As the number of homeless people in the United States continues to grow, state and local governments are enacting new laws targeting the poorest and most vulnerable segment of society.
A homeless encampment can be seen in San Francisco, Monday, December 12, 2022. [AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez]
According to the recent 2022 Homelessness Assessment Report compiled by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on any given day in 2022 there were 582,500 homeless people in the US. Among that number, 60 percent stayed in city or state sponsored homeless centers, with the remaining 40 percent sleeping on the streets or in an improvised shelter. Between 2020, when the last report was issued, and 2022 the homeless rate increased by approximately 1 percent.
According to Consumer Price Index data for 2022, rental costs increased by an average of 8.3 percent over the previous year. Shelter costs, when considered as a whole, which includes rent or mortgage payments, utility bills and other expenses related to housing represented 40 percent of the core inflation increase over the past year.
For most of the working class, housing costs account for the largest part of their monthly income. The second largest expense is food, which rose in cost by 10-12 percent in the last year. Considering the already tenuous state of most workers’ finances, this spike in inflation has had the predictable effect of pushing more people into homelessness.
As more and more workers are forced into homelessness under the strain of record inflation and rising rents, they find themselves trapped between a collapsing social system and oppressive new laws passed to conceal the failures of capitalism.
Forty-eight states already had existing anti-homeless laws prior to 2022. In four states (Texas, Florida, California, and New Hampshire) “camping” in any public place is banned. In New Hampshire, sleeping anywhere in public is outlawed. There are dozens of other laws on the books in various states which prohibit loitering, vagrancy, or panhandling.
State laws will often overlap with various municipal laws, both of which are frequently found by the courts to be unconstitutional. Legislators rely upon the fact that those targeted by these laws have few resources to challenge their validity. According to the National Homelessness Law Center, 60 percent of lawsuits challenging anti-panhandling or anti-camping laws are successful, as well as 77 percent of lawsuits challenging loitering, loafing, or vagrancy bans.
Several new anti-homeless laws took effect in the last year. In Missouri, the state legislature has coupled a ban on sleeping in public places with the withdrawal of state funds for permanent housing. In Tennessee, a law passed last July makes sleeping in a tent on public property, under a bridge, or on an interstate exit a felony punishable by imprisonment, the first of its kind in the nation. In Los Angeles and Portland, two cities with large homeless populations, their respective city councils have passed various restrictions on encampments.
In many states the anti-homeless laws being passed are based on model legislation formulated by the ultra-right Cicero Foundation. The institute was founded in 2016 by billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is also the co-founder of the tech company Palantir, which has created software used by the police and military. According to Pew, nine bills have been introduced in six states over the past two years based on the Cicero model, whose features include “state-sanctioned encampments with a six-month residency limit, a ban on permanent encampments and penalties for cities that refuse to remove them.”
The passage of these new laws and ordinances is often accompanied by large -scale police raids of homeless encampments where tents, blankets, and other personal belongings of encampment residents are confiscated or destroyed.
In New York City under the administration of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams the police have carried out dozens of raids on encampments and makeshift shelters. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 the city moved more than 8,000 homeless individuals into hotel rooms as a measure to control the spread of the virus. Little more than a year later, however, the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio rescinded the policy and moved to relocate the homeless to barracks style shelters.
The city has set up a hotline for residents to report homeless encampments and has tasked transit police with evicting people who are sleeping on subway trains. In January of 2022 the NYPD conducted 133 “clean-ups,” or raids, on various encampments, many of which house a single individual and consist of little more than carboard boxes.
Although it is city policy to offer homeless victims of police raids access to shelters, many refuse. The city-backed shelters are frequently overcrowded and dangerous, and are vectors for the spread of COVID-19.
India’s Narendra Modi-led Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has responded with vitriol to a BBC documentary that examines the current prime minister’s role in facilitating and overseeing the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.
The communal violence that convulsed the western Indian state of Gujarat for three days, from February 28 through March 2, 2002, officially killed 1,044 people, of whom the vast majority, 790, were Muslims. The true death toll is believed to be closer to 2,000. In addition, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Muslims were rendered homeless after mobs of vigilantes—some led by well-known BJP politicians, others by leaders of Hindu communalist groups closely associated with the BJP—terrorized them and burned their homes to the ground.
The role Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister from 2001 to his ascension to the prime ministership in 2014, played in instigating and enabling the February-March 2002 pogrom has long been known.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi [Photo: Narendra Modi Facebook page]
Under conditions of a war-crisis with Pakistan whipped up by India’s then-BJP-led national government, Modi fomented anti-Muslim violence. He did so first by immediately blaming Muslims for a February 28 train fire at Godhra in which 59 Hindu fundamentalist activists perished, and in a manner that effectively declared Gujarat’s Muslim minority collectively responsible; then by supporting calls from Hindu communalist groups for a state-wide general strike. When, as could only be expected given the state-backed communal incitement, anti-Muslim violence erupted, Gujarat’s chief minister instructed police not to intervene.
If Modi has not spent the last two decades languishing in a prison cell it is because he has been protected by a highly communalized state apparatus, from the police and judiciary to the Gujarat state and Indian governments, with the complicity and support of India’s capitalist ruling elite.
