Zelensky government shaken by political crisis as NATO prepares escalation of war with Russia

Jason Melanovski & Clara Weiss

As NATO is preparing a major escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine, the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is gripped by an intense crisis. On Tuesday, top officials including Zelensky’s top adviser, six deputy ministers and five regional governors resigned or were dismissed by the Cabinet of Ministers amid widespread corruption allegations.

Kyrylo Timoshenko, Zelensky’s deputy head of office, was the highest-ranking official to resign. Timoshenko was responsible for media content within the Zelensky regime. While no reason was given for his resignation, Timoshenko had previously been accused of using expensive cars donated to the Ukrainian government in order to evacuate civilians for his own personal use.

Earlier in December of 2022, Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda spotted Timoshenko driving around in a $100,000 Porsche Taycan amidst martial law. 

Reports have also emerged that the five dismissed regional governors were forced to resign due to their ties with the outgoing Timoshenko.

Earlier on Monday, Ukraine’s Deputy Infrastructure Minister Vasyl Lozinskyi was fired and detained by police after being accused of accepting a bribe worth $400,000 for the purchase of generators. Russian missile strikes have caused widespread blackouts in recent months, leaving millions without power and access to critical infrastructure.

Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov has also been implicated in a corruption scandal, after reports emerged that the defense ministry signed a contract to procure food for the military at inflated prices two to three times higher than store prices. 

Reznikov claimed those prices were a “technical mistake” and has remained in his position so far. However, his deputy, Viacheslav Shapovalov tendered his resignation. As defense minister, Reznikov is a central figure in the war. A little over a week ago, Reznikov openly declared that “Ukraine is a member of NATO de facto.”

In an address Tuesday night, Zelensky tried to present the purge of his government as part of an effort to fight “corruption” and announced that government officials would be banned from traveling abroad for vacation or nonofficial purposes. Zelensky also indicated that more firings may be coming. He warned that he had “made personnel decisions” involving “ministries, regional governments, law enforcement agencies and other departments.”

David Arakhamia, the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, warned in a Telegram post, “Officials at all levels have been constantly warned through official and unofficial channels: focus on the war, help the victims, reduce bureaucracy and stop doing dubious business. Many of them have actually listened, but some, unfortunately, did not,” he said.

“If it doesn’t work in a civilized way, it will be done according to the laws of wartime. This applies both to recent purchases of generators and to fresh scandals in the ministry of defense.”

Prior to the invasion by Russia in February 2022, government procurement scams were a favorite of the Ukrainian oligarchy with both former President Petro Poroshenko and former Interior Minister Arsen Avakov implicated in similar scandals. While such scandals are pitched as part of the “fight against corruption” as Ukraine seeks entrance to NATO and the EU, in reality such scandals are above all a mode of internal warfare between the various factions of the Ukrainian oligarchy. In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine 122 out of 180 in its list of most corrupt countries. 

Whatever the fraudulent nature of Zelensky’s claims to be fighting corruption, the revelations indicate that the crisis of the Zelensky government is not least of all fueled by growing social discontent within the population. They leave no doubt that the corrupt oligarchy that has emerged out of the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy is shamelessly using a significant portion of the tens of billions of dollars that are flooding the country for NATO’s war against Russia in order to further enrich itself.

Meanwhile, 8 million out of Ukraine’s pre-war population of 39 million have fled the country and another 8 million have been internally displaced. Within Ukraine, 11.4 million have only “insufficient food consumption,” an increase of over 3 million over the the past three months, according to the World Food Program. Over one in five children (22.9 percent) in the country are now suffering from chronic malnutrition.

There are also indications that the Ukrainian military is in a state of crisis. Ukraine has suffered immense casualties during the war with US chief of staff Mark Milley indicating that 200,000 soldiers have either died or been wounded on both sides last November. Russia’s population is more than three times larger than that of Ukraine.

News reports suggest that Ukrainian forces are losing ground to Russia in Bakhmut, where the main fighting is now taking place. On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a bill into law that imposes draconian penalties on soldiers for deserting and disobeying military orders, and significantly undermines their right to legal defense.

The government reshuffle comes just one week after several top officials of the country’s Interior Ministry were killed in a helicopter crash. Among them was Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky, a close ally of Zelensky and key figure in the wartime leadership. Also last week, Zelensky’s former adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, one of the most prominent faces of the war, was forced to resign. Arestovych had been publicly attacked by the military and the far right, as well as Zelensky himself, after he suggested on live television the destruction of a residential building in the city of Dnipro that killed 46 people was caused by Ukrainian air defense and not a Russian missile, contradicting the official line of the Ukrainian government.

Following his dismissal, Arestovych stated publicly that, in his view, Ukraine was unlikely to win the war and acknowledged that as a government official he had purposely misrepresented the real state of the war as going in Ukraine’s favor. Arestovych also suggested that the very existence of the Ukrainian state was in real jeopardy, again contradicting official propaganda.

The crisis of the Zelensky government has been unfolding as top US and NATO officials were touring Kiev and the major European powers involved in the war, in order to prepare the most reckless and significant escalation of the war with Russia to date.

In an indication that the ouster of the officials was motivated at least in part by Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to get more heavy weaponry from NATO, the New York Times, acting as the semi-official mouthpiece for the Pentagon and CIA, wrote that “the removal of the officials, coming amid almost daily pleas from Ukraine for more Western support, suggested an effort by Mr. Zelensky to clean house and to try to reassure Ukraine’s allies that his government would show zero tolerance for graft.”

