeting of logistics sites throughout Ukraine, with weapons depots being a major target. What will be the consequence if these US troops, serving as liaisons for the coordination of logistics and weapons shipments, are targeted, including inadvertently, by Russia?

The fact that the massive funneling of arms into Ukraine by the US and NATO powers now requires the deployment of military personnel in Ukraine explodes the fiction that the US is not directly involved in the conflict, and is also revealing about the forces with which the US is allied.

To date, the United States has sent more than $50 billion in military and economic assistance to Ukraine. Having financed and supplied the war, the US wants to make sure it has direct control over where the weapons have ended up and how they are being used. This is part of the conflict within the American political establishment in advance of the midterm elections.

The US military and State Department are also concerned that advanced weapons may end up in the hands of elements within Ukraine that may use them in a way that Washington has not approved beforehand.

The Pentagon’s statements followed the release of a report by the State Department on its plans to “Counter Illicit Diversion of Certain Advanced Conventional Weapons in Eastern Europe.”

The report referred to “a variety of criminal and non-state actors [who] may attempt to acquire weapons from sources in Ukraine during or following the conflict, as occurred after the Balkan Wars in the 1990s.”

“Criminal” actors, however, are embedded in the Ukrainian military, particularly in the form of the fascistic Azov Batallion, which is playing a frontline role in the war against Russia and whose leaders have been brought to Washington and feted by Congressmen, Democrat and Republican alike.

The open secret is that the actual US force presence in Ukraine is far greater even than that admitted by the Pentagon on Tuesday.

In October, veteran journalist James Risen reported that the Biden administration had authorized the clandestine deployment of US Special Forces in Ukraine. “Clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war,” wrote Risen.

Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding, current and former officials said. The finding indicates that the president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders about the administration’s decision to conduct a broad program of clandestine operations inside the country. One former special forces officer said that Biden amended a preexisting finding, originally approved during the Obama administration, that was designed to counter malign foreign influence activities.

In July, the New York Times reported that dozens of US ex-military personnel are operating on the ground in Ukraine and that retired senior US officers are directing portions of the Ukrainian war effort from within the country.

US forces are intimately involved in all aspects of Ukrainian military operations, having helped provide intelligence for the strike that sunk the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, in April, and for Ukrainian strikes that have killed Russian generals.

The announcement comes amidst a major escalation of the war over the past month. Following military setbacks in both Northern and Southern Ukraine, Russia has mobilized hundreds of thousands of reservists, annexed four regions of Ukraine, and threatened the use of nuclear weapons to defend them.

A series of major provocative actions targeting Russia have massively increased tensions, including the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, for which Russia has blamed the UK, as well as the assassination of Russian far-right ideologue Daria Dugina and the bombing of the Kerch Bridge, which the New York Times reported were carried out by Ukrainian forces.

Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out an attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Times reported, which prompted Russia to withdraw from its grain agreement with Ukraine, threatening to escalate the global food crisis.

Under these conditions, forces within the US, including admiral James Stavridis, have renewed calls for more direct US intervention, including in the form of the dispatch of warships to the Black Sea.

Suspension bridge collapse in Indian state of Gujarat claims over 140 lives

Martina Inessa & Yuan Darwin

At least 141 people, including dozens of children, are dead, with scores more injured, after a 143-year-old pedestrian cable-suspension bridge straddling the Machchhu River in Morbi city in the western Indian state of Gujarat collapsed last Sunday evening, around 6:30 pm.

Rescue operations by the army, navy and national disaster rescue personnel were still ongoing Tuesday, with many people reported missing. As a result, the death toll is almost certain to rise significantly.

Search and rescue work is going on as a cable suspension bridge collapsed in Morbi town of western state Gujarat, India, Monday, October 31, 2022. The century-old cable suspension bridge collapsed into the river sending hundreds plunging in the water. [AP Photo/Ajit Solanki]

The bridge was prematurely thrown open to the public on October 26, the Gujarati new year day, after being closed for repairs and renovations for several months. The decision to reopen the bridge was taken by the private company that was given charge of bridge operation and maintenance at the insistence of the Gujarat state government earlier this year. The horrific incident has caused widespread shock not just in Gujarat, but throughout the country.

Both municipal and Gujarat state authorities are complicit in this entirely preventable tragedy. The Oreva watch company, which claimed to have carried out extensive repairs and renovation on the bridge, failed to even seek, let alone obtain, the requisite fitness certificate from the municipal authorities before opening the bridge. Yet neither the municipal nor the state government stepped in to prevent the reopening from going ahead, despite the fact that the bridge was known to have suffered severe damage in a 2001 earthquake.