That said, the two-part documentary titled “India: The Modi Question,” the first part of which aired on BBC 2 last Tuesday, has provided additional corroboration of the calculated and coordinated character of the 2002 “riots” and Modi’s culpability in mass murder.
The documentary cites at length from a secret British government report on the Gujarat pogrom, whose very existence was hitherto unknown. It was prepared by a Foreign Office inquiry team that travelled to the western Indian state shortly after the communal bloodletting.
The report says that “the extent of the violence was much greater than reported,” and was well-orchestrated: “a systematic campaign of violence” with “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.” The report goes on to state that “The aim of the riots was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas,” adding that “Widespread and systematic rape of Muslim women” was perpetrated to terrorize the populace.
The report highlights the role of activists from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in fomenting the violence. The VHP is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization dedicated to the revival of the “Hindu nation.” Modi has been a life-long member of the RSS and routinely consults its leaders on major government decisions.
However, the BBC report underlines that the Hindu communalist thugs of the VHP and their ilk could never “have inflicted so much damage without the climate of impunity created by the state government.” For that, it asserts, “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”
The BBC documentary also points to the results of a separate investigation conducted by the European Union. That inquiry reportedly concluded that ministers in Modi’s BJP state government “took an active part in the violence and the senior police officers were instructed not to intervene in the rioting.”
“India: The Modi Question” also includes an interview with a former diplomat, whose identity is not revealed and who presumably was actively involved in the work of the Foreign Office inquiry team. “At least 2,000 people were murdered during the violence,” says the ex-diplomat. “The vast majority were Muslims. We described it as a pogrom–a deliberate, and politically driven effort targeted at the Muslim community.”
The BBC documentarians also interviewed the then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who, as one of the architects of the illegal 2003 US-British invasion of Iraq, has hands, like Modi’s, that are dripping with blood.
Straw explained the background to the Foreign Office establishing the Gujarat inquiry team, saying, “These were very serious claims–that Chief Minister Modi had played a pretty active part in pulling back the police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.”
Straw called the team’s report “very thorough,” then defended the British Labour government’s failure to make its findings known on the grounds that it would have hurt Britain’s interests, i.e., the commercial and strategic interests of British imperialism. While Straw was invoking “human rights” in fronting British imperialism’s predatory foreign policy, including in justifying the Iraq war, when it came to India, he had, he claims, “fairly limited” options. “We were never going to break diplomatic relations with India,” he says, “but it is obviously a stain on his (Modi’s) reputation.”
Much further evidence of Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat pogrom emerged in the months and years after the British Foreign office conducted its inquiry—an inquiry, it need be noted, that did not have at its disposal any of the compulsory investigative powers of the Indian police and courts.
Of especial importance is evidence provided by Haren Pandya, revenue minister in Modi’s Gujarat state government, and Sanjiv Bhatt, a deputy commissioner of police who participated in an “unofficial meeting” Modi convened at his residence on the night of Feb. 27, 2002. According to Pandya, who was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in March 2003, the meeting had a singular purpose. Modi instructed those assembled to “allow people to vent their anger and not come in the way of a Hindu backlash.” In 2009, Bhatt testified that he was present at that meeting and corroborated Pandya’s account.
But at every step of the way, Indian authorities have thwarted investigation of the 2002 events, especially any in which Modi and his chief henchman, India’s current home minister, Amit Shah, were implicated. The few convictions that have taken place have generally been the result of tenacious efforts on the part of the victims, as in the case of Blikis Bano, who was 21 and five months pregnant when she was brutally gang-raped in 2002, while 14 other members of her family were killed.
So blatant were the efforts of the police, judicial and government authorities in Gujarat to shield those responsible for the 2002 pogrom that ultimately the Supreme Court was compelled to intervene. India’s highest court, however, was quick to put its ill-deserved reputation for judicial probity at the service of Modi and his accomplices.
This culminated in a verdict last June that will live in ignominy. The Supreme Court dismissed the plea of Zakia Jafri, the widow of a Congress MP who was slaughtered along with 68 others in a Muslim neighbourhood of Ahmedabad on February 28, 2022, that it investigate whether their deaths were part of a “larger conspiracy”—that is, a calculated campaign of anti-Muslim violence and ethnic cleansing.
In so doing, the court not only absolved Modi, Shah and the Gujarat authorities, giving them a so-called “clean chit,” it denounced Jafri and her co-petitioner, the journalist and activist Teesta Setalvad, for wanting “to keep the pot boiling for ulterior design,” and said they should themselves be “in the dock” and prosecuted. The next day, citing this Supreme Court judgment, the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Setalvad and R.B. Sreekumar, a former top Gujarat police officer who has exposed police complicity in the pogrom.
This is part of a larger process in which the Indian ruling class has embraced Modi as the “strongman” it needs to wage class war against India’s workers and toilers and aggressively pursue its great power ambitions in alliance with US imperialism. The BJP, whose activist base is made up of fascistic Hindu supremacists, has been transformed into its principal party of government. In addition to leading India’s national government, it now holds power in some two-thirds of India’s states.
As elsewhere, the rise to power of far-right forces has been facilitated at every point by the sharp turn to the right of the ostensible “left” and liberal parties. In the name of fighting “Hindu fascism,” the twin Indian Stalinist parliamentary parties, the CPM and the CPI, have for decades subordinated the working class to the big business Congress Party, and where they have held power in various states, they have implemented what they themselves describe as “pro-investor” policies.
