Canada’s governments exploit health care crisis of their own making to press for privatization

Dylan Lubao

Governments across Canada are exploiting the collapse of the public health care system to open the floodgates for its privatization. Almost four decades of brutal spending cuts by provincial and federal governments, followed by three years of the disastrous profits-before-lives response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have left Medicare on life support.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shakes hands with Ontario Premier Doug Ford in Toronto, August 30, 2022. [Photo: Doug Ford/@fordnation]

Ontario Tory Premier Doug Ford announced on January 16 that for-profit clinics will permanently be handed 50 percent of surgical procedures. The list will initially include minor surgeries as well as diagnostic procedures, before expanding to knee and hip replacement surgeries by 2024.

Ford claimed that his government was addressing Ontario’s colossal backlog of surgeries, which had ballooned to one million by mid-2022. This backlog has festered for years, but worsened after provincial governments across the country dropped all pandemic health measures last spring in response to the demands of big business and its instrumentalization of the far-right “Freedom” Convoy to batter down public opposition.

Successive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic have combined with other epidemic diseases like respiratory syncytial virus and the flu to create a “tripledemic,” overwhelming hospitals and pushing more and more scheduled procedures onto waiting lists.

Ford did not provide a shred of evidence that for-profit clinics would reverse the decline in public health, because no such evidence exists. A quick glance at the United States, where the private sector plays the dominant role, shows that health care run for profit has been a total catastrophe for the health and lives of ordinary working people.

Provincial and territorial governments from coast to coast are currently developing or discussing similar privatization plans. They cynically claim that public health care systems, which they have intentionally underfunded for many years, simply cannot cope with the present level of illness and death.

In Quebec, the hard-right “Quebec First” Coalition Avenir Québec government announced a health care “reform” last year that will increase the number of surgeries performed in private clinics from 14 to 20 percent.

British Columbia’s supposedly “progressive” New Democratic Party government has handed $393 million worth of contracts to private clinics over the past six years, mainly for less complex and more profitable procedures.

Last spring, Alberta’s former United Conservative Party Premier Jason Kenney announced the Alberta Surgical Initiative, which will double the number of medical procedures done by private clinics, funneling $133 million over three years to for-profit medicine.

Ford and broad sections of the corporate-controlled media are making the absurd claim that his latest proposal does not amount to privatization because the government will continue to fund the health services. Yet it is obvious that the increased use of private clinics will encourage an exodus of personnel to the private sector, enable private clinics to charge hefty ancillary fees, thereby further reducing the available funds for public sector health care, and initiate an ever-expanding role for private providers of health care.

At the federal level, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is promoted in establishment circles as Ford’s “progressive” and more sophisticated counterpart, welcomed the Ford government’s initiative. Refusing to utter a single word of criticism, the Prime Minister applauded the privatization scheme as an “innovation” that would help lessen the strain on an overburdened health care system. What Trudeau did not mention was that his government has done just as much to destroy Medicare as Doug Ford. Since taking office in 2015, the Liberals have kept Canada Health Transfer payments to the provinces far below inflation, population growth, and the needs of an aging society. 

In response to demands by provincial governments for more federal health care funding, Trudeau stated that any money would be contingent on “accountability” and “results.” These are code words for more savage cost-cutting. Trudeau and the premiers are scheduled to meet next month to plan the next steps of their slash and burn campaign. The provincial demands are themselves hypocritical in the extreme, given that governments like Ford’s are on record for withholding billions in COVID-19 emergency funds given to them by the federal government.

For their part, the Liberals have overseen a callous response to the pandemic that prioritized the protection of corporate profits over human lives. Officially, over 50,000 Canadians have needlessly died of COVID-19, but leading epidemiologists estimate the true number of deaths to be closer to 70,000.

The Liberals grudgingly introduced, then promptly withdrew, the measly Canada Emergency Response Benefit, capped at $2,000 per month, that gave workers a temporary financial lifeline. At the same time, they showered the country’s largest businesses with a $650 billion bailout beginning in March 2020.

The NDP is just as committed to the profits of the banks and corporations as the Conservatives and Liberals. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has vowed to keep the minority Liberals in power until 2025 through a confidence and supply agreement, even as the Liberals oversee mass death and the gutting of Medicare. Singh recently demagogically attacked the Liberals for “doing nothing” to stop health care privatization, before making clear that the issue would not result in the confidence-and-supply deal between the NDP and Liberals being broken.

To the billionaires and millionaires who dictate all social and political decisions, the public funds allocated for health care are a drain on their wealth accumulation, which their political lackeys have vastly accelerated by implementing tax cuts and corporate subsidies. Most importantly, they will not tolerate any health measures like a few extra sick days or mandatory isolation protocols that remove workers from the process of generating wealth for these social parasites.

