How Russia Destroys its Male Population

Chloe Atkinson

Russian women have the reputation of being strong and demanding, but they can be sweet and caring when they want to be. Nationalistic by nature, Russian women have long been patriotic and willing to send their husbands and sons off to war. But this has come at a steep price to the country. Today, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine failing dismally, the women of Russia are turning their backs on him and are calling for their male family members to be returned home from the front lines.

Russian men have died in large numbers in many wars since the time of the Cossacks, due to a variety of factors. The Cossacks, who were a semi-nomadic warrior class, were heavily involved in conflicts with neighboring powers, such as the Ottoman Empire and Poland. In the more recent history, during World War I and II, the Soviet Union suffered staggering losses, with an estimated 10 million military deaths and an additional 8-13 million civilian deaths. In addition to the devastating human toll, these conflicts also had a significant impact on the country’s economy and infrastructure. Furthermore, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was involved in several armed conflicts, such as the Afghanistan war, which also caused many deaths of Russian men.

With this history in mind, it is easy to understand why females in Russia make up 54% of the population, while males only make up 46%. The problem is only getting worse. In 2022, roughly a million Russians left the country to escape the ravages of wartime living. More than 500,000 Russian citizens are estimated to have left Russia by the end of August 2022, and an additional 400,000 by early October. This number includes political refugees and economic migrants.

Unlike the case with Ukraine, where millions of women and children escaped to neighboring countries, most Russians who fled their country are men. Experts on global migration are calling the current mass exodus from Russia the largest since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution when millions of intellectuals and economic elites fled the rise of the Soviet Union.

If Russia’s military operations continue in 2023, as is likely, Russia may see its lowest birthrate in modern history. In addition, total deaths in Russia average close to two million annually, though the number increased during the pandemic and approached 2.5 million last year. Now, that death toll has risen drastically and will continue to do so as real numbers are released.

A 2015 Pew Research Center article explains that “This region has been predominantly female since at least World War II, when many Soviet men died in battle or left the country to fight. In 1950, there were just 76.6 men per 100 women in the territory that is now Russia. That number rose steadily in subsequent decades, climbing to 88.4 by 1995 before declining again.”

The Pew research also shows that the population in Russia and the former USSR as a whole is older than that of the world. Most of these nations, including the most populous, also have low fertility rates compared with the global average. This skews the population’s gender ratio because older people are more likely to be female, while more younger people are male.

Younger men in the former Soviet Union also have an unusually high
mortality rate, which has deepened the population’s gender imbalance. One way to see this is to look at the life expectancy of men and women and the differences between those numbers. Russian women born from 2010 to 2015 are expected to live to age 75.6, while Russian men are expected to live to age 64.2 – a significant gap of 11.4 years.

Furthermore, alcoholism has long been a problem in the former USSR, especially for young men. A 2014 study in The Lancet medical journal found evidence that excess vodka use is a top killer in Russia, responsible for a disproportionate amount of deaths among Russian men.

A female activist affiliated with the feminist group Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), said in an interview recently that angry women “can do anything.”

“Mobilisation [in Russia] currently resembles ethnic cleansing,” she lamented. “This is not new and not an idea I have come up with. There are lots of villages that have been completely emptied. Not a single man remains.”

Another organization, the Council of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, has partnered with FAR to combat the Russian government and fight for the men being sent to Ukraine where they are dying by the thousands.

Today, Russia’s women know they are paying the price for the war in Ukraine. For one, they are losing their husbands and sons. And two, they are the ones out protesting against the war since men are too worried about being arrested and then drafted. They have made an emotional appeal to Putin to cease sending their family members to the slaughter, and are demanding that the authorities return their underequipped and undertrained men.

But to no avail.

Dr. Jade McGlynn, a specialist in Russian memory and foreign policy at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies, notes that before September, the visible lack of such protests had led many to question why women were reacting differently to Russia’s war on Ukraine, as compared with the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan. While factors such as the comparative weakness of civil society should not be overlooked, the key difference was that conscripts were sent to those conflicts, while until September contractors were sent to Ukraine.

McGlynn also points out that mothers of conscripts “hold a different moral authority to that of a contractor in Russian society. Many mothers of the contractors, rather than calling for peace, spent the early months of the war fomenting pro-war sentiment, touring schools, organising online and offline meetings with students to ‘form in their minds the correct picture of the world’. They urged children to show support to the soldiers and officers of the Russian armed forces and ‘separatists’ of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics who ‘fight fascism and Nazism in Ukraine.’”

The question today is how the Russian government will react to the protests. Russian wives and mothers have played a destabilizing role in other wars and they are now working to destabilize the current war against Ukraine. While many supported Putin’s initial moves, today they realize they are losing their sons and brothers for no reason other than to fulfill Putin’s maniacal desire to conquer Ukraine. Putin and his henchmen will attempt to assuage the women – while working to silence them as soon as possible. Putin needs their men to fight his ego war – even if it means he must destroy Russia’s entire male population once and for all.