Two decades on, the Gujarat pogrom remains a festering wound on the Indian body politic. Tens of thousands of Muslims driven from their homes by the events of February-March 2002 are now ghettoized in what are for all intents and purposes internal displacement camps.
Modi and his BJP continue to use the 2002 events to rally their Hindu supremacist base and polarize the electorate. In the run-up to last year’s Gujarat state election, the state government released to a hero’s welcome all 11 of those sentenced to life prison terms for their role in the murder of Blikis Bano’s family.
The BJP also delisted its sitting state legislative assembly member for the Naroda neighbourhood of Ahmedabad so that it could stand as its candidate Payal Kukrani, the 30-year-old daughter of a BJP activist who was convicted for the Naroda Patiya Massacre, in which 96 Muslims were killed.
Predictably, India’s government, much of the corporate media and the BJP’s extensive diaspora network have responded to the BBC documentary with a deluge of vitriol. Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi denounced it as a “propaganda piece,” shaped by “bias” and a “colonial mindset.”
Well aware of Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, Western imperialist governments initially thought it wise to keep some distance from him. He was not allowed to travel to the UK for a decade or so, and only after he became Indian prime minister in 2014 was he welcome in Washington. But that is all ancient history.
Throughout his nine-year tenure as prime minister, but especially since his re-election in 2019, Modi and his BJP have fomented anti-Muslim and anti-minority bigotry with the ideological aim of transforming India into a Hindu rashtra (a state where the supremacy of Hindus is acknowledged and minorities live in sufferance), and with the political aim of channeling mounting social anger over mass joblessness and deepening poverty and social inequality along reactionary lines and splitting the working class. Yet this communalist gangster is now lauded and feted by the likes of Biden, Macron, Scholz and Trudeau as the leader of the world’s most “populous democracy” and a staunch defender of “freedom” against autocratic China.
In keeping with this, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rushed to disassociate himself from the BBC’s exposure of Modi’s role in the Gujarat pogrom. He told the British Parliament Wednesday he did not agree with its “characterization” of India’s prime minister.
Sweden and Finland are moving ahead with negotiations to finalize defence cooperation agreements (DCA) with the United States in what amounts to a further escalatory step in the US/NATO war with Russia. The agreements, which would allow US troops to operate unhindered on both countries’ territories, and store weaponry and other equipment at advanced bases, would strengthen Washington’s ability to open up a northern front in its drive to subjugate Russia to the status of a semi-colony and seize control of its natural resources.
Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson met in Helsinki (left) and Pekka Haavisto, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finland (right). [Photo by Finnish Government/Dean Calma / IAEA / CC BY 2.0]
Sweden’s right-wing coalition government led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson declared in its announcement of bilateral talks with Washington that the DCA would enable Stockholm to “get more effective and faster support from the US in crisis or war situations.” Defence Minister Pål Jonson told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the deal will allow the US to store weaponry at bases in Sweden during peacetime and deploy more rapidly in a crisis, adding, “We are moving from being close partners to allies.”
A similar process is underway in Finland, where Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told Iltalehti on January 8 that talks on the bilateral deal are in the preliminary stages. Haavisto’s ministry said in a statement that the agreement would “create conditions for closer cooperation if the security situation so requires.” Washington is “the most important external actor in Northern Europe,” the statement continued, before adding that Washington “is committed to security in Finland and Europe.”
Finland and Sweden’s joint application to join NATO last May marked a major escalation of the US-led military confrontation with Russia in northern Europe. While Finland shares a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia, Sweden is strategically positioned on the northwest of the Baltic Sea, placing forces based there in easy striking distance of St. Petersburg and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies just 300 kilometres southeast of the Swedish island of Gotland.
While the vast majority of NATO members, including the European imperialist powers, are determined to integrate Sweden and Finland into NATO as quickly as possible, Turkey has refused to approve the applications, citing Sweden’s alleged protection of Kurdish nationalists with ties to the PKK. Unanimous consent by all NATO members is required to approve a new member.
DCAs are critical in facilitating the deployment of American military personnel on foreign soil. They regulate the extent to which American soldiers will be subject to local laws, grant Washington sweeping authority to move troops as it sees fit, and allow the US military to create forward supply bases for weaponry and military equipment. The US currently has 17 DCAs with EU members and six with non-EU states.
Last June, Washington and Oslo announced the finalization of a DCA to facilitate the expansion of American military activity, especially in Norway’s Arctic, where it shares a 196-kilometre border with Russia. It included four “agreed areas,” zones to which US forces have unhindered access. In and around these “agreed areas,” US forces can exercise authority over Norwegian citizens, including by taking a “proportionate” response to any perceived security threats. The areas include Ramsund Naval Base and Evenes Air Base in the arctic.
In a submission to the Norwegian parliament, the country’s Judge Advocate General, Sigrid Redse Johansen, noted, “The access to exert authority (and power) is located with each troop member, and authority can be exerted towards anyone who comes into contact with the agreed area or who, in extraordinary cases, comes in the way of an American operation … Power can thus be exerted by any American troop member towards Norwegian civilians to restore order or protect the force.”
Johansen also addressed the lack of controls in place for Norwegian authorities to challenge US decisions or actions, writing in somewhat understated language, “Genuine Norwegian control over the conditions for the USA’s exertion of power do not appear prominent.”