The bridge collapse is a major embarrassment for the national Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Gujarat is the home state of both Modi, who served as chief minister from 2002 to 2014, and his chief henchman Amit Shah, who is India’s Home Minister. Shah is known as the main implementor of the BJP’s virulent Hindu-communalist campaign, including threatening to push migrants from Bangladesh into the sea and enacting the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act.

Gujarat is set to hold state assembly (parliament) elections in December. The bridge collapse is therefore a serious political problem for the BJP, which has ruled the state for the past 27 years and overseen sweeping business deregulation and privatization. The Modi-led BJP national government has made privatization of all public assets, including bridges, roads, enterprises and railways, a central feature of its domestic policy ever since it came to head the national government in 2014. Opposition to Modi and the BJP is growing due to its disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in more than 5 million deaths and India’s pandemic of poverty, hunger and mass joblessness, which has been further exacerbated in recent months by sharply rising food and fuel prices.

Modi was on a three-day visit to Gujarat and the neighboring state of Rajasthan when the tragedy occurred. He inaugurated an aircraft manufacturing facility and participated in “National Unity Day” celebrations on the birth anniversary of Vallabhbhai Patel, a right-wing Congress Party leader from Gujarat and India’s first home minister. It was Modi’s second visit to the state since October 10, as he seeks to strengthen the BJP’s re-election effort.

The state BJP government has announced a measly compensation of Rs. 400,000 to the kin of each deceased person, whereas the Modi-led national government announced half that amount. Taken together, this amounts to total compensation of  just $7,300 for those who lost relatives. People who were injured will receive a derisory Rs. 50,000 from the state and national government.

Around 500 people were standing on the bridge when it collapsed, despite it having a maximum capacity of 125 persons. The overcrowding occurred because the Oreva watch company had sold an excessive number of tickets and allowed hundreds of people to get on the bridge, a major tourist attraction, especially during the festive new year season. The bridge started swaying dangerously and then snapped, plunging the victims into the river, many on top of each other. Most of the dead were women and children or elderly people. Out of the dead, 78 were elderly and 56 were children, according to official figures.

A Morbi resident, Ranjanbhai Patel, commented to the media, 'As most of the people had fallen into the river, we were not able to save them.”

Another young man was quoted by the BBC as saying, 'My sister and I fell in the water. I survived but my sister is still missing. I went to the government hospital, searched everywhere, but my sister is nowhere to be found.” Weeping, he said he has been looking for her since Sunday evening.

More casualties are expected as the rescue mission continues. 177 people have been rescued so far.  Dozens of people were critically injured. TV footage showed people holding the cables and remains of the bridge as emergency teams tried to reach them. Some attempted to climb up the wrecked bridge while others swam to safety.

Officials confirmed that the bridge collapsed because it could not bear the weight of so many people. Sandeep Singh, the chief municipal officer of Morbi, stated to the press, “Historically, only 20 to 25 people used to go in a batch on the bridge and that has always been there.”

While the police were quick to arrest the nine people responsible for operating the bridge, it is the top officials of the city and the BJP state government who bear chief responsibility. Up until March 2022, the upkeep of the bridge was under the jurisdiction of the municipality. However, the municipality handed over its maintenance and operation through a public tender to the Oreva watch company, which has no experience in operating bridges, let alone supervising bridge repair.

Lower-level municipal officials were reluctant to grant the contract for the bridge’s operation and maintenance to a watch company. But the municipal authorities were reportedly compelled to do so after receiving a nudge from the BJP state government. This is because the multi-millionaire owner of Oreva is a big supporter of the BJP and is politically well-connected.

The Gujarat government claims to have appointed a five-member committee to probe the bridge collapse. However, it is all but certain that the real culprits including ministers in the BJP government will be shielded while obfuscating the totally corrupt nexus between BJP politicians and industrialists.

The tragic events of the weekend are just the latest in a long series of failures of basic infrastructure. Many of India’s bridges and roads are in woeful shape and tens and even hundreds of thousands of people perish every year from flooding, bridge collapses and landslides.

While visiting Morbi, Modi expressed his condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the bridge collapse. “Rarely in my life, would I have experienced such pain,” he claimed. He called for a “meticulous” investigation.

India’s Supreme Court is scheduled to hold hearings on November 14 in response to a public interest litigation filed on behalf of the victims. Filed by an advocate, it charges the government authorities with negligence and utter failure to protect the public.

Bolsonaro breaks silence after defeat in Brazilian election, hailing fascist protests against “injustice of the electoral process”

Tomas Castanheira

On Tuesday afternoon, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro made his first statement since his defeat in the presidential election, which was announced on Sunday night.

In his brief speech, Bolsonaro thanked the “58 million Brazilians who voted for me,” while failing to acknowledge the victory of his challenger, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT), who won 60 million votes.