Egyptian court hands down 38 life sentences for 2019 anti-government protests

Jean Shaoul

Following a sham trial, an Egyptian court sentenced 38 people to life imprisonment for taking part in anti-government protests in September 2019.

Twenty-three people, including self-exiled businessman and actor Mohamed Ali, whose social media posts helped to spark the protests, were tried in absentia. Forty-four others, including 22 children, received prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years. Twenty-two people were acquitted.

Protesters chant slogans against the regime in Cairo, Egypt, early Saturday, September 21, 2019. Dozens of people held a rare protest in Cairo during which they called on Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to quit. Security forces dispersed the protesters and no casualties were reported. [AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty]

Its purpose was to make an example of them and ensure no one else challenges the brutal dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who overthrew the elected government of President Mohammed Morsi in a bloody military coup in July 2013. Since then, he has defended Egypt’s financial elite and the military chiefs who control much of the economy, maintaining a rule of terror.

Those sentenced were convicted in a mass trial of 104 people by the first terrorism circuit of the Cairo Criminal Court under the draconian anti-terrorism laws. The charges included posting videos on YouTube calling for the protests, sharing these videos on Facebook and WhatsApp, disrupting traffic and using violence against civil servants, including the police.

The nationwide demonstrations were sparked by a series of videos released by Mohamed Ali, who lives in Spain, accusing Egypt’s dictator el-Sisi of embezzling public money for his own use and building extravagant palaces for his family while forcing most of Egypt’s 104 million people to live in abject poverty. Demonstrators chanted slogans, denouncing el-Sisi, poverty and social inequality.

Police arrested more than 2,000 people in the first week of the protests, the largest number in a single week since el-Sisi’s bloody coup, according to human rights groups. Most were arbitrary and carried out without a warrant. The victims were often tortured until they confessed to false charges.

The regime itself admitted to detaining and interrogating 1,000 people. While most were under 25 years of age, prominent lawyers—detained for defending other detainees journalists, professors and political figures, including some who had explicitly disassociated themselves from the protests, were also arrested. They were charged with spreading false information and aiding “terrorist” organisations.

They are now part of an estimated 65,000 political prisoners languishing in el-Sisi’s jails, according to Human Rights First. The organisation describes them as “places of humiliation, torture, and abuse” that “make ideal recruitment centers for violent extremists,” including ISIS, and “helps in the radicalization of angry prisoners looking for revenge against the authorities.” Several thousand have been sentenced to death and many have been executed.

This state clampdown has proceeded with the tacit support of the United States and the European imperialist powers. The jail sentences were barely reported in the western corporate media.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (left) with US President Joe Biden at the GCC+3 summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 16 2022 [Photo: The White House]

The trial comes when Egypt, having implemented the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) demand to float its currency, has witnessed a dramatic fall in the value of the Egyptian pound against the US dollar that is devastating living standards. Some 30 percent of the population live below the poverty line with another 30 percent marginally above it.

The pound’s value has halved in value in the last year, sinking from E£16 to the dollar to E£32 after Egypt agreed to end its fixed currency regime tying it to the US dollar and move to a flexible currency regime—leaving the pound at the mercy of international currency speculators. The black-market rate, upon which many depend, is even lower. The move was one of the many conditions the IMF imposed in return for a $3 billion loan in October, the fourth in six years, that comes nowhere near meeting a financing gap estimated at between $17 and $70 billion.

This latest loan is to relieve the severe foreign currency shortage that has left importers unable to access foreign currency to pay for the $9.5 billion of goods stacking up at the ports. The IMF had earlier demanded a raft of economic reforms including the slashing of subsidies for gas, water and bread, the privatisation of state assets, opening up public procurement to the private sector and transferring ever greater wealth from the masses to the tiny elite. But with many of the state’s assets in the hands of companies controlled by the military or former military chiefs, el-Sisi has prevaricated while placing the entire burden on the working class.

Egypt’s economy was badly affected by the pandemic that halted a tourism industry accounting for around 12 percent of GDP, 15 percent of foreign currency and 10 percent of jobs, and the return of workers from the Gulf—and the loss of their remittances—swelling the ranks of those without work.

The situation confronting workers has been compounded by the outbreak of the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine that led to an outflow of $20 billion—more than half of all the hot money invested in the country—of speculative capital seeking a higher rate of interest. Foreign currency has remained in desperately short supply despite efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Qatar to bolster its economy with $13 billion in loans and $3.3 billion in return for state-owned assets; the Central Bank’s restrictions on imports and interest rates’ hike to a massive 16.25 percent to shore up the pound; and limits on foreign currency withdrawals.

Energy, grain and fertiliser prices have soared, with Egypt the world’s biggest importer of wheat. Food prices rose by 40 percent, with the cheapest foods doubling and tripling in price, and urban consumer inflation hitting 24 percent in December. Last year saw consumer finance rise by 7 percent to $374 million in the second quarter of last year, according to the state-run Financial Regulatory Authority.