Over the past weeks, the Zelensky government has been pushing to obtain Leopard 2 tanks from the German government and the Times acknowledged this has played into the mass dismissals. Later on Tuesday, the German government announced that it would send the Leopard 2 tanks and allow other countries to do the same. Reuters also reported that the US government is considering to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine.

Coming on Ukraine’s war plans that are worked out directly with NATO, Zelensky’s adviser Andriy Yermak declared that Ukraine was preparing for a war that would last several more years and require hundreds of tanks and billions—if not trillions—more in foreign aid. “We need tanks—not 10-20, but several hundred,” Yermark wrote on the Telegram app. “Our goal is [restoring] the borders of 1991 and punishing the enemy, who will pay for their crimes.”

Mass protests grow against Israel’s far-right government

Jean Shaoul

The third round of mass protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to give his fascistic government absolute powers and neuter the judicial system saw increased numbers of people participating across Israel’s main cities.  

Around 120,000 people took part in demonstrations in Tel Aviv Saturday evening, including several thousand attending one called by the Jewish-Arab activist group Standing Together. At least 7,000 rallied opposite the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, more than 6,000 in Haifa, 1,500 in Be’er Sheva and hundreds in Herzliya and Rosh Pina.

Israelis carry torches at a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his his far-right government that his opponents say threaten democracy and freedoms, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

The numbers testify to the anger and concern over the trajectory of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history that took power at the end of last year. However, the leading lights of the former “government of change” and its supporters are seeking to maintain control of the movement, prioritizing the government’s plans to weaken the High Court over other broader social, economic and political issues that are also animating the movement.

The new government, made up of Netanyahu’s Likud party, the fascistic and racist parties Religious Zionism, Jewish Power and Noam, and the reactionary religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, is committed to Jewish supremacy and apartheid rule as embodied in the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law. This includes the permanent seizure of the Palestinian territories; Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa Mosque; the rollback of already circumscribed anti-discrimination measures through sweeping changes to Israel’s legal system; and stepped-up police and military repression against the Palestinians and workers, Jewish and Palestinian, in Israel itself.

The economic costs of implementing such an agenda mean the gutting of education, health and what remains of Israel’s public services, under conditions where 21 percent of the population live in poverty and 28 percent of children suffer from food insecurity.

Implementing this agenda is bound up with Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plans to curtail the High Court’s ability to strike down laws and allow parliament to override any such rulings. As well as appointing judges, the government would abolish the post of attorney general. This would pave the way to end Netanyahu’s trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases and the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence. More importantly, it would speed up settlement construction in preparation for annexing much of the West Bank.

The protest movement opposing the government’s power grab is led by the same forces that led the 2020-21 Saturday evening protests against the previous Netanyahu government under the slogan “Anyone but Bibi”, following his indictment. The beneficiaries of that movement were Israel’s misnamed “government of change” that was largely made up of ministers that at one time or another had served under Netanyahu. It continued seamlessly Netanyahu’s policies of expanding the settlements in the West Bank, suppressing Palestinian opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, lifting all remaining measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus and placing the full burden of the costs of these policies and the impact of global inflation on the working class.

With no political vehicle to provide a progressive solution to the crisis, Israel’s far-right forces—like their counterparts elsewhere—were able to take advantage of the political vacuum and help Netanyahu return to power with a 64-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, ending years of fragile majority rule.    

An array of speakers associated with the opposition bloc, led by former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, addressed the main Tel Aviv rally. Lapid, who attended the protests for the first time, focused on defending Israel’s reputation and its democratic pretensions and said nothing about the broader social questions animating the protests.

He said, “What you see here today is a demonstration in favour of the state. People who love the country have come to defend its democracy, its courts, the idea of a common life and a common good.” Other speakers included the former Likud Defence Minister and army chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon and the international prizewinning Israeli novelist David Grossman.

Senior executives in Israel’s high-tech industry have declared their support for a one hour “warning strike” Tuesday morning amid warnings by two former governors of the Bank of Israel that the government’s efforts to weaken the Israeli judicial system “could deal a severe blow to Israel’s economy and its citizens.” It followed warnings by Maxim Rybnikov of Standard & Poor’s that the government’s plans could jeopardize Israel’s credit rating and deter investment.

The rally was dominated by Israel’s more affluent, secular layers carrying the national flag. People  carried banners such as “Criminal Government” and “The End of Democracy”, “Our Children will not Live in a Dictatorship” and “Israel, We Have A Problem.” and handwritten placards reading “No to dictatorship.” 

But others expressed broader concerns. Noya Matalon, 24, a law student at Tel Aviv University, told the Guardian, “The last big protest movement in Israel was about taking Netanyahu down, but it’s not a matter of right and left any more. Everyone – Arabs, Jews, even people who agree we need some reforms to the judicial system – everyone is saying they are scared.”

Musician Ollie Danon said, “I believe the supreme court does need reform. Its rulings usually support the occupation [of the Palestinian territories], and somehow now it’s the left wing who are out protesting to defend it. It’s all absurd.”

As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) pointed out, the planned changes to the judicial system, including limiting the right of public petitioners to appeal to the High Court against infringements of human rights and the enactment of an override clause, would seriously affect hundreds of organisations defending vulnerable groups. The fascistic forces in Netanyahu’s government have railed against such groups, branding them as “dangerous and hostile,” declaring human rights groups an “existential threat to Israel.”