Bolsonaro speaking at the presidential palace on Tuesday (Photo: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil) [Photo: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil ]

Instead, he praised his fascist supporters who have erected more than 300 blockades on roads across Brazil, rejecting the election’s results and calling for an intervention by the armed forces to prevent Lula from taking office.

Bolsonaro stated that “The current popular movements are the result of indignation and a feeling of injustice of how the electoral process was carried out.”

At the same time, the president sought to dissociate himself from the violent actions he is encouraging, stating that “our methods cannot be those of the left... such as invasion of properties, destruction of patrimony, and curtailment of the right to come and go.” This is yet another of the maneuvers that have mirrored Donald Trump’s conduct during his attempt to overthrow the 2020 US election, which Bolsonaro has adopted as his main political model.

In the 45 hours before his pronouncement, while his supporters were creating havoc throughout the country, Bolsonaro met with his closest political allies, his military ministers, and representatives of the armed forces, including Defense Minister Paulo Sergio Nogueira and Air Force Commander Carlos Baptista Junior.

In these meetings, the fascistic president and his accomplices worked out the dubious content of his first post-election speech, as well as the next steps of their ongoing conspiracy to subvert democracy in Brazil.

As part of this plan, Ciro Nogueira, the president’s chief of staff, was chosen to speak publicly after Bolsonaro about a process of transition to Lula’s new government. The nominee to lead the transition team on behalf of Lula is his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, whose long-time right-wing political ties will allow a better accommodation of the PT to the reactionary forces brought to state power by Bolsonaro.

However, despite the political accommodations by the PT, the actions of Bolsonaro and his allies over the last three days signal that the next two months leading to the presidential inauguration will be a period of intensifying political crisis.

On Sunday’s election day, the Federal Highway Police (PRF) promoted under Bolsonaro’s command extensive roadblocks to make it difficult for voters to get to the polls, especially in states where Lula had a majority. One of the clear objectives of the operation was to make his competitors feel aggrieved and generate a deadlock over the validity of the elections.

In the following days, the PRF openly allowed Bolsonaro’s pro-coup demonstrators to mount their own roadblocks. Videos recorded in Santa Catarina, a state that is home to important sections of the bourgeoisie aligned to the fascistic president, showed PRF officers virtually integrated into the pro-coup blockades.

In one of the videos, an officer declares, “The only order we have is to be here with you.” In another, speaking into a microphone, a commander declares to the protesters that “at no time… we will arrive to irritate or to confront any of you, who are our bosses.”

In the midst of the growing protests, the representatives of the bourgeois institutions revealed all their political impotence to confront the threats posed by Bolsonaro, by turning to the president himself to curb the crisis provoked by him.

According to Folha de São Paulo, the ministers of the judiciary assessed that “the demonstrations [had] escalated so much that a statement from the president was essential to try to contain the movements of his supporters in the streets.”

In contrast to the complicity of the police and the state with this pro-coup movement, a spontaneous episode revealed that the only social force truly capable of defending democracy is the working class. Faced with the blockade of the Rio-Santos highway, workers from the BrasFELS shipyard in Angra dos Reis got off the bus in which they were returning home from work, confronted Bolsonaro’s fascist supporters and cleared the road.

The mobilization of the working class against the authoritarian threats promoted by Bolsonaro and the military would necessarily bring with it social demands that would drive a powerful movement against capitalism. For this reason, the PT, which represents rotten Brazilian capitalism, is absolutely opposed to directing any appeal to workers.

Condemning calls for a confrontation with Bolsonaro supporters made by the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), linked to the pseudo-left PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) and to the PT itself , the president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffman, declared, “We don’t agree with that because this is a responsibility of the state.”

Big oil, food giants, restaurant chains reap windfall profits as US real wages plunge

Barry Grey

With one week remaining before the US midterm elections, President Joe Biden has taken to denouncing the oil monopolies for “war profiteering” and price-gouging. On Monday, he took time out from traveling around the country to boost the faltering campaigns of Democratic House and Senate members and candidates for state offices to attack the record profits reported last week by oil and gas companies as “outrageous” and threaten the imposition of an excess profit tax.

“It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering, meet their responsibilities to this country, give the American people a break and still do very well,” he told reporters at the White House.

It is all too obvious that Biden’s bluster against corporate profit-gouging is prompted by polls showing that soaring prices for basic necessities is the biggest concern driving voters in elections that may very well shift control of one or both chambers of Congress, as well as much of the country’s electoral machinery, to Trump’s fascistic Republicans.

Nobody knows better than Biden that there is no possibility of getting an excess profits tax through Congress, even should it remain under Democratic control.

Share of corporate-sector income received by workers over recent business cycles, 1979-2022. [Photo: Economic Policy Institute]

The oil magnates responded contemptuously to Biden’s threat. Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, stated, “Rather than taking credit for price declines and shifting blame for price increases, the Biden administration should get serious about addressing the supply-and-demand imbalance that has caused higher gas prices and created long-term energy challenges.”