The World Bank estimated that despite a 6.6 percent growth in 2020-21, Egypt’s economy will grow by only 4.8 percent to June 2023. About 54 percent of the government budget goes into paying interest on its debts, 13 percent on wages and 12 percent on subsidies—whose costs are rising with devaluation and inflation—and other welfare payments, leaving little room for anything else.

Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly has ordered ministers to cut their budgets and put a stop to all “new projects that have a clear dollar component”, as Egypt comes close to defaulting on its foreign debt—$158 billion debt falls due in the coming period. As the IMF’s second largest debtor after Argentina, Cairo has become increasingly dependent on the petro-monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.

Under such conditions, despite his police-state measures, el-Sisi is sitting atop a volcano. It poses, as the regime foresees, a renewal of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses that began in 2011 and resumed in 2019, not just in Egypt but across the Middle East.

Indonesia’s new criminal code: A major assault on democratic rights

Owen Howell

Last month, the Indonesian parliament unanimously passed a new revision of the country’s criminal code. The code, which would replace legislation dating back to the period of Dutch colonial rule, signifies a major assault on the democratic rights of working people.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo with newly appointed Armed Forces Chief Adm. Yudo Margono at the State Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 19, 2022. [AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim]

Much of the attention in the Western corporate media has centred on articles in the code that criminalise sexual relations and cohabitation outside marriage—in particular, the impact this will have on tourism and foreign investment in Indonesia.

The new law, however, includes over 624 articles and contains a broad range of sweeping attacks on the basic rights of Indonesian workers and their ability to express political opposition, under conditions of growing social tensions.

Among these are bans on “insulting” the president, vice president, the government, or state institutions, punishable by up to four years in prison. Those holding demonstrations in public spaces without an official permit from authorities could be fined or imprisoned for six months.

Individuals accused of spreading “disinformation” or “fake news” that may result in public unrest can face a prison sentence of six years.

Significantly, the provision outlining the most severe penalty outlaws the teaching or spreading of Marxism and communism—10 years’ imprisonment. It also prohibits any perceived deviation from the state ideology of Pancasila, which enshrines belief in a divinity, nationalism, and bourgeois democracy.

Abid Al Akbar, a university student from capital city Jakarta, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “[If] we, as students, want to hold a discussion or a scientific study on communism and Marxism, this could potentially be reported too and we could be hit [by the law].”

The first attempt by President Joko Widodo’s government to introduce this new code in September 2019 sparked mass protests across the archipelago, led mainly by students in the major cities. These were among the largest student demonstrations since the mass movement of workers and youth that toppled the Suharto military dictatorship in 1998.

Three years after nervously postponing a parliamentary vote on the code, it was approved on December 6 by every member of the lower house, including so-called “democratic” parties. The new law will take effect on January 2026, after Widodo’s last term ends next year.

Thousands reportedly protested around the country in the week following the announcement. Protests are expected to continue and grow over the coming period, as objections are to be filed to the Constitutional Court for a judicial review.

The far-reaching character of the new law provoked an uproar on social media, through circulation of the hashtags #SemuaBisaKena (“Everyone can be charged”) and #TibaTibaDipenjara (“Suddenly imprisoned”).

The new code contains numerous reactionary measures aimed at appeasing Islamic fundamentalist forces, whose political influence has grown over recent years.

Extramarital sex can be punished by one year in prison, based on police complaints made by relatives of the individual. Couples living together without being married can be imprisoned for six months. This will affect tens of millions of Indonesians who do not legally marry for financial or religious reasons, as well as LGBT people who cannot get married under Indonesian law.

Abortion, assisting an abortion, and distributing information about contraception are all criminalised and carry jail terms of up to five years. The code’s blasphemy chapter has been expanded: not only blasphemy, but apostasy and attempted conversion to atheism are now also outlawed.

Additionally, under the new law the government will formally recognise “living laws” – i.e., customary laws at local level such as Sharia regulations or regional customs. These include curfews for women, female genital mutilation, and mandatory hijab dress codes.

The passage of the code has been condemned by global human rights and press freedom groups. Amnesty International identified at least 88 articles that are broadly defined and “could be misused and misinterpreted” by authorities. The UN published a statement that “certain provisions” of the new code are “incompatible” with international conventions to which Indonesia is a signatory.

Sasmito Madrim, chairman of Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists, stressed that the new articles on “fake news,” criticism of government, deviation from Pancasila, and defamation of the dead will prevent the “basic work” of reporting and have “the potential to send journalists to prison,” Reuters reported.

The Indonesian government has rammed through the repressive new code at a time of rising social anger among workers and rural masses towards the conditions they confront, which have drastically worsened since 2019.

The Widodo government’s profit-driven response to the COVID-19 pandemic has economically and physically devastated millions. A recent report by the World Health Organisation estimated that the real death toll in Indonesia during the first two years of the pandemic, based on excess deaths, could have been over one million, when officially recorded deaths stood at 140,000.

Global inflation has sent the costs of basic commodities soaring. Three months before the new code was approved, widespread protests and strikes erupted after a fuel price hike. Social inequality in Indonesia, ranked among the highest in the world, has only deepened.