Educators and education chiefs in local government have declared their refusal to cooperate with the educational program department, now under the direction of the homophobic Noam minister Avi Maoz—with 170 mayors and council leaders refusing to implement the government’s decision to fund ultra-Orthodox schools.

In Jerusalem, where more than a third of its near one million residents are Palestinian and two thirds of the remainder are religious or right-wing Jewish Israelis, at least 7,000 rallied opposite the President’s Residence. Ha’aretz reported the presence of many supporters of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem who are threatened with eviction. They held placards in Hebrew and Arabic to highlight the fact that the struggle for Israeli democracy is bound up with the struggle against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, illegally occupied—and annexed in the case of East Jerusalem—since the 1967 Arab Israeli war.

The protest’s organisers, Bayit Meshutaf (Shared Home), built the Jerusalem rally on the slogan “Right and left against destruction—protecting our shared home,” inviting speakers from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the opposition bloc, as well as liberal activists.

Netanyahu has no intention of backing down as the conflict between his government and the court escalates. On Wednesday, Netanyahu and his far-right allies were enraged when the High Court accepted petitions and disqualified his appointment of Shas leader Arieh Dery to head the Health and Interior Ministries. The court branded it “unreasonable” and unconstitutional given Dery’s three criminal convictions, including a prison sentence, last year’s guilty plea to tax evasion and his pledge to withdraw from public life as part of that plea bargain. 

Netanyahu was forced to fire Dery. But describing him as an “anchor of experience, intelligence and responsibility,” he told Dery, “The High Court decision ignores the will of the nation, and I am intending to find every possible legal means to allow you to contribute to the country.”

On Friday, Defence Minister and Likud member Yoav Galant ordered the removal of the unauthorized Or Haim outpost in the West Bank, after Netanyahu backed its eviction as a token concession to US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who was visiting Israel.

Sullivan’s visit came days before Washington and Tel Aviv launched their largest ever joint military exercise, put together with unprecedented speed in just two months. It was designed to send a warning to Iran and underscore the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel, despite the new government’s fascistic character. The joint exercise, named Juniper Oak, includes 100 US aircraft with fighters, bombers and refueling aircraft flying in unison with 42 Israeli aircraft, as well as the USS George H. W. Bush carrier strike group.

Peru protests continue in face of police state repression

Andrea Lobo

Protests in Peru’s capital continued into a fifth day on Monday as the demonstrators who traveled from across the country for the “takeover of Lima” have been brutally repressed through mass arrests, the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings, and the deployment of armored vehicles.

Protesters march through Lima [Photo by Candy Sotomayor / CC BY-SA 4.0]

As the US-backed regime of Dina Boluarte, which was installed in a coup in early December, met last Thursday afternoon with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the police and military carried out a renewed onslaught against the peaceful demonstrators in Lima and elsewhere in the country, resulting in at least one death that day in Arequipa.

Several more protesters have been killed since, as the police continue to use live ammunition. There have been 56 confirmed deaths of civilians and one of a policeman, and hundreds have been injured. Other reports have placed the number killed by the security forces at 62 or more.

The epicenter of the protests remains the impoverished south. The largest demonstrations and most persistent roadblocks are taking place in the cities of Arequipa—the second largest after Lima—Juliaca, Ayacucho, Cusco and Tacna. While sporadic roadblocks have been reported in La Libertad and Amazonas, as well as a fire in an oil pipeline close to the Ecuadorian border, the north of the country and the formal mining, energy and industrial workers have not participated en masse in the protests.

The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) veered from initially recognizing the Boluarte regime to feigning support for the demonstrations and calling a series of “national strikes.” At the same time, however, the trade unions that belong to it have kept workers in all key sectors on the job, showing that they stand on the regime’s side of the barricades in defending the profit interests of the transnational corporations and the oligarchy.

The heroism of the protesters notwithstanding, the limitations of seeking to disrupt economic activities and topple the regime through roadblocks, airport occupations and scattered marches are becoming clear. By their very nature, these tactics can be isolated and crushed by the armed forces. Similar tactics were followed—in some cases more massively than in Peru—in Nicaragua in 2018, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Honduras in 2019, Paraguay in 2021 and Colombia in 2021-2022, to the same effect.

As a result, the leadership of the Boluarte regime, the military and intelligence apparatus and, undoubtedly, behind them the US Embassy, felt confident enough to carry out the highly provocative move of crashing through the gates of Lima’s San Marcos National University with an armored vehicle and invading the campus with hundreds of heavily armed police on Saturday.

At the emblematic campus of the most important university in the country—and the oldest in the hemisphere—police arrested more than 200 students and demonstrators who had traveled from the interior and were being sheltered by the students. Those arrested at the university, including a mother and her eight-year-old child, were treated as “terrorists,” forced to lie on the ground before screaming police in scenes reminiscent of the darkest days of the Peruvian dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, or even Chile in 1973.

The continued defiance of this murderous police-military violence by demonstrators drawn from the most impoverished and heavily indigenous regions of Peru has won the attention and admiration of workers and youth all over the world. But bravery is not enough. Despite being the largest wave of demonstrations in Peru in recent memory, without a revolutionary program and leadership, it cannot achieve the fundamental political and social aspirations driving the mass popular anger that is gripping the country.