The agreement also gives US authorities the first right to prosecute soldiers who commit crimes off-duty, and define what is considered an act of duty. In other words, American forces can act with virtual impunity while in the country.
The agreements Washington is negotiating with Finland and Sweden appear set to contain similarly sweeping provisions guaranteeing US military operations and legal immunity. As Teemu Tanner, Finland’s ambassador to Norway, put it in an interview with High North News, “I think we can learn a lot from how Norway builds its NATO activities.”
In November, Finland, Sweden and Norway announced the upgrading of a trilateral defence agreement to enable joint military activities in the Arctic areas of all three countries. The agreement allows for joint exercises, military planning and the carrying out of joint military operations in a crisis situation. It followed the participation of Finnish and Swedish troops in a joint brigade under Norwegian command in NATO’s Cold Response exercise last August.
Also in November, Sweden’s new right-wing government announced a plan to massively increase military spending in order to reach the NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence. The coalition, which is led by the conservative Moderates but relies on support in parliament from the fascistic Sweden Democrats to obtain a majority, intends to hike military spending by 64 percent by 2028. Just days after this announcement, the government unveiled a military aid package to Ukraine worth 3 billion kronor (about €270 million). It included an air defence system and light armoured vehicles, and totaled 1 billion kronor more than all Sweden’s previous aid packages to Ukraine combined.
Earlier this month, the government revealed a plan to reintroduce civilian conscription. Young people will be trained in disaster relief and other emergency services at the municipal level in a move that the government explicitly linked to the need to strengthen Sweden’s defensive capabilities in the event of a war. Military conscription was already reintroduced by the Social Democrat government in 2017. The latest plan commits to doubling annual military conscripts to 10,000.
A major factor driving the intensifying conflicts over the Arctic is the vast quantities of oil, gas, and rare earths in the region, which are becoming easier to access due to the impact of capitalist-induced climate change. Territorial claims involving Arctic states, which include Canada, Denmark, Russia and the United States, are also being driven by the opening up of new trade routes as the ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean recedes. The US, Canada and the European imperialist powers are determined to strengthen their respective positions in the region, recognizing that it could mean access to the resources necessary to play a big part in the clean energy economy of the future, control the flow of world trade, and gain a military-strategic edge over their rivals.
Underscoring the vast economic interests at stake in the region, Swedish iron ore miner LKAB revealed last week the discovery of a huge deposit of more than 1 million tons of rare earth oxides in Kiruna in the Swedish Arctic. While the site represents less than 1 percent of global rare earth deposits, according to US Geological Survey estimates, it is the largest such find in Europe. LKAB explained that the deposits were sufficient to supply a “substantial part of Europe’s needs” for electric vehicle production as part of the so-called “clean energy transition.”
Far from being motivated by the desire to stop climate change, the key concern of the European powers is to reduce their dependence on Russia and China for critical economic supplies so that the European imperialist powers can act more aggressively on the world stage, not only against Russia and China, but ultimately where necessary the United States. As Ebba Busch, Sweden’s Minister for Energy and Business,\ and leader of the right-wing Christian Democrats, put it, “electrification, the EU’s self-sufficiency and independence from Russia and China will begin in the mine.”
On Friday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley gave a briefing at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they pledged the United States to the military defeat of Russia.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington on Nov. 16, 2022. [AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File]
Milley announced the commitment of the United States and NATO to “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” He repeated that Ukraine would use NATO armored vehicles and tanks to go on the “tactical and operational offensive to liberate the occupied areas.”
With this declaration, the entire prestige of the NATO alliance is being staked on the reconquest of all Ukrainian territory, which according to the United States includes both the entire Donbas and the Crimean Peninsula.
As the immense challenges posed by the new American strategy emerge in the coming months and as the death toll among Ukrainian troops rises, the demand will inevitably be made for the direct deployment of NATO troops in the war. This would mean that American and Russian soldiers would be shooting at each other in the first general engagement between nuclear-armed states in history.
Milley is an active-duty military officer, and Austin is a retired four-star general who was granted a special dispensation from Congress to serve in the civilian office of defense secretary. These two four-star generals were effectively setting the foreign policy of the United States, in a sweeping display of the power of the military in American society.
The explicit assertion by Milley and Austin that the weapons being provided by the US and NATO are of an offensive, not defensive character, is a 180-degree reversal of public statements by the Biden administration, which justified the escalation of US involvement in the war with the declaration that it would not provide “offensive” equipment.
“The equipment that we’ve provided is defensive, as you know, not offensive. And we see that as being a difference,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said at a briefing in May.
“The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Biden said that same month, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand—and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say—that’s called ‘World War III.’”
Late last month, Biden declared, “The idea we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there, would have the prospect of breaking up NATO, and breaking up the European Union.” He added, “They’re not looking to go to war with Russia, they’re not looking for a third world war.”
If one accepts both the public statements of Milley and the repeated assertions of Biden, it would mean that the United States is in reality at “war with Russia.” This undeclared war is being waged without congressional authorization or any effort to seek the approval of the American people.
The announcement by NATO that it is sending offensive weapons to Ukraine has exposed the Biden administration’s entire narrative of US involvement in Ukraine as a fraud. It has repeatedly claimed that the US and NATO are not involved in the war. But NATO is not only a party to the conflict, it is its driving force.