The unanimous passage of the criminal code demonstrates that there is no constituency for basic democratic rights in the country’s political establishment. Every political faction of the capitalist class fears the emerging opposition of the working class, which they are seeking to head off and suppress.

Widodo, once promoted among the international media and rights groups as a “reformer,” is presiding over the abolition of democratic norms. The code exposes the bankruptcy of reformasi, the charade of democratic reform supposedly opened up after the ousting of Suharto in 1998.

Since then, elections have maintained an increasingly thin democratic façade behind which the apparatus of the military junta apparatus remains intact. Successive governments sought to cultivate and legitimise far-right Islamist groups, a process now accelerating under the pressures of an historic crisis of global capitalism and the re-emergence of the international working class.

Oxfam: Social inequality and poverty soaring in Australia

Mike Head

“Extreme” wealth and poverty have increased simultaneously in Australia over the past year, as they have globally, according to this week’s latest annual inequality report by the Oxfam charity.

Unemployed workers registering to receive social welfare outside Centrelink office in Sydney in 2020. [Photo: WSWS]

The widening social gulf has been intensified by corporate profiteering on the most basic human necessities—food and energy. Oxfam’s report shows that “95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, driving major inflation in Australia and around the globe and leaving millions struggling to feed themselves and their families.”

The direct connection between these super profits and the worsening impoverishment of millions of people by the cost-of-living crisis is another damning indictment of the entire economic and social order based on private profit and wealth accumulation.

The profit-gouging by food and energy conglomerates, exploiting the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, comes on top of the inflationary spiral caused by years of governments and central banks pumping trillions of dollars into the financial markets, and the ongoing global supply chain problems created by governments letting the COVID-19 pandemic rip for the sake of profit.

Far from being an exceptional “lucky country,” Australia’s mining billionaires are among those benefitting most spectacularly, while working-class households suffer sky-rocketing prices and housing costs, falling real wages and sub-poverty welfare payments. Just one mining magnate, Chris Ellison of Mineral Resources, increased his worth by $600 million in 2022, climbing to $2.25 billion.

By Oxfam’s calculations, based on the Forbes Rich List, Australian billionaire wealth is 61 percent higher than it was before the pandemic began. There were 11 more billionaires last November than there were in 2020—up from 31 to 42. These billionaires now had a combined wealth of close to $236 billion.

That may be an underestimate of a deepening process. As of January 13, there were 45 Australian billionaires, the Australian Financial Review reported.

While the gulf between the rich and poor has accelerated this decade, it is a longer-term trend. Oxfam said the richest 1 percent of Australians had accumulated 10 times more wealth than the bottom 50 percent in the past decade.

Oxfam estimated that the top 1 percent had collectively garnered more than $2,500 a second (or $150,000 per minute) throughout that 10-year period, matching the super-wealthy internationally. The fortunes of billionaires around the globe increased by $3.6 billion a day while more than 1.7 billion workers lived in countries where “inflation is now outpacing wages.”

Oxfam Australia director of programs Anthea Spinks said the enormous gains seen by the world’s richest people were stark evidence of a broken system. “While ordinary people in Australia and around the world are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires—a roaring 20s boom for the world’s richest.”

Yet, Oxfam’s response, as it has been in every such annual report for many years, is to seek to mend, and maintain, the “broken system” of capitalism, in order to fend off threatening social unrest. Oxfam called on the Australian government to abandon its planned “stage three” income tax cuts and introduce limited wealth and windfall profits taxes.

But the Albanese Labor government has repeatedly refused to drop the income tax cuts, for which Labor voted under the previous Liberal-National government. These will directly benefit high-income households by more than $23,000 a year and cost $252 billion over a decade. Combined with higher interest payments on the near-$1 trillion in government debt, mainly caused by business handouts during the first two years of the pandemic and soaring military spending, that will mean deeper cuts to health, education, housing, welfare and other essential social programs.

Oxfam said a wealth tax of 2 percent on those with wealth above $7 million, 3 percent with wealth above $67 million and 5 percent on Australian billionaires would raise $29.1 billion annually.

“This would be enough to increase the foreign aid budget by seven times, or dramatically reduce poverty in Australia by raising income support payments to $88 a day [the unofficial “Henderson” poverty line] for 1.44 million adults (benefiting 840,000 children); building 36,000 social housing homes annually; and investing in grants to get millions of homes off gas, which could save households up to $1,900 off their energy bills each year.”

But these goals, similar to those proposed by Oxfam’s call for a 5 percent wealth tax globally, would barely scratch the surface of social need. They would leave millions at constant danger of poverty and homelessness, while allowing the giant corporations and the rich to continue to plunder and exploit the population and the natural resources.

In any case, there is not the slightest chance of the Labor government, or any other capitalist government, adopting such taxes. Oxfam has made similar appeals for years, only to be met by the opposite reaction. Its own report, the Survival of the Richest, shows that governments worldwide have dramatically reduced corporate, wealth and high-income taxes since the 1960s to satisfy the demands of the financial markets, fueling the billionaire bonanza.