There are several fundamental aspects of the current mobilizations that workers in Peru and internationally need to assess. Firstly, the protests are part of a global resurgence of the class struggle triggered by the policies of ruling elites. Everywhere, their aim is to intensify the exploitation of the working class and plunder semi-colonial countries like Peru to sustain the record profits of the financial and corporate oligarchy in US and Europe, pay for the repeated financial bailouts of the rich, and feed the US-NATO war drive for hegemony against Russia and China.

The Boluarte regime does not merely represent the Peruvian oligarchy, but it primarily oversees the interests of US and European imperialism. Washington and the European Union are working, both openly and behind the scenes, to bolster the regime’s ability to “pacify” the country to safeguard the continued extraction of the strategic mineral wealth of Peru.

On January 9, as the police was carrying out a massacre of demonstrators in Juliaca, killing 19 demonstrators and injuring over 100 more, the US Embassy congratulated the Boluarte government for confiscating drugs, declaring that the State Department is “glad to collaborate with the National Police in Peru, providing advanced training in the fight against drugs and organized crime.”

In fact, the Biden administration has openly poured millions in aid into the Peruvian repressive apparatus during the crackdown and supported the “state of emergency,” which criminalizes the protests and involves the deployment of the military.

Last Thursday, the first day of the “takeover of Lima,” the US ambassador in Lima and CIA veteran Lisa Kenna met with Boluarte’s Energy and Mining Ministry in a “high-level dialogue between Peru and the United States on the subjects of mining development.”

The ministry officially “thanked the support of the American government in the subjects of mining and energy and reasserted the determination of the national government” to expand natural gas production and develop petrochemical production in the south of the country, the epicenter of the protests. Peru’s natural gas exports have almost doubled during the war in Ukraine and have gone primarily to Europe as an alternative to Russian energy.

Washington’s overriding concern over the Peruvian mass protests centers on their shutdown of massive mining operations, such as those of Glencore in Antapaccay and MMG’s Las Bambas facility, and the continuing blockade of key highways linking the mines to port facilities. While the US Embassy issued a carefully worded statement lamenting the mass killing of protesters, behind the scenes the Pentagon and CIA are collaborating in the bloody repression in the defense of profit interests.

The leaderless character of the demonstrations makes them vulnerable to repression and also to their manipulation by sections of the regionalist and indigenous elites that belong to the venal bourgeoisie and have responded to the discrediting of the old traditional parties by advancing their own political platforms to negotiate corrupt deals with the mining companies and public contracts. The rise of President Pedro Castillo was the result of these processes.

Few Peruvians see the depiction by the regime and the media of the demonstrators as “terrorists” and pawns of the now defunct Sendero Luminoso Maoist guerrillas as anything but fascistic hogwash. However, support for guerrillaism, along with the promotion of the indigenous nationalism of Mariátegui, bourgeois nationalism and syndicalism by the Stalinist Communist Party, the Maoist Communist Party-Bandera Roja and its split Patria Roja have had devastating effects on the socialist consciousness of workers in Peru.

In the name of left-wing politics and socialism, these organizations and their Morenoite and Pabloite partners worked for decades to channel social opposition behind one or another bourgeois politician, from the nationalist military dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado, and broad bourgeois coalitions like United Left (IU) in the early 1980s, to the pseudo-left Broad Front and Nuevo Perú in the last 15 years.

Most recently, employing the politics of lesser-evilism with respect to the far-right Fujimorists, the Stalinists have endorsed the right-wing former presidents Ollanta Humala, Alejandro Toledo, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Martín Vizcarra and Pedro Castillo. These repeated betrayals are responsible for politically disarming the working class and paving the way for the effective return of the Fujimorists to power behind the Boluarte coup regime.

Portuguese teachers mount nationwide strike

Alejandro López

A nationwide teachers strike is underway in Portugal amid a rising tide of class struggles in Portugal and internationally, three years into the COVID-19 pandemic and as NATO wages war on Russia in Ukraine. Last Monday, teachers began an 18-day strike called by eight union confederations, which had previously rejected calls for strikes, claiming it was “not an appropriate time.”

They called a strike under mounting pressure from teachers who held one of the largest protests since the Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal’s far-right regime in 1974. Called by the Union of All-Education Professionals (STOP), up to 100,000 teachers, school staff and parents marched in Lisbon. They waved banners demanding “respect,” “dignity in the profession,” “a public school system (that works),” calling on Socialist Party (PS) Education Minister João Costa to resign.

The PS government is threatening to ban the strike. “What is happening is that there is a strike one day at one hour and the next day at another. In our opinion, this does not respect basic principles of what a strike should be,” Costa said. This echoes the PS attack on the 2017-2018 Portuguese nurses strikes, which it attacked by declaring that crowd-funding of strikes is illegal.

Teachers are demanding an end to professional instability, precarity and unpaid overtime, calling for more hiring and higher wages. Teachers have lost 20 percent of their purchasing power since 2009. Teachers are also demanding to retire without penalty after 36 years of service, since obtaining a permanent job as a teacher can take decades of work.

The average monthly salary for teachers in the lowest pay band is roughly €1,100 ($1,191.08), and even those in the highest pay band are typically under €2,000. Low wages have been compounded by the skyrocketing cost of living triggered by EU bank bailouts and the NATO war in Ukraine. Inflation reached 9.6 percent in 2022, and food prices rose 18.9 percent.