In other words, it should lift the minimal restraints on the fossil fuel industry and give it an even freer rein to pollute and profit from the impact of the US-NATO war against Russia.

Last Friday, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the largest US oil companies, reported record or near-record profits for the July-September quarter of 2022. Exxon’s profit of nearly $20 billion was a record for any quarter and 10 percent higher than the previous record, set the quarter before. Chevron’s profit of $11.2 billion was slightly less than the previous quarter’s record amount.

On Thursday, the two biggest European producers, Shell and TotalEnergies, reported that their profits had more than doubled from the third quarter of 2021.

The five biggest oil companies took in more than $50 billion in profits in the second quarter of this year, and the International Energy Agency reported that the net income of the world’s oil and gas producers will double this year from last to a record $4 trillion. “Today’s high fossil fuel prices have generated an unprecedented windfall for producers,” the agency stated.

Rather than using some of their windfall profits to reduce prices or increase production, the oil giants have raised dividends and carried out massive stock buybacks to enrich their big investors. On Friday, Exxon Mobil raised its stock dividend, citing its commitment to “return excess cash” to shareholders.

Biden has released some 165 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and prices at the pump have receded in recent weeks from their previous highs, but they remain more than 13 percent higher than at the end of 2021.

The energy industry is not alone in taking advantage of the inflationary spiral, rooted in decades of central bank handouts to Wall Street and exacerbated by supply chain disruptions triggered by US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to reap windfall profits.

A person shops at a grocery store in Glenview, Ill., Monday, July 4, 2022. [AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]

The New York Times on Monday reported that major food companies and restaurant chains have driven up their profits by charging the public far more than what was needed to cover their increased costs.

The article noted that over the past year, the price of food eaten at home has increased 13 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Basic staples have risen far more than the 8.2 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index.

Cereals and bakery goods are up 16.2 percent. Dairy products have shot up by 15.9 percent.

A dozen eggs that could have been purchased for $1.83 in 2021 now cost $2.17.

Meanwhile, the profits of major food companies have risen even faster than the prices they charge. Last month, PepsiCo, whose prices for drinks and chips were up 17 percent from year-earlier levels, reported that its third-quarter profit grew by more than 20 percent. Coca-Cola reported a profit increase of 14 percent from the previous year.

Many restaurant chains are likewise reaping super-profits on the basis of inflated prices. The Times article focused on Chipotle Mexican Grill, which reported that its prices by the end of 2022 would be nearly 15 percent higher than a year earlier. It reported a nearly 28 percent increase in its profits in the latest quarter as compared to the same quarter last year.

The newspaper quoted Kyle Herrig, president of advocacy group Accountable.Us as saying, “The [earnings] calls tell us corporations have used inflation, the pandemic and supply chain challenges as an excuse to exaggerate their own costs and then nickel and dime consumers.”

Housing costs are likewise soaring, further eroding workers’ purchasing power. According to the latest report on inflation, issued last month by the BLS, the cost of renting a primary residence rose this year by 7.2 percent through September, more than double the usual annual increase of around 3 percent.

The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has topped 7 percent, due mainly to the rapid increase in interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve to slow down economic growth and drive up unemployment—a central component of the ruling class war against workers’ wage struggles. This is the highest mortgage rate since the Great Recession of 2008.

With the national median asking price for a home at $435,050—itself prohibitive for most workers—mortgage payments today are nearly $1,000 a month higher than in August of 2021.

Biden’s feigned outrage over corporate price- and profit-gouging cannot conceal the fact that his administration is working relentlessly with the trade union apparatuses to impose the full inflationary impact of the war in Ukraine, for which the White House and Congress have already allotted over $50 billion, on the working class. With the support of both big business parties, Biden has joined with the rail and West Coast dock workers’ union leaderships to block 22,000 longshoremen and 120,000 railroaders, who have voted overwhelmingly to strike and rejected pro-company contracts, to exercise their right to strike.

The result has been a devastating decline in the real earnings of US workers.

Dallas Federal Reserve chart shows most US workers have negative wage growth. [Photo: Dallas Federal Reserve Bank]

Last month, the BLS reported that real hourly and weekly earnings for all employees decreased 0.1 percent from August to September, seasonally adjusted. Year over year, real hourly earnings fell 3 percent, while real weekly earnings declined even more, 3.9 percent, due to a decrease in the average workweek.

According to a study released in October by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the decline in real wages for US workers is even more severe. The authors of the study wrote:

We find that a majority of employed workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) wages have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5 percent. Taken together, these outcomes appear to be the most severe faced by employed workers over the past 25 years…

While the past 25 years have witnessed episodes that show either a greater incidence or larger magnitude of real wage declines, the current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face.