While assuring the corporate elite of the promised tax cuts, the Labor government has also refused to increase the starvation rates of Jobseeker unemployment and youth allowance payments—about $47 a day and $38 a day respectively.

The result, combined with a decade of falling real wages, is rising social stress and outright hunger. Oxfam cited recent research from Foodbank, another charity, which found more than two million Australian households (21 percent) had experienced severe food insecurity in the previous 12 months, meaning they could not afford to eat.

Foodbank itself said it was providing 1 million meals per month, but struggling to keep up with soaring demand. Sponsored by governments and corporate giants, Foodbank depends heavily on agri-businesses, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers to donate “waste” produce, which is then distributed to a network of other charities that run handout centres or soup kitchens.

This week Foodbank issued a new call for the Labor government to provide a “food waste tax incentive” for businesses that donate produce. This would allow businesses to reduce the amount of tax they paid, via a refundable tax offset or a non-refundable tax credit, by sending “food waste” to charities instead of landfill.

Based on calculations by international accounting and tax advisory network KPMG, Foodbank said this could provide an additional 100 million meals a year.

Thousands of demonstrators from across Peru march “to take Lima”

Andrea Lobo

Protests in Peru have escalated continuously in tandem with the murderous repression unleashed by the US-backed Dina Boluarte regime. Demonstrations, strikes and roadblocks have led to calls and preparations for a “march to take Lima,” the country’s capital.

Demonstrators in Lima denounce Army and police massacres [Photo: Mayimbú] [Photo by Mayimbú / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Demonstrations rapidly expanded in the southern Puno region in the Andes, whose population is predominantly Quechua and Aymara-speaking. Puno is also one of the poorest regions in the country, with nearly half of the population living under the official poverty line.

On January 9, in response to the blocking of all roads to Juliaca, the region’s main commercial center, the police used live ammunition against demonstrators, killing at least 18.

The ashes of a policeman and his vehicle were found the following morning in the city, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths in the protests to 49. At least 41 demonstrators have been killed and about 600 have been wounded by gunfire.

The Juliaca massacre has unleashed an escalation of the protests, which erupted one month ago in response to the December 7 coup against President Pedro Castillo. Protesters have demanded the resignation of Boluarte and the Congress, immediate general elections and a constituent assembly.

Last week, roadblocks gradually spread from the southernmost Puno region to the rest of the country, including important economic chokepoints at the Bolivian border in Puno and the Chilean border in Tacna, as well as the northern Amazonian region.

Despite violent efforts by security forces to reopen the roads, gas and food shortages have already been reported in the southeast, while inter-provincial and local public transportation has shut down in Arequipa, Puno and other parts of southern Peru.

Flowing from the logic of the struggle, protesters are increasingly targeting the economic and political centers of the country, and an “indefinite strike” has been called, arising out of the impromptu discussions in plazas, community halls and the roadblocks themselves. Local mayors, other political officials and leaders of trade unions have been compelled to go along for now, while attempting to raise the prospect for dialogue with the regime.

The national leadership of the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) was further discredited for acknowledging Boluarte after the coup and holding talks with her. The bureaucracy, which is nothing but an appendage of the corporations, has since sought to distance itself from Boluarte.

In an interview with Reuters, José Luis Chapa, secretary of the Arequipa Workers Federation, suggested that the government needs to convoke elections this year “if it wants dialogue.”

While demanding his liberation from prison, nowhere are demonstrators even raising the restoring of Castillo to the presidency. His record as another bourgeois politician subordinated to the oligarchy and the mining corporations, including his deployment of troops against demonstrators, is undebatable. Nonetheless, local leaders of so-called Defense Fronts and the pseudo-left in Peru and internationally have sought to exploit the anger and political confusion to again promote illusions in Castillo.

Most recently, demonstrators in the towns and the indigenous Aymara and Quechua communities in the south have called for a march to “take Lima” and forcibly oust Boluarte and Congress. Since Sunday, thousands have joined caravans from across the country and are heading to the capital, as the police and military seek to intercept them with checkpoints.

Demonstrators north and south of Lima have also established roadblocks along the Pan-American highway, but have not so far tried to systematically surround the city.

Local indigenous leaders have called the caravans the “March of the Four Corners,” which was the name of mass demonstrations in Lima in the year 2000 against the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori. While triggered by electoral fraud that year, social anger had accumulated against Fujimori over the privatization of the mines and other public enterprises, social cuts and his use of massacres to suppress social opposition.

The present eruption in Peru is driven by rampant social inequality and hostility to the ruling oligarchy and the mining corporations. Alongside a growing number of dollar billionaires and some of the largest mineral deposits in the world, 51 percent of the population suffers from food insecurity, according to the UN.

“They want to sell us to the transnational corporations. We will not allow this. We are fighting for our children and grandchildren,” a caravan participant in Arequipa told Telesur.

Production in the key mining region around Arequipa, an epicenter of the protests, has already seen disruptions. Last week, the road to Cerro Verde, the largest copper mine in the country, owned by US-based Freeport, was blocked at intervals.