Like with all wars, as the fighting progresses, the debate over who “fired the first shot” fades away, and the real, complex social forces driving the war come into view.
Throughout 2022, the Biden administration claimed that it was intervening in the conflict in order to save Ukrainian lives. In the year-long conflict, it has become clear that America’s only use for the Ukrainian population is as cannon fodder for a war to dominate the Eurasian landmass.
Opening the meeting, Austin declared, “As President Biden said, this is a decisive decade for the world.” This was a quotation from Biden’s introduction to the United States’ National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States “will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors.”
Throughout the event, there was no mention of the word “ceasefire” or “peace.” Instead, Milley declared, “This war, like many wars in the past, will end at some sort of negotiating table.”
But what Milley was describing as a “negotiating table” is like the one plated aboard the USS Missouri, in which Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the unconditional surrender of Japan, with the alternative being, in the words of the Potsdam Declaration, “prompt and utter destruction.”
Following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities and a series of fire-bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, that war, too, ended at the negotiating table.
Even as they admitted that the United States’ intentions in the war were fundamentally offensive, the generals engaged in the obligatory lies and hypocrisy with which the gears of war are oiled.
“International aggression, where large countries use military force to attack small countries and change recognized borders, cannot be allowed to stand,” declared Austin. This comes from a country that has, in the past quarter century alone, illegally attacked or occupied Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
Austin continued, “It’s about the world that we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.” In fact, the catastrophe unleashed by US imperialism in its “decisive decade” will, if not stopped, leave the next generation with a charred wasteland, if there is a generation left to witness it.
Responding to NATO’s assertion that its goal is the defeat of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, penned a brief statement on Telegram: “The loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war. Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends.”
The position of American imperialism, however, is that the use of nuclear weapons—either by Russia or the US itself—cannot be a deterrent in the escalation of the conflict. In an editorial published Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal demanded strikes inside of Russian territory, declaring, “Why should a dictator who rolled over a foreign border be free to claim his territory as sacrosanct?” It concluded, “The rejoinder is that Mr. Putin might unleash a nuclear weapon, but the past months have shown that he will make that decision based on his own calculations in any case.”
This editorial reflects the utterly reckless mood that has gripped the capitalist oligarchy, which sees war as a way out of the myriad social, economic, and political crises gripping the capitalist social order.
The social forces driving the war were shown at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where billionaires and the heads of major banks hobnobbed with Ukrainian oligarchs and warmongers, such as the disgraced former British Prime Minister Boris “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands” Johnson, who declared, “Give them the tanks! There’s absolutely nothing to be lost.”
Embracing the lie that COVID-19 is “mild” and “endemic,” the Thai regime is setting the stage for a new surge of the pandemic by attempting to kickstart its tourism sector by opening up to Chinese New Year tourists.
Thailand's Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, right, greets Chinese tourists at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Samut Prakarn province, Thailand, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. [AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit]
With the ending of zero-COVID in China and the opening up of its borders, some 300,000 Chinese are expected to travel to Thailand in the next three months. Several provincial areas and cities in Thailand are resuming Chinese New Year celebrations for the first time since 2020.
“It has been three years since we launched such large-scale Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations in Thailand due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Chinese embassy charge d’affaires Yang Xin told the China Daily. “This year’s celebration back to normal is really encouraging.”
These comments reflect the abrupt about-face of the Chinese government, under huge international pressure, in ending its effective zero-COVID policy and embracing the murderous “let it rip” approach taken in countries around the world.
In Thailand, the true picture of daily COVID cases is masked behind a complete dismantling of testing and tracing. Official daily cases, now updated on a weekly basis, are indicating the beginnings of a case spike with the latest seven-day average of 4,166 daily cases.
Thailand’s Department of Disease Control (DDC) has declared that the arrival of Chinese tourists is “unlikely” to trigger a spike in the number of new COVID-19 infections. Large crowds, however, attend the Chinese New Year’s celebrations, likely turning them into mass spreader events.
The country’s health system, which is already under immense pressure, is assuming the worst. Deputy clerk Suksan Kittisupakorn told the Bangkok Post that the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) and the Ministry of Public Health have prepared more than 10,000 hospital beds for new COVID-19 patients.
The tourist promotion is being driven by a flagging economy and big business demands for profit. The Thai economy has been hit hard by the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the US economic war against China. The IMF is forecasting a deceleration in growth and potentially a recession in Thailand’s major markets, the US and the European Union. Thailand’s economy is heavily dependent on export which constitute 55 percent of GDP.
A recent World Bank report projected that Thailand’s economy will expand by 3.4 percent in 2022 and 3.6 percent in 2023—revised by 0.7 percentage points since June. This estimate is well below the economic growth for 2022 and 2023 in comparable countries, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia where projections range from 5 to 7 percent.
The Thai ruling class is pinning its hope of reviving the economy on restoring the tourist sector, which constituted a fifth of Thailand’s GDP prior to the pandemic. A revival of tourism, which is labour intensive, could also boost private consumption adding to economic growth.
The return of Chinese tourists is critical. Chinese tourists accounted for nearly a third of Thailand’s 40 million visitors before the onset of the pandemic, but this dropped to virtually zero after Beijing imposed its zero-COVID restrictions. After China’s borders re-opened on January 8, the Thai government is estimating that 3 to 5 million Chinese tourists will return in 2023, as part of the predicted 25 million international visitors. This is almost 15 million more than in 2022.