The Biden administration’s war on refugees

Eric London

Behind the backs of the population, the Biden administration is implementing a dangerous and reactionary shift in immigration policy and enforcing it through dictatorial expansions of presidential power.

The aim of the shift is to dramatically reduce physical border crossings on a scale not seen in decades, as well as to block asylum seekers from reaching US soil where the US Constitution applies. This right-wing shift exposes as lies the claim that US imperialism is a beacon for “democracy” and that its war against Russia has anything to do with “human rights.”

On October 30, NBC News reported that the Biden administration has drafted a policy document granting the executive branch the power to detain Haitian immigrants at Guantánamo Bay, adjacent to the military prison where the government has imprisoned and tortured hundreds under the auspices of the “war on terror.”

Now the Biden administration says it may use Guantánamo as a “lily pad” for immigrants, though the correct term would be “internment camp.” Under the initial proposal, 400 Haitian immigrants would be held in cells and bunk rows in a constitutional no man’s land where they have no right to challenge their treatment or deportations as they would have if they had arrived on US soil.

Days earlier, the Biden administration pulled out of mediation talks with lawyers representing over 300,000 recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who sued the Trump administration for rescinding TPS for 240,000 Salvadorans, 77,000 Hondurans, 14,000 Nepalese and 4,000 Nicaraguans in 2018. The Biden administration has continued to oppose the immigrants’ challenge, essentially backing Trump’s revocation of TPS status and threatening to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

Earlier in October, data published by the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) documented that the Biden administration removed 2.8 million immigrants from the United States in Fiscal Year 2021, more than any year in American history.

Most significantly, the data revealed that over one million were removed under “Title 42,” the antidemocratic provision by which the government bans immigration due to a “public health” emergency. Trump initially invoked Title 42 citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a pseudo-legal justification, and courts have maintained it under Biden. Those banned from entering the US under Title 42 also do not have constitutional rights and cannot apply for asylum.

On October 12, the Biden administration signed a new rotten deal with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) banning tens of thousands of immigrants from Venezuela from crossing into the United States, also under Title 42. AMLO has agreed to allow the Venezuelans to live in tent cities, where immigrants escaping societies ravaged by imperialist war and capitalist exploitation live in squalor and disease.

With a blend of cynicism and hypocrisy that the Democratic Party has perfected over the last 200 years, Biden and the Democrats continue to posture as defenders of immigrants.

At a recent event for new US citizens, Biden repeated the hackneyed Democratic Party appeal: “It’s the dreams of immigrants like you that built America.” But on Monday, when a group of asylum seekers tried to march across the Rio Grande near El Paso carrying a flag that said, “We, the migrants, built America,” Biden’s CBP fired pepper balls down at their heads, as they scrambled across the river back to their tarp houses in Mexico.

The attack on immigrants comes as poverty and scarcity devastate the working class of Latin America and the Caribbean. The pandemic and the prolongation of the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine have had a devastating impact on hundreds of millions of people in countries who have suffered over a century of US imperialist domination.

In Haiti, society is in a state of collapse, as cholera spreads, food and gas are running out, and gangs take control of broad portions of the country. Nevertheless, the Biden administration has deported refugees back to Haiti, even after family members reported that the Haitian government was detaining deportees in a penitentiary in exchange for ransom money.

Those who make it to the US are treated with extreme brutality. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with a young Haitian mother who was detained by the Biden administration at the border last year:

It is painful to talk about what happened to me in Texas. When I talk about it, it feels like someone is putting a fork in my heart. When I was detained, it was horrible. First, I was forced to sleep under a bridge with my baby. Some of the guards were beating us under that bridge, like you used to be able to see on the news. When we were moved to a prison, I thought things would get better, but they didn’t. In prison they took my child’s medicine even though he was bleeding. I was there four days, they didn’t give us food, we were only eating crackers. We couldn’t bathe, brush our teeth, we had to sleep on the floor. The babies were dehydrated, their eyes looked like they were going to faint. One doesn’t know what to do as a mother when your child says, “Mom, I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” but you can’t do anything. My baby was vomiting, he had diarrhea, he was bleeding in his feet. And when we left the guards mocked us for smelling bad.

The policy pivot currently being carried out by the Biden administration is a massive concession to the fascistic political right.

The Republican Party’s midterm strategy has gone farther than the usual right-wing chauvinistic language. The Republican governors of Texas and Florida (Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis) have spent the last several months bussing and flying over 11,000 immigrants to large cities run by Democrats in a series of stunts aimed at portraying immigrant workers as criminals.

The Democratic political strategy has been to adapt to this narrative. In a Pennsylvania Senate debate with Trump-backed Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, for example, the Democrat John Fetterman denounced “illegal immigrants” and called for “secure borders.”