On Thursday, Swiss-based Glencore said that it had evacuated its Antapaccay copper mine, the fifth largest in the country, after demonstrators invaded it and set fire to two vehicles. Communities near the Las Bambas mine, the third largest, have threatened to disrupt its activities.

Fearing an offensive against the mines, most of which are located in some of the poorest regions of the country, like Cajamarca, Apurímac, Pira, Cusco, Junín and La Libertad, the companies are calling for a harsher crackdown.

The National Association of Mining, Oil and Energy (SNMPE) released a statement last Friday ranting about “blackmail and anarchy” and an “escalation of vandalism and terror that has forced Peru to mourn.” The employer group demanded a return of the “rule of law, the principle of authority and rules, in an environment of social peace,” as well as an end to the “impunity under which the violent groups operate.”

Behind these hysterical calls for repression lies the high demand for metals and minerals, intensified by supply chain disruptions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia, and labor shortages. Peru is the second-largest producer of copper, and a major producer of key minerals like silver, gold, zinc, lead and tin.

Responding to these demands, the Boluarte regime extended the state of emergency for another month in the departments of Lima, Cusco, Callao and Puno, suspending democratic rights and authorizing military repression.

The corporate media and the ultra-right Fujimoristas in Congress and the state apparatus, who are dictating the policies of the regime, have ramped up their denunciations of demonstrators as “terrorists,” “communists,” and minions of Bolivian ex-president Evo Morales, whose entry into the country was denied. Without presenting any evidence, Boluarte and the far right have claimed that Morales is helping funnel weapons to demonstrators and fomenting “separatism.”

Hundreds of arrests of alleged leaders of the protests and raids of local organizations have taken place on the basis of these fraudulent accusations. Books of Marx, Lenin and Mao have been cited as “proof” of ties to terrorism.

In reality, the protests remain largely uncoordinated and leaderless. As reported recently by La Jornada, Boluarte’s former intelligence chief, General Wilson Barrantes Mendoza, said that “the intelligence agencies never identified any party or Senderista [Maoist guerrilla] movement or any central organization that was coordinating the demonstrations.” There are also no indications that demonstrators anywhere have been armed.

The bloodthirsty frenzy of the ruling elite is a sign of weakness and desperation under conditions in which all of its political parties and institutions, including the trade union bureaucracy, are totally discredited, and Peruvian capitalism offers nothing to the impoverished urban and rural masses but hunger, disease and militarized repression.

The Boluarte regime has offered not even a hint of democratic or social reforms. Instead, the Peruvian ruling class and US imperialism are following a similar script to that of the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia.

Concluding that Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party had become discredited and were increasingly unable to contain social opposition, Washington set out to overthrow them. The Organization of American States (OAS), an appendix of the State Department, claimed that Morales had perpetrated electoral fraud, which led to demands by the right-wing parties, the military and even the pro-MAS Bolivian Workers Central (COB) for his resignation.

The resignation of Morales, who escaped to Mexico, set the stage for brutal massacres with the use of live ammunition, and mass arrests against demonstrators under the US-backed coup regime of Jeanine Áñez. Eleven months later, in the face of mass demands for new elections, the MAS was restored to power under Luis Arce in October 2020. Little more than two years later, he now faces renewed coup threats from the far right, while popular support for his government has recently fallen from 47 to 40 percent, according to a poll that cites inflation and “instability” as the main reasons.

In Peru, days before the December 7 coup, the OAS explicitly rejected giving any support to Castillo against a trumped-up impeachment drive. The US Embassy then took the initiative, denouncing Castillo’s preemptive attempt to dissolve Congress, while signaling to the military and police to oppose Castillo. Congress, Washington and the European Union then swiftly acknowledged Boluarte as the new president.

The experience with Castillo in Peru, just as with the MAS in Bolivia, Gabriel Boric in Chile and their counterparts elsewhere, demonstrates that the second “Pink Tide” in Latin America is nothing but a card being played by the capitalist ruling elites to buy time and prepare for dictatorship as they continue to impose the deepening crisis of global capitalism onto the backs of workers.

Capitalism can provide no progressive way out of the present crisis. Despite Peru’s enormous mineral and agricultural wealth, the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and the crisis of grains and fertilizers due to the war in Ukraine have demonstrated the country’s dependence on the global economy.

US Department of Education publishes plan to revise income-based student loan payments

Alex Findijs

The Biden administration and the Department of Education (DOE) have released a proposal to overhaul student loan payment plans. The Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) program would be extensively restructured to reduce monthly payments for student loan borrowers as well as the time needed to qualify for loan forgiveness for some.

The proposal comes as the Biden administration’s much-touted plan to forgive a portion of the massive debt burden on students remains blocked in the courts, a situation accepted by the Democratic Party without any opposition. It also coincides with a mounting crisis in the vast student loan market that is placing severe strains on the financial system.

The current REPAYE plan requires borrowers to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income each month, defined as income minus 150 percent of the poverty line ($20,400 a year), with the possibility of qualifying for forgiveness of the remaining amount after 20 years for undergraduate loans and 25 years for graduate loans.