The private sector already gobbles up 30 percent of health care spending in Canada. It delivers a growing number of services, from diagnostics like MRIs and CT scans to minor surgeries, ambulance services, and telehealth. Medicare does not cover dental and prescription eye care, so the vast majority of the population pays for these expenses out of pocket or desperately hopes that their employer-sponsored health insurance provides coverage.

A historic shortage of nurses and other health care workers has forced hospitals to pay hundreds of millions to for-profit agencies, whose nurses, for the time being, earn considerably more than their public sector counterparts. In many cases, agency nurses are filling the same job vacancies in public hospitals that they previously left because of burnout, low pay, and punishing schedules, including forced overtime.

The delivery of public health care falls under provincial jurisdiction. It was established, in practice, through two pieces of federal legislation in 1957 and 1968, but the federal government limited its role to funding the system. Medicare marked the last gasp of liberal social reform, and was only granted in the face of militant struggles of the working class in the post-war era.

From a roughly 50-50 split of federal and provincial funding for Medicare in the 1960s, consecutive federal governments quickly scaled back their contributions. The federal share of Medicare funding today stands at a mere 22 percent. Provincial governments worsened this deficit by slashing health care and other public spending to grant tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.

The rollback of federal funding to public health care was kicked off in 1976 by former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister’s father. Major cuts were carried out by the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, and continued by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

After this decades-long onslaught, the pandemic has compounded the disastrous conditions in Canada’s health care system. Workers are intimately familiar with overcrowded hospital waiting rooms where patients regularly die before even seeing a doctor. Nearly five million Canadians do not have a family doctor. Hundreds of thousands of people languish on years-long waiting lists for routine procedures.

The privatization of Medicare is a political third rail that every major party knows is impossible to accomplish all at once. Survey after survey shows an overwhelming majority of Canadians oppose privatization. A critical role in preventing this widespread popular sentiment from finding any expression is played by the trade unions in the health sector, which have systematically suppressed all struggles by health care workers for improvements to wages and working conditions for decades. The unions more broadly are a pillar of the anti-worker Liberal/NDP/union alliance, which the ruling elite is using to impose its policies of war abroad, and public spending cuts and attacks on workers’ rights at home. This includes the gutting of public health care.

Calls for privatization are growing as the ruling class intensifies its onslaught on working people. The bill has come due for the massive federal pandemic bailout of the banks and corporations, as well as non-stop financial speculation on Bay Street. The ruling elite is determined to make working people pay for the nine-year, 70 percent hike in military spending the Liberals committed to in 2017, and the $1.1 billion in weaponry they have so far supplied to Ukraine in support of the US-NATO war on Russia.

Indian budget intensifies austerity for working people, hikes military spending

Keith Jones

With its 2023-24 budget, India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is intensifying its class war assault on working people and aggressive pursuit of the great-power ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie.

The 45.03 trillion rupee ($549.5 billion) budget, which was presented to parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, February 1, combines brutal austerity measures for India’s workers and toilers, with massive sops to big business, the rich and superrich.

Military spending is to be increased by a further 13 percent to 5.94 trillion rupees ($72.6 billion) and, when debt payments are discounted, will account for more than 17.5 percent of all Indian government outlays.

Far and away the budget’s biggest spending increase is a 33 percent hike in capital expenditure (CAPEX)—that is, spending on rail, road, seaport, power and other infrastructure projects—to $122.3 billion.

Big business has been pressing for such an increase, as the president of the Confederation of India Industry (CII) observed in gushing press comments. This is because it hopes to profit from a bonanza of government infrastructure building contracts and because development of India’s grossly inadequate transport, power and telecommunications infrastructure will facilitate its efforts to expand cheap labour manufacturing for global markets and attract investments from global capital.

To the delight of Indian’s capitalist elite, the BJP government is also slashing income taxes, as part of a continuing drive to shift more of the taxation burden onto consumption taxes that disproportionately penalize those with low or no income. The budget’s tax cuts are skewed to benefit the better-off but especially those with the biggest incomes. According to a celebratory editorial in the Times of India, they will lower “the effective income tax rate for the rich by almost 4 percentage points.”

A man sleeps on the ground at a wholesale vegetable market in Guwahati, India, Wednesday, February 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Anupam Nath]

This giveaway to the rich is being justified on the grounds that it will stimulate the economy. This under conditions where a recent Oxfam report, Survival of the Richest: The India Story, showed that between 2012 and 2021, 40 percent of all the new wealth created in India went to just the top 1 percent of the population and a mere 3 percent to the bottom 50 percent.