The public schools have not recovered from EU austerity imposed after the global 2008 capitalist crisis. In 2011, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank bailed out Portugal with €78 billion. These funds, handed over to the banks, were repaid with a decade of austerity imposed by the entire political establishment: the right-wing Social Democratic Party (PSD), the PS, and PS minority governments backed by the middle-class Pabloite Left Bloc (BE) and the Stalinist Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).

Now, Portugal’s competing union bureaucracies are blocking a broader struggle against the PS, preventing united action by teachers and other layers of workers, and cutting them off from workers struggles internationally. Several unions are calling rolling strikes, dividing teachers across different regions, while STOP supports an indefinite strike but refuses to broaden the struggle.

STOP emerged after decades of union collaboration with successive governments to impose cuts to public education. Created in 2018, STOP poses as an “apolitical” alternative to traditional trade unions. It describes itself as a “non-sectarian, non-partisan and truly democratic union,” committed to “never signing important commitments/agreements with the government without democratically listening to the teaching class first.”

STOP organized a protest of 20,000 teachers in Lisbon last December and called the current strike. STOP does not, however, offer an alternative to the old union bureaucracies and explicitly refuses to broaden the strike into a struggle against NATO war and the PS government. It is led by André Pestana, a former BE leader who has founded the pseudo-left Movimiento Alternativa Socialista (MAS).

On Facebook, STOP says that while teachers want to broaden the struggle, STOP and other unions cannot work for this. It states: “The overwhelming majority of strike/union commissions agreed to appeal to civil society solidarity, as we did on January 14 for March 1 (without specifically inviting any professional sector).”

In reality, strikes are erupting in one economic sector after another. In November, thousands of Portugal’s doctors, nurses, teachers and civil servants went on a one-day strike to demand wage increases. They were opposing the paltry wage increases of 3.6 percent for the public sector in 2023. Judicial staff are set to strike from February 15 to March 15 over wages.

At Volkswagen’s Autoeuropa assembly plant near Lisbon, one of Portugal’s top exporters, 5,100 workers struck. The union bureaucracy imposed a 5.2 percent wage increase, effectively cutting real wages by 4 percent.

Starting in December, port administration workers and staff at the veterinary and sanitary inspections authority (DGAV) struck for higher wages. Rail workers also went on strike, demanding bonuses to compensate for falling purchasing power in 2022. This forced the cancellation of over 1,000 train services.

In coming weeks, cabin crew at state-owned airline TAP will strike to demand higher wages, better working conditions and against an EU-approved €3.2 billion bailout plan for TAP. This plan would downsize its fleet, cut more than 2,900 jobs, and slash wages up to 25 percent.

In 2019, they backed a PS deployment of the army to break a nationwide truckers strike, as fuel stations ran dry. The BE endorsed the PS use of the army to break the strike, with BE leader Catarina Martins stating: “In certain fundamental sectors, it is understandable that there are minimum levels of service; in other sectors it is not understandable. … The government will have to do whatever is essential for the country to function.”

In the autumn of 2021, mass strikes erupted across Portugal of rail workers, teachers, pharmacists, subway workers, nurses, firefighters, and civil servants. The PCP and BE did not, however, seek to mobilize the workers against the minority PS government, which they were supporting in parliament. Instead, they sought to prop up the PS by forcing new elections.

They suddenly voted against the PS budget, which they had previously supported. This was not because they opposed EU austerity. Both the BE and PCP had loyally supported all the PS austerity budgets since the PS took power in 2015. Their vote against the PS budget triggered a government crisis and new elections, in which the PS narrowly eked out a victory against the PSD.

The PS cannot be fought on an apolitical, trade-union basis. STOP claims Portugal’s right-wing PSD president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, can protect the strike from the PS. It hails de Sousa as “guarantor of the regular functioning of democratic institutions … Therefore, the President must have a clear position in the face of this attack on the right to strike (which is a constitutional right).” But the PSD is a right-wing tool of finance capital, as hostile to strikers as the PS.

Death toll in Monterey Park, California dance studio massacre climbs to 11

Jacob Crosse

A critically wounded victim injured during Saturday night’s Monterey Park, California, massacre died at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center on Monday, driving the death toll from the mass shooting up to 11.

In a statement issued Monday by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services on behalf of the hospital, the county said that one of the three victims at the hospital remains in serious condition while two other patients are recovering. At least three other victims are still being treated in local hospitals according to media reports.

People pay their respects outside Star Dance Studio for the victims killed in Saturday's mass shooting in Monterey Park, California Monday, January 23, 2023. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

Twenty people were shot at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio Saturday night amid Lunar New Year celebrations being carried out by the predominately Asian community east of downtown Los Angeles. As of this writing, Saturday’s killings mark the deadliest mass shooting in California since the 2018 Thousand Oaks shooting which left 12 people dead, and the largest mass shooting since the slaughter of 19 children and two school teachers in Uvalde, Texas, last year.

In a press conference Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he met with some of the victims of the shooting at a local hospital. Newsom described talking with a victim in the ICU with “shattered bones … that might not make it.”

“And while that young man is in the bed with shattered bones, he’s saying, ‘How many days do I have to be here because I can’t afford this hospital? How many days am I going to be here because I’m scared I’m gonna lose my job in the warehouse? Can you help me?’” quickly adding, “So I’ve met with the victims and their families. And I hope we remember those folks too. Not just the people that died.”