Incoming tourists will no longer be required to undergo COVID testing, let alone show proof of double vaccination.
“A full recovery hinges on arrivals from China, which are not expected to return en masse in the first half of 2023,” said Suksit Suvunditkul, president of the Thai Hotels Association Southern Chapter, told Bloomberg.
A key part of returning to “normal” economic activity is lulling the Thai population into a false sense of security. A recent comment in the Bangkok Post, headlined “Making Peace with Covid” is typical. Along with casting doubts on the safety of vaccines and promoting quack remedies such as green chiretta (a traditional herb), it completely downplayed the health impact of the virus.
“I think we can finally celebrate the New Year with peace of mind,” said Dr Thiravat Hemachudha, chief of the Thai Red Cross’s Emerging Infectious Diseases Health Science Centre, claiming the public was now “largely immune” to the virus. “The symptoms will be less severe as the virus becomes more easily transmissible in the future,” he added.
These statements fly in the face of repeated infections of the global population and reported by the WSWS which confirm that repeat infections result in steadily worse health outcomes for patients, including the risk of death, hospitalization and Long COVID. The prospect of “living with the virus” also poses the inevitability of new variants which further increase the danger of infection and death.
A report by the Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) estimated that, as of December 12, 77 percent of the Thai population in Thailand had been infected at least once, and that a surge was expected to begin in January following Chinese New Year’s celebrations. Daily infections were modelled to rise to 328,400 by January 29, 2023.
The government’s policies are setting the working class on a collision course with the capitalist system. While increased tourist numbers might provide a limited boost to businesses, it will do little or nothing to improve the living conditions of workers and the rural power. Indeed, while a modest increase is projected for the urban economy, the rural economy lags behind. At the same time, working people face greater risks of serious illness and death with the spread of COVID.
According to the World Bank, poverty is projected to rise to 6.6 percent in 2022 from 6.3 percent in 2021. Much of the rise is bound up with the phasing out of COVID-19 relief measures as well as rising inflation. The minimum wage was increased in October by 5 percent—well below the official inflation rate of more than 7 percent.
Even those earning above the minimum wage are struggling to make ends meet. The Thai Chamber of Commerce University’s Center for Economic and Business Forecasting warned that household debt in Thailand will likely rise to around 89.3 percent of GDP or 14.97 trillion baht by the end of 2022, the highest rate in 16 years.
The deepening social and economic crisis in Thailand will inevitably fuel rising social tensions and outbreaks of the class struggle, as is increasingly the case around the world.
Today, Brazil’s newly inaugurated president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT), had his second meeting with the command of the armed forces since the January 8 fascist attack on government buildings in Brasilia.
Military parade on the commemoration of Brazil’s independence, September 7, 2022. [Photo: Photo: Alan Santos/PR]
In an interview with Globonews on Wednesday, Lula said that the central topic of this meeting would be “to discuss the strengthening of the defense industry in this country.”
Explaining the agenda of the discussion, he said: “I asked each force to present me the difficulties they are experiencing in terms of functional structure … so that we can have a process of rebuilding the productive capacity. Including using military technology to make a stronger, more modern defense industry.”
The PT president said that his goals included to “dynamize the military patents that we already have, dynamize the development of the nuclear submarine and dynamize other things that Brazil needs to be a respected country. Our armed forces have to be prepared.”
In order to “effectively put into practice” these objectives, Lula invited the president of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP), Josué Gomes, to participate in his meeting with the military command. He boasted that FIESP—the same big business lobby that seven years ago publicly campaigned for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the PT—has a “project for the defense industry.”
The new PT government is promoting this militaristic campaign in the face of what Lula himself characterized as the threat of a military coup that confronted his administration less than two weeks ago.
In a press conference last week, Lula declared that if he had agreed to call for a Law and Order Operation (GLO) suggested by his defense minister and the Army commander, “the coup would have happened.” That would have meant, Lula said, his abdication of power “so that a general could take over the government.”
In Wednesday’s Globonews interview, Lula again talked about the background of the January 8 events. He essentially acknowledged having confronted an act of sabotage by the military top brass.
The president claimed to have left the Brazilian capital two days before the storming of government offices “with the information that there were only 150 people in the encampment [of Bolsonaro’s fascist supporters at the army headquarters] and they weren’t going to allow any more buses in. ... And after it happened, then you see that on social media this was being called for for more than a week!”
“Here we have army intelligence, we have intelligence from the Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI), we have Navy intelligence, we have Air Force intelligence,” Lula said. “The truth is that none of this intelligence served to warn the president of the republic that this could have happened.”
The interviewer, Natuza Nery, asked the president why then he didn’t adopt a “more energetic attitude in relation to the military, the Ministry of Defense itself, the GSI,” or even the “immediate changing of the [military] command that had just taken over.” Lula responded, “We can’t have a witch hunt.” “My sorrow,” he added, “is that there was negligence.”
In the interview, Lula also presented for the first time an assessment of the role possibly played by his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro on January 8. Stating that the silence maintained by the fascistic ex-president gave him the impression that “he had a lot to do with what was happening.” Lula concluded, “Possibly Bolsonaro was hoping to return to Brazil in the glory of a coup. I then could not allow a GLO.”