Amid this right-wing climate encouraged by the political establishment, incidents of violence against immigrants are growing. In late September, Michael Sheppard, the warden at an immigration detention center in Sierra Blanca, Texas, fired on a group of migrants who had stopped for a drink in the desert, killing 22-year-old Mexican immigrant Jesús Iván Sepúlveda Martínez and critically wounding 31-year-old Brenda Berenice Casias Carrillo.

The ongoing attack on immigrant workers is an international process and a warning to the entire working class. On Monday, British Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced immigration as “out of control” and an “invasion.” The same day, a right-wing individual threw firebombs at a center for immigrant refugees in the coastal town of Dover, where the government detains refugees in crowded internment camps, where they sleep on floors and catch diseases like diphtheria.

The same applies in the “democratic” European Union, where thousands of immigrants fleeing North Africa and the Middle East drown attempting to enter every year.

Just yesterday, a boat carrying 68 refugees sank off the Greek island of Evia. Earlier in October, 92 immigrants from Morocco, Iran, Bangladesh and Pakistan were discovered in Greece after having been “abandoned” and stripped “completely naked” by authorities. In Italy on Tuesday, fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appointed a man who has been photographed wearing a Nazi armband as a minister in her government.

The attack on immigrant workers is driven by the logic of the escalating war against Russia. In wartime, the most ruthless attacks on democratic rights are always bound up with restrictions on immigration and the shoring up of the repressive apparatus of the nation-state.

As US imperialism entered the First World War, the Wilson administration signed the Espionage Act, which restricted both anti-war speech and immigration and now serves as the basis for the prosecution of Julian Assange. As the US prepared to enter the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration signed the Smith Act, also known as the Alien Registration Act, which banned anti-war speech, blocked immigration and enabled Japanese internment.

Netanyahu and establishment parties pave way for rise of far-right in Israel’s election

Jean Shaoul

Israel goes to the polls Tuesday for the fifth time in three and a half years. The general election takes place amid rising class tensions within Israel and the occupied territories, the Middle East and internationally.

Opinion polls are predicting that the Likud Party, headed by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will once again win the largest number of seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party taking second place.

People walk past an election campaign billboards showing Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister and the head of Likud party, in Bnei Brak, Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Israel is heading into its fifth election in under four years on Nov. 1. [AP Photo/Oded Balilty]

Nevertheless, the outcome, in terms of which political bloc will be able to form a government, is too close to call. The result will largely depend on the surging vote for the far-right, fascistic forces led by Jewish Power legislator Itamar Ben Gvir and his Religious Zionism partner Bezalel Smotrich, who are allied with Netanyahu, and the plunging support for the traditional parties of the “left”, and the Arab parties competing for the votes of Israel’s Palestinian citizens making up 20 percent of its 9.3 million population.

The 5.5 million Palestinians who live under the gun in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza have no vote, although the 700,000 or so Israeli settlers that live there do.

Today’s elections were called last June, one year after the formation in June 2021 of yet another unstable coalition with a majority of one after the 73-year-old Netanyahu—on trial for corruption, fraud and breach of trust for his actions while serving as prime minister—proved unable to form a coalition despite his Likud Party winning the most seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

United only in their opposition to Netanyahu, the coalition consisted of eight disparate parties, spanning most of Israel’s mainstream parties, including those ostensibly committed to the Olso Accords and a Palestinian mini-state—Meretz, Labor, Yesh Atid and Blue and White—and included for the first time one of Israel’s Arab parties, Ra’am.

In a rotten deal aimed at ousting Netanyahu and securing the support of some of the secular rightwing parties, Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party won the second largest number of seats, ceded the premiership to Naftali Bennett, a former settlers’ leader, even though his party won only six seats, and agreed not to negotiate with the Palestinians over statehood for the duration of their alliance.

What passes for Israel’s left and centrist parties then proceeded to participate in an ever-sharper lurch to the right, an escalation of Israel’s covert wars against Iran and its allies, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollahin Iran, the Persian Gulf, Syria and the eastern Mediterranean—and its attacks on the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, including administrative detention without charge, house demolitions, land theft, almost daily raids and mass arrest operations, collective punishment and trampling on basic human rights.

In June, as Bennett faced mounting opposition from his own right-wing ministers, Netanyahu’s opposition bloc engineered a parliamentary maneouvre aimed at bringing down the government and securing his return to power. Following the coalition’s collapse and in accordance with their coalition deal, Lapid replaced Bennett as caretaker prime minister until the elections set for November 1 and the formation of a new government that could take weeks if not months to negotiate. Bennett, with his party—now led by strident right-winger Ayelet Shaked—viewed as unlikely to cross the minimum threshold to qualify for any seats in the Knesset, promptly announced his resignation from politics.