Despite Newsom and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature maintaining a supermajority, California, the fourth-largest economy in the world, like every other state in the US does not have single-payer guaranteed medical coverage for every resident.

On Monday, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner identified two of the women killed in the shooting at the Star Dance Studio; My Nhan, 65, and Lilan Li, 63. The coroner said that all the deceased were in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

In a statement put out by the Nhan and Quan family, My Nhan, affectionately known as “Mymy,” was described as a “loving aunt, sister, daughter and friend. Mymy was our biggest cheerleader.”

“She spent so many years going to the dance studio in Monterey Park on weekends. It’s what she loved to do. But unfairly, Saturday was her last dance.”

On Sunday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reported that Huu Can Tran, 72, was the chief suspect in the shooting at the Star Dance studio. According to police, late Sunday morning Tran was found dead in a van from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Torrance, roughly 30 miles from the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio, where Tran had attempted a second mass shooting after fleeing from the Monterey Park shooting. Police said on Sunday that they recovered a pistol in the van where Tran’s body was found.

That Saturday’s killings did not result in significantly more fatalities is due entirely to the heroic actions of those participating in the event at the Lai Lai dance hall.

In an interview with Good Morning America, 26-year-old Brandon Tsay confirmed that as the evening’s celebrations were wrapping up at the Lai Lai Ballroom in Alhambra, Tsay saw the gunman, later identified as Tran, walk into the studio and begin “looking around the room” as if he were “looking for targets.”

Tsay, who helps run the ballroom with his family, said he saw Tran start “prepping the weapon and something came over me. I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him. I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died.” Tsay, who at the time was not aware of the shootings at the Star Dance Studio, described struggling to disarm Tran: “He was hitting me across the face, bashing the back of my head.”

Tsay, covered in bruises, described taking the gun away from Tran at which point he told Tran to “get the hell out of here” or else he would shoot him. “I thought he would run away, but he was just standing there contemplating whether to fight or to run,” Tsay recalled. “I really thought I would have to shoot him and he came at me. This is when he turned around and walked out the door, jogged back to his van. I immediately called police with the gun still in my hand.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, who identified Tran as the shooter Sunday, said Tran “intended to kill more people.” Referring to the actions of Tsay, Luna said, “They saved lives. This could have been much worse.”

The gun used in Saturday’s killings was identified by Luna on Monday as the Military Armament Corporation Model 10, or MAC-10, 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The weapon used by Tran had an extended magazine, capable of holding up to 30 rounds. Originally designed for the US military in 1964, the civilian version of the weapon was included in the 1994 US Assault Weapons Ban, which expired in 2004.

In a Sunday press conference, Luna said that he believes the weapon was not legal to own in California, which has some of the more restrictive gun laws in the United States.

Police have yet to release a motive in the shooting, however, on Monday it was revealed that Tran, who lived in a mobile home retirement community in Hemet, California, over 80 miles from the dance studios, had twice recently visited the Hemet Police Department to report serious allegations against his family members.

According to police, Tran first visited the Hemet Police station on January 7, 2023, and again on January 9, 2023. According to police, in each instance Tran alleged that his family members had stolen money from him and were in fact, trying to poison him. After each visit the police refused to do a follow-up or further investigation, despite the fact that Tran was making serious allegations indicative of either abuse, or a mental health crisis.

On Monday morning investigators executed search warrants on Tran’s home where they said they found more evidence linking him to both dance studios.

An anonymous police source, speaking to Los Angeles magazine, said that the initial investigation appeared to indicate that Tran’s rampage was a severe case of domestic violence. The law enforcement source told the publication that Tran was “looking for his wife.”

“There is increasing evidence this was domestic violence,” the source said.

In an interview with CNN, Tran’s ex-wife, who did not reveal her name and was not one of the victims of Saturday’s shootings, said that she met her ex-husband at the Star Dance Studio and that Tran taught lessons there nightly in the early 2000s. After a brief marriage, Tran’s ex-wife said he filed for divorce in 2005.

She said her husband was not violent, but quick to anger, and that Tran had emigrated from China. She said he lived in the San Gabriel neighborhood, roughly five minutes from the dance studio, for two decades before moving to Hamlin.

Another former friend of Tran’s interviewed by CNN also said that before Tran moved to Hemet, he would go to the dance studio “almost every night.” In another indication of possibly deteriorating mental health, the former friend told CNN that Tran would often complain that other instructors at the dance hall did not like him and said “evil things about him.”

Twenty-three days into the new year, the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun deaths and mass shootings in the United States (characterized as four or more victims, not including the shooter), has recorded 37 mass shootings, or roughly 1.6 per day.

While not technically a “mass shooting,” on Monday in Des Moines, Iowa, at least two students were killed and a teacher remains in critical condition after a shooting at “Starts Right Here,” a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization that provides education to “at-risk” students in the state’s capital.

In a press conference Monday, Sergeant Paul Parizek with the Des Moines Police Department said that three suspects believed to have been involved in the shooting were taken into custody. “The incident was definitely targeted. It was not random,” Praizek said.

South Korean government lifts indoor mask mandate while COVID-19 continues to run rampant

Ben McGrath

The South Korean government of President Yoon Suk-yeol has announced that it will lift the indoor mask mandate to limit the spread of COVID-19 on Monday, January 30. This is despite the fact that the virus continues to run rampant throughout the country, with the official number of cases in the tens of thousands daily.