Since the attack in Brasilia, investigations into Bolsonaro and his allies have intensified. Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, Anderson Torres—who since the end of the presidential term had been acting as secretary of security of the Federal District, appointed by Governor Ibaneis Rocha—was arrested last Saturday, accused of collaborating with the pro-coup demonstrations.
Two days earlier, the Federal Police had seized at Torres’ residence the draft of a decree allowing Bolsonaro’s government to establish a state of defense (an even harsher military intervention than a GLO) over the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The document was quickly dubbed the “coup draft.” This evidence indicates that over the two months between the election results and Lula’s inauguration, which Bolsonaro spent secluded from public life, the former fascistic president was prepared for a possible coup d’état based on the overthrow of the electoral system by the military.
The fact that the armed forces have in the meantime released their report on the elections, falsely claiming to have identified a “relevant risk to the security of the process,” demonstrates their direct involvement in Bolsonaro’s dictatorial plot.
The extension of these investigations is limited from the outset by Lula’s obstinacy in appeasing and getting closer to the military and the far-right political forces that dominate the Brazilian state.
These efforts are being welcomed by the Brazilian bourgeoisie. The right-wing Estado de São Paulo, which acts as a mouthpiece of a section of the armed forces, praised Lula for his conciliation with the pro-coup military. In its lead article on Friday, the newspaper acknowledged that in Lula’s first two terms (from 2003 to 2010) “the three forces had the most spectacular renovation program in decades.”
However, Estado added, today “the commanders also have other, more subjective demands.” These include the guarantee of political autonomy for the armed forces and nonintervention by the government in the curricula of military schools, which extol the military coup of 1964 and the two-decades long brutal dictatorship that it imposed upon Brazil.
Referring to the political significance of today’s meeting between Lula and the military, Estado described it as “a pact of coexistence.”
The PT’s response to the violent fascist threats that have emerged in its first weeks in office have a purely reactionary character. At the same time that it seeks to balance itself in power by leveraging the strength of the military—which can only fuel the potential for a future coup—the Lula government is using these threats to declare any infringement upon capitalist profit interests impossible.
This week, the minister of economy, and one of the main leaders of the PT, Fernando Haddad, participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos. On the sidelines of the event, Haddad told the Financial Times that the recent attack in Brasilia demonstrated that “the opposition to Lula will be made of extremists” and, consequently, that “the speed of the implementation of our program will need to be considered very carefully ... as to avoid being the target of fake news and rioting.”
In other words, Haddad announced to the billionaires present at Davos that they have nothing to fear from the PT government in Brazil. Clarifying the practical meaning of his words, the minister declared: “It is not easy to raise taxes on rich people because a lot of congressmen have wealth and income . . . We have to start to change the mindset of people first.”
Next to taxing the richest, the main social promise of the PT presidential campaign was to raise the minimum wage in Brazil. Last week, Haddad announced that even the meager 18 real (US$3.46) increase in the monthly minimum wage—currently set at1,302 reais (US$250)—cannot be met this year.
Under conditions of soaring inflation, exploding social inequality and widespread hunger in Brazil, the supposedly “left-wing” PT government is orienting itself, already in its first weeks in office, to raising military spending and freezing social spending. In the name of appeasing fascist forces and the military, the pro-capitalist PT government is paving the way for an explosion of working class fury.
Under these conditions, the unions and the pseudo-left parties have renewed their support for this anti-working class government. Also on Wednesday, Lula received representatives of the different Brazilian trade union federations. While the trade unionists “expressed solidarity with the government,” Lula promised to establish new means of financing the unions.
A particularly criminal role was played by the pseudo-left trade union federation CSP-Conlutas, controlled by the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU). Just two days before Lula’s meeting with the military command, the PSTU unionists demanded massive federal investments in the defense industry, fraudulently presenting the proposal as a means of defending workers’ jobs.
The militarist turn of the PT and the pseudo-left in Brazil is intimately connected to the drive toward a third world imperialist war.
In his Wednesday interview, Lula was asked about the similarities between the far-right movement promoted by Bolsonaro in Brazil and that of his ally and political mentor, Donald Trump, in the United States. The PT president admitted the global character of the phenomenon, stating that “everywhere a far-right grouping is being born.”
As a reaction to this global political threat, Lula said: “I’ve already talked to French people, Spanish people, German people. We need to unite the progressive and democratic people of the world to have a meeting so that we can establish a confrontational action to prevent the resurgence of Nazism or fascism.”
In particular, he pointed to his meetings scheduled in the coming weeks with US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as key arenas to elaborate an “anti-fascist” political strategy.
All the countries named by Lula are NATO members, engaged in escalating the proxy war against Russia, employing openly fascist forces such as the Azov Battalion in Ukraine. In particular, Biden and Scholz, heads of US and German imperialism, are responsible for this criminal war, which has unleashed the largest military confrontation since World War II.
The militaristic campaign, the deepening of capitalist attacks and the covering up the developing fascist forces in the Brazilian state, jointly promoted by the PT and its pseudo-left satellites, require a direct response by the Brazilian working class.