The elections come amid key domestic issues, including the annual budget for 2023 that must find cuts in services to fund a pay rise awarded to teachers to avert a national strike at the start of the school year and the health, economic and social fallout from the continuing COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 12,000 people and is on the rise following the lifting of restrictions.

The skyrocketing cost of living and rental charges, among the highest in the advanced countries, is making it hard for Israelis and Palestinians alike to put food on the table.

Israel’s ruling elite, the dozen or so wealthy families that dominate economic life, has refused to lift a finger to alleviate the mounting social and economic suffering.

The beneficiaries have been the far-right, fascistic forces of Ben Gvir and Smotrich who support ethnic cleansing, with the media amplifying their every word. It was Netanyahu who engineered their entry into the Knesset to bolster his bloc prior to the 2021 elections.

These racists, the ideological successors of the banned Kahanist movement, are forming vigilante groups in Israel’s Negev and Bat Yam, an impoverished Tel Aviv suburb, and inciting pogrom-like violence against the Palestinians in both the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Israel’s mixed towns and cities. Ben-Gvir was filmed recently pulling out a handgun during a campaign stop in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, where he demanded the police fire on the residents.

Their Jewish supremacist agenda includes Israeli rule over the West Bank, the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian population, the demolition of the al-Aqsa Mosque to make way for the building of a Jewish Temple, and the imposition of religious law.

Both leaders support the introduction of a “French Law” that bars criminal investigations into a sitting prime minister, with Ben Gvir, a lawyer who defends Jewish extremists, supporting retrospective legislation that would end Netanyahu’s trial. Netanyahu, taking his cue from former US President Donald Trump, has called his trial a “rigged” political witch-hunt by a leftist judiciary.

This has been enough to guarantee them key posts in a Netanyahu-led government that would remove any remaining restraints on the imposition of direct military rule over the Palestinians. They constitute a serious threat to the Israeli and Palestinian working class, strengthening the far-right forces in the state apparatus and in society that are already terrorizing immigrants, refugees and human rights and left-wing activists. Netanyahu and the media’s cultivation of these forces demonstrate that the ruling class, like its counterparts internationally, is preparing for the violent suppression of social and political resistance, for which it needs the fascists.

Their rise has been aided by the refusal of the Labor Party, the nominally left parties and the corporatist trade unions to lift a finger to defend the living standards of working people. Similarly, the four Arab parties face dwindling support and voter apathy. Mansour Abbas, the leader of the conservative Islamist party Ra’am, was the first leader of an Arab party to join a coalition government based on the promise of funding for Israel’s impoverished Arab towns and cities and pledges to tackle inequality that proved to be little more than empty words. Should the Arab parties fall below the electoral threshold, it would further weaken the links between the Arab working class and its traditional leaders that have bound them to the State of Israel.

Workers, Jewish and Arab, face the complete dead-end of bourgeois politics. All the establishment parties and the trade unions have acted against the interests of the working class, slashing expenditure on education, health, essential public services and the social safety net, while overseeing a massive decline in the living standards of those on lower incomes and pensions. Workers also face the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic, climate change that has brought drought, fires and floods, and the war against Russia that threatens to draw Israel/Palestine and the entire Middle East into the front line.

Resistance is growing. The ruling class is preparing for this by giving carte blanche to the military to behave with impunity, as the recent murder of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the mass closures and raid and arrest operations in the West Bank have demonstrated, giving succour to the fascists and turning to authoritarian forms of rule.

Europe’s governments prepare third winter of mass COVID-19 infection and death

Samuel Tissot

Contrary to the propaganda of the European political establishment and the corporate media the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Thousands of people continue to die each week across Europe from the virus and a new winter surge, alongside other respiratory illnesses and increasing poverty, will lead to hundreds of thousands more excess deaths on the continent.

A patient is pushed on a trolley outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, during England's third national lockdown since the coronavirus outbreak began. Britain, with over 81,000 dead, has the deadliest virus toll in Europe and the number of hospital beds filled by COVID-19 patients has risen steadily for more than a month. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Another winter of mass infection and death from COVID-19 is primarily a product of the European ruling class’s decision to allow the virus to freely spread through the population. With a “vaccine only” strategy and the near-total abandonment of even minimal measures to contain the spread of the virus, epidemiologists are warning of the deadly impact of two new vaccine resistant variants this winter.

In Europe over the past two weeks cases have fallen slightly as the eighth wave of the virus slowly subsides. In the last seven days there were just over 1 million cases throughout Europe, compared to 1.5 million in the week before. There were 4,216 deaths in the last week, compared to 5,449 the week before.