Health workers check their protective gear outside of a COVID-19 testing center at the Incheon International Airport In Incheon, South Korea, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023. [AP Photo/Lee Jin-man]

Prime Minister Han Deok-su made the announcement on January 20, a day before the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday. The announcement was calculated to encourage people to travel, eat out, and otherwise drop precautions while visiting family, and to promote the lie that the pandemic is all but over. People will only be required to wear masks on public transportation and in hospitals and pharmacies.

The government claims without a shred of scientific evidence that it is safe to end mask-wearing if two of four criteria are met. Those four criteria are a downward trend in new cases, a decline in critically ill patients and deaths, the supposed existence of strong medical response capabilities, and high vaccination rates among high-risk groups. The government claims that all but the fourth criterion have been met.

At the same time, over the past week, the average number of official new cases each day has been approximately 27,000, with a recent slight fall in identified cases due to the holiday and less testing. On average, 35 people have died each day over the same period.

Yet, as experience has shown, a relative fall in cases does not mean that a wave is over or that another wave, with a potentially even more contagious and deadly variant, will not occur. The new, highly infectious and immune evading XBB.1.5 variant is already spreading in South Korea after it was detected in December.

Prime Minister Han’s own words contradicted the claim that it is now safe to remove masks. He said: “The importance of vaccination has grown with the easing of the mask mandate. I strongly advise high-risk people aged 60 or older and the elderly residing in high-risk facilities to get vaccinated as soon as possible.” The question must be asked that if high-risk groups—to say nothing of the very real health threat to other segments of the population—are still at risk, why is the mask mandate being lifted?

The answer lies in the fact that mask-wearing is widely supported in South Korea with the vast majority continuing to wear masks both indoors and outdoors, even with little or no enforcement measures in place. The lifting of the indoor mask mandate, which has been in place for almost the entire pandemic, is meant to sow confusion about the dangers of COVID-19 and encourage the complete resumption of economic activities for the benefit of big business.

The real concern of the government therefore is the economy. The Hyundai Research Institute, a South Korean think tank, released a report on January 19 that the country’s economy would grow only 1.8 percent in 2023, down from the 2.2 percent predicted last year. With fears of a global recession, the population is being put at risk to offset the economic downturn, an agenda embraced by both the ruling People Power Party and the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea.

As of Monday, there have been more than 30 million official cases of COVID-19, in a country with a population of 52 million. Most of these have come since the end of 2021 when the previous administration of Democrat Moon Jae-in initiated the “with COVID” era, declaring that the population would have to live with the deadly and debilitating disease.

These numbers are certainly an undercounting of the true situation. Many people do not seek medical attention after testing positive through at-home testing kits and PCR testing and contact tracing have been largely dismantled, which means that the government has no real idea how many positive cases there currently are.

Since coming to office in May, the Yoon administration continued to promote the lie that the pandemic is over, even as deaths skyrocketed throughout 2022. On October 31, 2021, there were only 2,849 deaths during nearly two years of the pandemic. Since then, 30,386 people have died while “living with COVID,” accounting for 91 percent of all official deaths during the pandemic.

In September, the Ministry of Health and Welfare also stated, “Over the BA.5 wave the highest one-day death count was 122, recorded Sept. 1, which is less than a quarter of the highest one-day death count of 469 recorded March 24 over the BA.1-BA.2 wave.” In other words, dozens or hundreds of deaths a day from a preventable disease is perfectly acceptable to the government.

The number of excess deaths paints an even grimmer picture. According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, between January 2 and October 29 last year, there were 304,931 deaths or approximately 47,000 more deaths than for each of the previous three years. Officially during the same ten months in 2022, there were 23,464 COVID-19 deaths, indicating that the true toll is double the official numbers.

The number of excess deaths includes uncounted COVID deaths as well as those who died from other causes, many of whom were unable to access treatment due to hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID patients.

Addressing a forum last September, Professor Kim Yeong-sam of the Department of Pulmonology at Severance Hospital in Seoul stated that the hospitals have not been allocated additional resources but that existing resources were being shifted, including healthcare staff, to COVID dedicated wards.

“Although hospitals have secured beds, they have made no changes in the treatment system of critical patients. The most crucial point is how to secure a workforce,” Kim stated. “As the large hospitals have no workforce, they have no choice but to reduce the number of general ICUs.” This, Kim pointed out, has led to a rise in excess deaths. “The number of excess deaths is more important than fatality rate, and the number of critical cases is more crucial than sickbed occupancy rate,” he added.

All of this makes clear that the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea, as in other countries, is far from over.

While slashing pensions, Macron demands 40 percent hike in French military budget

Alex Lantier

As he pledges to cut €13 billion per year from pensions, French President Emmanuel Macron aims to raise military spending €118 billion over the next six years. On Friday, speaking at an airbase in Mont-de-Marsan, he announced a nearly 40 percent rise in military spending, to €413 billion in the period of 2024-2030.

France said Wednesday January 4, 2023 it will send French-made AMX-10 RC light tanks to Ukraine, the first tanks from a Western European country, following an afternoon phone call between French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. [AP Photo/Jeremy Bessat/Armee de Terre]

As Macron and all the NATO powers spend billions of euros on waging war on Russia in Ukraine, this plan exposes the ruling elite’s undisguised contempt for public opinion and the social needs of the working class. Macron’s pension cuts are opposed by 80 percent of the French people. Yet he wants to transfer hundreds of billions of euros from retirees to the banks and the military, arguing that further, major escalations of the war are unavoidable.