Under the proposed revisions, the monthly payments would be reduced to 5 percent of discretionary income for undergraduate and 10 percent for graduate loans. Any combination of both would result in a percentage based on a weighted average of the two.

In addition, the discretionary income adjustment would be raised to 225 percent of the federal poverty line ($30,500), and those making less than $30,500 as an individual or $62,400 as a family of four would not have to pay any money towards their loan.

Any borrowers at least 75 days in delinquency on their loans would be automatically enrolled in the program and borrowers who have defaulted on their loans would be eligible for the first time to enroll in REPAYE.

President Joe Biden with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona [AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

The most significant changes to REPAYE will be in the time it takes to qualify for forgiveness and in regards to interest payments on loans.

Those with $12,000 or less in loans would be granted an expedited path to loan forgiveness after 10 years instead of 20. Every $1,000 dollars above $12,000 would add an extra year to the qualification requirement, capping out at the current maximum of 20 years for undergraduates and 25 years for graduates.

Arguably the most notable change is in interest payment requirements. A common complaint of issuers of income-based payment plans is that the monthly payment often fails to cover the interest on the loan, which typically runs around 5 percent, but can reach as high as 6.54 percent for graduate loans and 7.54 percent for parent PLUS loans.

The impact of interest on loan payments is so onerous that many borrowers, even after years of regular payments, still have tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding loans, or even owe more than when they took out the loan.

Under the proposed changes, if an income-based payment is not sufficient to cover the monthly interest, the federal government will waive the interest payment and take on responsibility for it. If implemented, this policy would prevent interest from accruing and help reduce the burden of loan payments for participants.

In its proposal document, the DOE explains that it hopes the plan will help ease the financial strain that student loan payments place on millions of Americans. Student loan debt in the United States has surpassed $1.7 trillion and continues to grow, as the cost of higher education increases every year.

The proposed changes to the REPAYE program touch on issues that student loan borrowers have raised for years. However, the real impact of the program is far less than it promises.

The DOE claims the $12,000, 10-year plan will benefit low income and minority populations. However, according to the DOE’s proposal, only 8 percent of borrowers would become eligible for the 10-year expedited forgiveness. More than 42 percent of borrowers would still not become eligible for forgiveness until after 20 years of payments, and a further 38 percent only after 25 years.

There are doubts about how many people will actually see any forgiveness at all, even under the more relaxed program. An investigative report by National Public Radio last year found that the number of people ever approved for forgiveness totals just 32!

NPR’s investigation also found that three companies with contracts to manage federal student loans—PHEAA, CornerStone, and MOHELA—were not keeping track of borrowers’ payments. This meant that borrowers would have to request the company in charge of their loan to conduct an intensive review of payment records just to determine how much money was actually still owed.

Roughly 4.4 million people have been paying off Income Driven Repayment plans for over 20 years, and errors in payment accounting mean that many may be making payments on debt that they do not even owe.

The Biden administration has issued plans to reform the amount of paperwork in loan processing, but no real efforts have been made to correct the vast failures in student loan payment tracking.

Without substantial changes to the way student loan payments are accounted for it is impossible to place trust in the proposed changes to REPAYE. Even with payments and interest relaxed, there is little reason to believe that the new rules will lead to greater rates of student loan forgiveness and lower total payments. Amidst the numerous issues with student loan debt and payments, a promise of “eligibility” for debt forgiveness rings hollow.

An additional detail of note that has largely been ignored by news coverage is that the DOE’s release of the formal proposal included references to future plans to slash federal funding to education programs with low “financial value.”

The DOE statement declared that is is “currently working on a proposed gainful employment regulation that would cut off federal financial aid to career training programs that fail to provide sufficient financial value and require warnings for borrowers who attend any program that leaves graduates with excessive debts.”

It added that the department is taking steps to “publish a list of the programs at all types of colleges and universities that provide the least financial value to students,” and that it will take public comment how best to determine which programs provide the “least financial value.” Once produced, “institutions with programs on this list will be asked to submit improvement plans to the Department to improve their financial value.”

This is a thinly veiled attack on higher education in the arts and humanities. “Low financial value” is a dog whistle from the Biden administration and a capitulation to the far right’s decades-long attack on education.

Programs that have “low financial value” will be in theater, music, literature, history, philosophy, social work, education, psychology, sociology and other fields in the social sciences and arts. Such fields of work and study do not necessarily offer high “financial value” to students, but are a critical part of any functioning society.

China’s abandonment of Zero-COVID and imperialist hypocrisy

Niles Niemuth

A medical official from China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported Saturday that China had recorded nearly 60,000 fatalities linked to COVID-19 between December 8 and January 12, the month since the country completely lifted its strict “Zero-COVID” policy, accelerating an outbreak that is believed to have infected millions of people. 

The disclosure by Jiao Yahui, head of the NHC’s medical affairs department, was the first time the Chinese government has provided an official measure of the COVID wave now sweeping the country.

By itself, the figure of 60,000 dead in a few weeks is a staggering sum, 30 times greater than the reported COVID-19 deaths for all of China since the start of the pandemic. However, the real death toll is likely to be much higher.