On Wednesday, the Sri Lankan parliament passed the Bureau of Rehabilitation Bill, which gives the army, navy and air force authority to run so-called rehabilitation centres. The legislation will give the increasingly hated regime of President Ranil Wickremesinghe the ability to incarcerate workers, youth and other political opponents in military-operated detention camps.
The bill, which was approved by the national cabinet and presented to parliament by Minister of Justice, Prison Affairs and Constitutional Reforms Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe was passed with 23 votes in favour and 6 votes against. Only 29 MPs were present in the 225-seat parliament for the vote.
Parliamentarians from the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) voted for the bill with MPs from the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) opposing it.
Despite the rhetorical criticisms by SJB MPs during the debate, less than five of the party’s 54 parliamentarians were in parliament during the vote.
Minister of Justice, Prison Affairs and Constitutional Reforms Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe. [Photo: Justice Media Division]
The original version of the bill was presented to parliament on September 23 but challenged by petitions filed by civil society activists and opposition MPs in the Supreme Court. The court ruled the bill to be “unconstitutional in its entirety,” an unprecedented finding in the judicial body’s recent history.
The judges decreed that most of the contravening clauses required endorsement by a two-thirds majority of the parliament and that clauses had to be approved by a national referendum. The court’s main concern was with provisions allowing the government to send “ex-combatants,” “violent and extremist groups,” and “any other groups of persons” to the military-run rehabilitation centres. The court suggested that the bill be amended to remove these clauses so it could be passed without a two-thirds parliamentary majority and a referendum.
From the outset, the government’s new law has nothing to do with “rehabilitating” drug addicts but was to incarcerate workers, youth and political opponents indefinitely, and without any judicial determination, in military-run centres.
Presenting its new version of the bill to parliament, the government claimed it had amended the bill in line with the court’s suggestions and had limited it to “drug dependent persons” and “other persons as provided for by the law.”
As pointed out in the parliamentary debate this week, insertion of the phrase “other persons identified by law” introduces a vague and unidentified category. No clear answer was given in the parliament to a question about whether “identified by law” meant a “judicial determination” or not. This leaves wide open the possibility of subsequent amendments to broaden the scope and application of this repressive law.
Government MPs and cabinet ministers regularly refer to the April–July 2022 mass uprising against former President Rajapakse, making clear that their intention is to use the law for the “rehabilitation” of political activists.
Amnesty International voiced its opposition to the legislation on Thursday, describing it as a “significant blow to human rights.” It noted that the bill enables “involuntary ‘rehabilitation’ through use of force” and “will put at risk the life and health of people who use drugs.”
In fact, the military-run centres will not be drug rehabilitation centres but legalised torture chambers used for political purposes. Even with the amendments suggested by the Supreme Court, anyone sent to these facilities will be subjected to forced labour and the use of “minimum force” and “authorised” narcotics to regulate their behaviour.
As Amnesty International and international health experts have pointed out, the rehabilitation of drug dependent people requires individualised programs designed by professional psychologists, psychiatrists and other health experts, and community-based voluntary treatments, not soldiers and a military with a long history of gross human rights abuses.
Entrance to the Kandakadu Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre. [Photo: Facebook]
The plight of inmates in existing government-run rehabilitation centres makes clear that these institutions are forced labour camps. Several uprisings and riots have erupted in these centres in the recent past.
Last June, a 36-year-old inmate of the Kandakadu rehabilitation centre was beaten to death by soldiers, following angry protests over unsafe coronavirus conditions. Hundreds of inmates escaped from the rehabilitation centre during the protest. One of the escapees later told the press, “We were sent here to be reformed. But they are not treating us. They are killing us.”
While some soldiers were arrested over their violent attacks on inmates, under the new legislation military officers are given blanket immunity from prosecution for “anything done in good faith in the exercise, performance or discharge of any power, duty or function imposed or conferred on the Bureau.”
Wickremesinghe is rapidly bolstering the state apparatus, acutely aware of the rising working-class opposition to its International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated austerity.
Having come to power after Rajapakse was ousted, Wickremesinghe mobilised the police and military to crackdown on anti-government protesters, arresting and detaining hundreds. He also used the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) to arrest student leaders including Inter-University Student Federation convener Wasantha Mudalige who has now been in detention for over five months.
Wickremesinghe has kept the military on alert throughout the country and uses the Essential Services Act to ban industrial action and protests by electricity, health and petroleum workers.
The working class, however, has challenged these repressive measures, with strike and protests. These includes a one-day strike by Telecom and Insurance workers against privatisation and a national postal workers’ strike against cuts in overtime payments in December. In early January health workers walked out on strike to demand wage rises and cuts in high interest rates on personal loans. This year there have been demonstrations virtually every day throughout the country, including in rural areas, and protests by thousands of students against the government’s repressive measures.
Students and youths protesting in Colombo to demand the release of student leaders, 2 November 2022. [Photo: WSWS]
During Wednesday’s parliamentary debate, opposition MPs criticised the government’s “undue hurry” about the new legislation and voiced concerns about it being used against social activists, but did not oppose the central thrust of the legislation.
SJB MP Sarath Fonseka, a former Sri Lankan Army commander said: “We have no questions [about the bill], if there’s no political suppression from this bill.” In other words, if the government gives a meaningless “assurance” to that effect, the SJB is ready to support it.
Opposition parties, such as the SJB and JVP, when in power, have a record of backing state repression against the working class and the rural masses.