Despite the huge increases in military spending and CAPEX and a slew of tax cuts, including reductions for small and medium business, the budget aims to achieve a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the fiscal deficit to GDP ratio, to 5.9 percent, in the coming April 2023 to March 2024 fiscal year.

This is to be achieved through brutal austerity measures targeting the working class and rural poor.    

They will compound a pandemic of joblessness and hunger that has been developing as India’s growth rate slowed during the last decade but has been enormously exacerbated over the past three years—first by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling class’s ruinous profits-before-lives response and then by the fallout from the US-NATO instigated war with Russia in Ukraine.

Since 2020, tens of millions more have been driven into “absolute poverty,” meaning their daily caloric intake is insufficient to fuel a full day’s work. Inflation has been running at an annual rate of 6 percent or more for almost a year. In December unemployment stood at 8.3 percent, according to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). This in a country where there are no state jobless benefits, and the labor force participation rate at around 40 percent is amongst the lowest in the world.

Yet the government is slashing subsidies for food, fertiliser and petroleum by 28 percent.

The food subsidy which benefits the 800 million poorest Indians is being cut by 1 trillion rupees ($12.1 billion), or 31 percent—an even greater cut in percentage terms than the overall subsidy cuts.

The BJP government is also taking the axe to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (MNREGP), which is meant to provide 100 days of menial, minimum-wage work to one member of every rural household that wants it. Eliminating the MNREGP has long been a BJP government objective, and the program has been systematically deprived of funds. But during the pandemic, if only to avoid famine and food riots, the government grudgingly allowed enrollment in the program—which is habitually oversubscribed—to swell. With two months remaining in the current fiscal year, more than 80 million people have participated in MNREGP projects. However, due to want of funding, just 3 percent of participants were able to complete the 100 days of work they are legally entitled to.

Now, as part of its intensified “post-pandemic” austerity push, the government is cutting the MNREGP budget by one-third, from 890 billion rupees ($10.8 billion) to 690 billion rupees ($7.3 billion)

While victimizing the most impoverished sections of Indian society, the BJP government budget continues the decades-long ruling class policy of starving public education and health care of funds.

India has long had a stated objective of boosting government funding for education, which under India’s constitution is a shared central and state government responsibility, to 6 percent of GDP. At present it is barely half that. This week’s budget increased central government education spending by 8 percent or barely more than the inflation rate to 1.1 trillion rupees ($13.4 billion).      

The state of public health care in India is, if anything, an even more unanswerable indictment of the Indian bourgeoisie. The public health care system is in shambles. According to the constitution, every citizen has a right to free health care, but none but the most destitute would turn to a public hospital for care. India’s government spends just $50 billion, or about 1.5 percent of GDP, on providing health care to the country’s 1.4 billion people.

India was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Excess death estimates put the pandemic death toll at more than 5 million, but the government callously clings to the claim that COVID-19 killed “only” 531,000 Indians. In keeping with its prioritization of profits over lives throughout the pandemic, the government is “increasing” health care spending in 2023-24 by just 3.4 percent—a substantial real-terms cut—and slashing the  budget for the Department of Health Research by 6.9 percent.   

Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP: Indian capital’s attack dogs

The Indian ruling class propelled Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP to power in 2014 with the hope and expectation they would run roughshod over popular opposition so as to implement pro-investor “reforms” and more aggressively pursue its predatory ambitions abroad. They have done just that, and at a rapidly accelerating pace since winning re-election in 2019

Over the past three-and-a-half years, the Modi government has dramatically rolled back corporate taxes; initiated a drive to privatize all but a handful of public sector enterprises in “strategic” sectors; launched a scheme to “monetize” public sector infrastructure by hiving off its management and profits to big business; opened the door still wider to contract labour and the casualization of employment; and authored a “labour law reform” that would gut restrictions on plant closures and criminalize most strikes.

This has gone hand in hand with an incessant campaign of communalist incitement aimed at diverting growing social anger against India’s Muslims and other minorities and splitting the working class.

On the world stage, the BJP government, with the enthusiastic support of big business and hardly so much as a peep of criticism from the ostensible opposition has integrated India ever more fully into Washington’s reckless all-rounded diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against China—an offensive the Biden administration has continued to expand even as it and its NATO allies escalate the war with Russia over Ukraine. Over the past two years, India has vastly expanded a web of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-security ties with the US, and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, transforming India into a frontline state in Washington’s confrontation with Beijing.