Such announcements show that stopping the decimation of workers’ living standards by austerity and inflation requires building a movement against NATO imperialist wars.

With NATO teetering on the brink of launching an all-out global war on Russia, Macron demanded that France prepare for further, explosive military escalation and high intensity wars. “We must never be one war late. We must be ahead by one war,” Macron said, insisting that France must be ready for “more brutal and more numerous wars.”

He announced a comprehensive modernisation of the warheads, missile launch systems of France’s nuclear missiles, and an increase in the size of its ballistic-missile submarine fleet. Praising France’s nuclear deterrent program, Macron said: “Deterrence is one issue that makes France a different country in Europe. We are seeing again in Ukraine its vital importance. It deserves the considerable efforts that we devote to it.”

The budget expends enormous resources on the latest methods of spying and drone warfare. Macron announced a 60 percent rise in military intelligence and cyber warfare budgets, increasing France’s fleet of reconnaissance and killer drones, and building new air defense systems to scan for enemy drones, many of which can evade radar. The budget also allows for building a new aircraft carrier, replacing all Mirage jets with newer Rafale fighters and buying large quantities of the new Scorpion armored vehicle.

Macron called for a major increase in the French military-industrial complex’s ability to put out large quantities of heavy weapons for use in overseas wars. Demanding to “build up our stocks of munitions, logistics capacity and support,” he said: “We must be more alert, reinforce national emergency preparedness and have the necessary means for military intervention on little warning, even far from metropolitan France.”

Macron called for France to be able to promptly deploy 20,000 soldiers capable of heavy combined arms operations.

He concluded by boasting that his presidency would entrench the vastly expanded power of the military high command in French public life, regardless of public opinion. Citing the 2019-2023 and 2024-2030 military budgets, Macron said: “Overall, the last two military budget laws will have led to a doubling of our military spending. … These are considerable resources that are amplifying defense spending whose growth is without precedent since five decades.”

This doubling of French military spending—to levels unseen since the era of the bloody 1954-1962 colonial war in Algeria—is, he said, “a profound change that will now be irreversible.”

Macron did not spell this out, but the anti-democratic implications of this statement are self-evident: If workers’ social and political demands interfere with Macron’s “irreversible” decision to shower the high command with hundreds of billions of euros, they must be crushed.

His attempts to present his military build-up as a defensive measure to deter attacks on French soil is thoroughly dishonest. It is belied, first of all, by the fact that he is calling to escalate spending on offensive weapons that are to be deployed overseas, far from France’s borders. Moreover, with the France, like the United States, having declared that it may be the first to use nuclear weapons in a war, Macron’s call for a nuclear build-up does not so much deter as threaten other countries.

It is increasingly clear, moreover, that the conception that a country can reliably deter attacks on its forces and soil by developing nuclear weapons is false. Russia has one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, capable of destroying the entire world many times over. Yet NATO is arming Ukraine, on Russia’s borders, and helping Ukraine launch attacks on Russian-speaking regions such as Crimea, on which Russia maintains armed forces and that Moscow claims as part of Russia.

The NATO war on Russia in Ukraine is the culmination of three decades of NATO wars since the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union. NATO countries were the aggressors in these conflicts, attacking countries like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali in wars that altogether claimed millions of lives. The Russian capitalist regime’s invasion of Ukraine last year was no doubt reactionary. However, it came after a 2014 NATO-backed coup in Kiev installed a far-right regime in Ukraine that attacked Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine on Russia’s borders.

In 2019, Macron publicly criticized US policy towards Russia in The Economist, calling NATO “brain-dead” for risking direct war with Russia and stating: “When the United States is very harsh with Russia, it is a form of governmental, political, and historical hysteria.”

After three years of rising class conflict and economic crisis since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Macron has turned 180 degrees and embraced war with Russia, recently pledging to send Kiev French tanks to attack Russia.

Macron’s pension cuts illustrate how French imperialism’s policy of plunder overseas is inseparable from its drive to plunder the working class at home. The slashing of hundeds of billions of euros from pensions is intended not only to free up resources for French military operations overseas, but also to generate massive profits and tax cuts for major French corporations.

Social media reports have confirmed that provisions in Macron’s pension-cuting law explicitly state that the purpose of cutting pensions is to allow the state to clash corporate tax rates. The passage in question declares: “This curbing of spending will allow, without threatening the objective of controlling the budget deficit, to continue the strategy of cutting mandatory taxes launched in the previous term … It will be pursued notably with the suppression over two years of corporate taxes paid on value added, as specified by the 2023 finances law.”

Spanish Government MAEC-AECID Masters Scholarships 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 10th February 2023

Type: Master

Eligibility: All the applicants of this program (SCHOLARSHIPS AFRICA-MED) must have knowledge of Spanish, meet all the requirements as stipulated in the specific conditions of section 3.1 of Annexure III and present all the documentation required as per section 3.4 of the mentioned Annexure.

Eligible Countries: Countries in  Latin America, Africa and Asia

To be Taken at (Country): Spain

Number of Awards: Not specified

Duration of Award: 9 months

How to Apply: Access to online procedure (requires authentication)

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details