However, scientists are warning that the rapid spread of immunity-evading new variants in Europe will lead to a massive surge of the virus on the scale of the Omicron wave last winter. Omicron was first detected in Europe on November 19, 2021, and the original variant and its offshoots have caused the majority of over 600,000 European COVID-19 deaths since.

On Friday, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned of the spread of the BQ.1.1 variant, which has immune escape from BA.5-targeted antibodies. The BA.5 and BA.4 drove the summer waves of COVID-19 throughout Europe.

BQ.1.1 is already dominant in France and accounts for more than 40 percent of infections in the UK. The ECDC predicts that it will be dominant across the continent in mid-November. This is also when new bivalent vaccines protecting against BA.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are scheduled to hit the European market. The effectiveness of these bivalent vaccines and their older counterparts against BQ.1 will be reduced, although it is not yet known to what extent.

In a press conference on October 26, Marco Cavaleri, the head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) vaccine strategy, stated that the EMA is also tracking the progress of the XBB variant in Europe. Due to its high number of protein spike mutations, it has been dubbed “the nightmare variant,” and is currently driving surges in Singapore and India. Early studies of XBB show significant immune escape from vaccines and the nullification of anti-viral treatments. A pre-print study from a lab in China describes the variant as, “the most antibody-evasive strain tested, far exceeding BA.5.”

It is possible that the vaccine resistant BQ1.1 and XBB variants will drive back-to-back or simultaneous waves. Cornelius Roemer, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told Nature magazine, “If it turns out that XBB is going to dominate globally in the end, we might see some sort of double wave in Europe and North America.”

It is also likely that the two variants are so genetically distinct that infection-based immunity conferred by BQ1.1 will be evaded by XBB and vice versa. Meanwhile, the level of vaccine conferred immunity is also waning amongst the European population. New vaccine doses are being taken up at a much slower rate than previously and the level of immunity gained from previous doses is continuously decreasing. These factors will significantly increase the number of infections and deaths over the winter.

In a massive COVID-19 surge, alongside other respiratory illnesses such as influenza and the effects of increased poverty and potential energy shortages, it is likely that many European hospitals, many of which are already near or overcapacity, will collapse under the weight of incoming patients.

Discounting the initial wave of the virus in in early 2020, this will be the northern hemisphere’s third winter of mass infection and death, and its second since the development of vaccines.

Indeed, over each of the last three years, the level of European deaths has remained consistent, despite the invention of life-saving vaccines. If March 1, 2020, is taken as the start of the pandemic, then in the first 12 months, around 845,000 died in Europe. The next year, after vaccines had been developed, between March 1, 2021, and March 1, 2022, 905,000 Europeans died. Since March 1, 2022, 220,000 people have died, and this is before the winter surge.

This constant level of death and the ever-present threat of illness underlines the criminal nature of the ruling class response to the pandemic. In France, a trial involving major figures under Emmanuel Macron’s first presidency is revealing considerable evidence that the French government broke the law in failing to take measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. This policy was mirrored throughout the Europe and the world, apart from China.

Measures were only reluctantly put in place in March 2020 by governments following a wave of wildcat strikes which began in Italy and soon spread throughout Europe and to the United States. However, at this time capitalist governments resolved not to eliminate the virus, but to force workers back to workplaces to resume the extraction of profit as soon as possible.

After the development of vaccines, the governments have pursued a “vaccine only” policy that has proven to be deadly for the working class. These vaccines were highly effective and have enormously reduced the proportion of those infected who fall seriously ill or die. But infection rates surged to astronomic levels, so that even after the first life-saving vaccines were rolled out in Europe in December 2020, nearly 1.5 million Europeans died from COVID-19 due to the malign neglect of the ruling class.

Under this policy, the impact of pandemic on the population is not being alleviated, but in fact threatens to get worse. In the same October 26 press conference, Cavaleri warned that new COVID-19 variants are evolving faster than vaccines are being developed. According to the World Health Organization, now over 300 Omicron sub-lineages are being tracked worldwide.

With more and more variants spreading freely, the mutation rate of the virus is increasing exponentially, making it harder to track variants and ascertain their risk, in a situation described as “variant soup” according to an article in Nature. A “vaccine only” strategy thus only ensures year after year of mass infection and death. Furthermore, epidemiologists’ ability to accurately track variants has also been systemically undermined by the gutting of testing infrastructure and reporting since European governments declared the pandemic over.

The criminal response of the French government in March 2020 was not the exception, but the rule for the pandemic response through Europe. At every possible juncture governments have lifted what remained of measures to stem the spread of the virus.

The ruling class in Europe and elsewhere have been able to achieve this only insofar as it has successfully suppressed scientific knowledge of the virus and its destructive impact on the human body. This continues with the consistent denunciation of China’s Zero COVID policy, which has saved millions of lives and has shown that eliminating the virus globally is possible.