Reliable infection and fatality reporting in China has been abandoned over the past several months. Even the figure given by Jiao was broken down between those who died “with” and “from” COVID, a false distinction with no scientific medical basis pioneered by the far right in the United States.  

This death toll is an indictment of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) abandonment of its Zero-COVID policy, which had proven effective in suppressing the spread of the coronavirus. While most governments adopted a homicidal “let it rip” approach to the pandemic, resulting in more than 6.7 million reported deaths globally, billions in China were able to live relatively free from the virus. 

Now, reports of the virus ripping through workplaces, long lines at hospitals and overwhelmed morgues are spreading through social media. Health officials in Henan Province announced that 90 percent of the region's nearly 100 million residents had been infected as of January 6. With an expected 2.1 billion trips by travelers crisscrossing the country during the Chinese New Year holiday, which begins on January 22, COVID-19 will rip through every neighborhood, city and village.

While the CCP bears responsibility for this disaster, the mass infection policy was implemented under the demands of the US and the other imperialist powers.

The underlying driving force behind the reopening was on display this week, with China’s Vice Premier Liu He addressing the gathering of billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos, proclaiming the end of Zero-COVID and that China would be fully open for business. “China is pursuing common prosperity … opening up to entrepreneurs,” he reassured his audience.

Among the loudest in beating the drum for the abandonment of public health measures was the Washington Post, which published an editorial board statement in early November 2022 demanding that China abandon Zero-COVID, claiming, “It isn’t working.” Small middle class protests later that month against COVID lockdowns trumpeted by the western media were seized on by the CCP bureaucracy to do just that. 

However, having adopted the mass infection policies demanded by global finance capital, the Chinese government is being further attacked and denounced by the US media. If President Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership thought their acquiescence would win them any breathing space, they were wrong.

The United States and a number of other countries have responded by placing new testing restrictions on travelers from China, even as they allow the more infectious XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron to spread unimpeded.

Dripping with hypocrisy, the same editorial board that demanded China let the virus rip now denounces Beijing for undercounting infections and deaths. The Washington Post wrote on Monday: 

Dishonesty about the true breadth of the pandemic in China constitutes a threat to public health worldwide. Scientists need to know whether transmission patterns have changed, new variants have emerged or the incidence of long covid has increased. Epidemiologists must be able to assess whether the world should prepare for a new global outbreak. And the people of China deserve to know the true scale of the calamity descending on their country.

This entire paragraph would apply with even greater force if references to “China” were replaced with “United States.”  Under the policy advocated by the Washington Post more than 1.1 million have unnecessarily died. It has resulted in an overwhelmed health care system with burned out medical workers, bodies piling up in refrigerator trucks and a mass grave on New York City’s Hart Island.

The Post complains that China’s reported death toll under Zero-COVID of 5,200 was “absurdly low.” However, this low death toll, which was highly accurate until the abandonment of Zero-COVID, was the outcome of the comprehensive measures taken to prevent the population from becoming infected en masse with a deadly virus, something which was never attempted in the US or in much of the world.

The editorial board then declares that “zero covid could not go on indefinitely,” this despite its effectiveness and the policy’s popularity among the Chinese population.

In fact, the Post has played a critical role in promoting the policy of “forever COVID” pioneered in the US which is now having such a devastating impact in China.

Just three days before their editorial denouncing China, the Post published an article by Dr. Leana Wen, a favorite of the Biden administration who paved the way for the premature reopening of schools and lifting of mask mandates, which called for the US to count fewer deaths and cases, absurdly claiming that cases are being overcounted. In reality, only about 1 in 10 positive rapid test results are confirmed by PCR tests, which is the only way for an infection to be officially counted. 

In March, the Post endorsed the call for a “new normal” promoted by former Biden and Obama advisers led by eugenics advocate Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel called for the dismantling of daily reporting of COVID-19 infections, a proposal that has been implemented over the subsequent year, with nearly all states and the federal government switching to weekly reporting of infections and deaths.

Furthermore, the Post has played a key role in promoting the far-right conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 virus had been developed by scientists in a Wuhan laboratory from which it leaked, despite clear evidence that it first emerged in a food market in that city. The editorial board continues this campaign in its latest statement, darkly declaring, “the Chinese government has relied on secrecy, obfuscation, intimidation and fabrication to draw a veil over the origins of the virus.” They make this claim in the face of international scientific investigations which have made clear its natural origin.

The 60,000 confirmed deaths in China is only the beginning. The policy of mass infection implemented by the CCP and demanded by finance capital has already produced a medical disaster whose real scope will become clearer with time. The infection of billions of people will inevitably produce new strains of COVID-19 which will spread globally.

The successful implementation of a Zero-COVID elimination strategy in China for the first three years of the pandemic makes clear that it is possible through widespread masking, testing and contact tracing, the temporary closure of schools and nonessential businesses, and mass vaccination to stop the pandemic in its tracks. However, the abandonment of Zero-COVID by the CCP and the continued spread of the virus underscores that there is no national solution to the pandemic.