With the spending increases in the 2023-24 budget, the Modi government will have more than doubled India’s military budget during its nine years in office. Currently, India’s military expenditure is the third largest in the world, although the recent massive armament programs announced by Germany and Japan raise a question mark as to whether this will remain true in coming years.

According to budget documents, the almost $20 billion set aside in the military budget for capital outlays will be used to buy warplanes, warships, missiles, drones, anti-drone systems, combat helicopters, tanks and other weapon systems.

Spending on roads and other infrastructure along India’s northern border with China is also being dramatically increased. This winter for the third year in a row tens of thousands of Indian and Chinese troops, tanks and fighter jets have been forward deployed against each other along the inhospitable Himalayan border, as part of a standoff that began in May 2020 and has flared into violent clashes on several occasions.

Signs of mounting crisis in India’s “world-beating” economy

In delivering the 2023-24 budget, the last full budget before the spring 2024 national election, Finance Minister Sitharaman boasted that India will continue to enjoy, as it did in 2022, the highest growth rate among the world’s largest economies.

There is every reason to believe that the government’s projection that the country’s economy will grow 6.5 percent in the coming year is a gross overestimate—given the imbalances in the world economy, the mountains of state and corporate debt, and the likelihood of a major recession in the US and the other imperialist centres, where central banks have jacked up interest rates to undercut an inflation-driven working class counteroffensive. But even were the growth projection to prove accurate, the BJP’s class war economic policies ensure that social inequality and poverty will continue to grow.

The budget’s massive increase in CAPEX spending itself points to an underlying crisis in the Indian economy. Despite massive tax cuts and other incentives, private capital investment has fallen in recent years, as Indian big business prefers to pay down debt and engage in stock buybacks and other financial manipulations.

Moreover, despite the crowing from the government and corporate elite about the country’s rise, Indian capitalism continues to be outpaced by China. Just the value of China’s annual exports, around $3.5 trillion, is more or less equal to the total GDP of India’s economy. And even as the Modi government has mounted a very public campaign to woo US, Japanese and European firms to relocate from China to India, seeking to exploit the imperialist powers’ push for “friend shoring,” Chinese exports to India have surged.

The greatest threat to the Indian bourgeoisie comes, however, from the working class. 2022 saw a wave of militant worker struggles, including by Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) and Ford India workers. Many of these struggles erupted outside of the control of the Stalinist-led trade unions and parliamentary parties (the CPM and CPI) that for decades have systematically suppressed the class struggle and tied the working class to the Congress Party and other right-wing capitalist parties in the name of fighting the “fascist BJP.”

The BJP government’s class war budget won ringing endorsements from the corporate media and the representatives of various big business lobby groups. However, India’s stock market did not rally as one would expect in the face of such “good news.”

This is because India’s financial markets have been rocked by the global sell-off of shares of the Adani Group companies. In a little over a week since the US-based investment research firm Hindenburg Research accused the Adani Group of fraud and stock price manipulation, its companies’ valuations have fallen by more than 50 percent, wiping out some $120 billion. On Thursday, Reuters noted, “As tycoon Gautam Adani’s woes mount, foreign investors and Indian regulators are abandoning any pretence that the conglomerate’s troubles are contained and domestic markets will be spared contagion.”

As the Reuters report indicates, there are fears that India’s banks and companies, like the partially privatized Life Insurance Corp. of India which has invested in Adani’s companies or lent them money, will be caught in the vortex of its cascading crisis.

The Modi government is also threatened since Adani, who only a few months ago was being feted as Asia’s wealthiest person, is widely considered to be Modi’s closest big business ally, with an association stretching back decades to their native Gujarat.

In typical Modi style, Adani has responded to the accusations of corporate fraud by declaring them an “attack on India.”

Surging inflation in Japan leads to growth of inequality

Misa Boisseau

Japanese workers are being hit hard by rising inflation. As of December, Japan’s core inflation had risen to 4 percent—double the Bank of Japan’s target rate. In December, the United States’ rate was at 6.5 percent while the European Union’s rate was at 9.2 percent.

However, unlike other leading economies, the wages of workers in Japan have been stagnant for almost three decades. According to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), annual wages in Japan have stagnated at around ¥4.4 million ($US38,000) since 1997. Wages in countries like South Korea and Taiwan have overtaken those in Japan, despite the latter’s position as the third largest economy in the world.

Tokyo residents in front of electronic stock board showing Japan’s Nikkei 225 index on Jan. 24, 2023. [AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko]

The yen has also fallen to a 20-year low against the US dollar. Export-driven companies like Toyota have seen their incomes increase as a result of overseas sales, taking in record net profits of ¥2.85 trillion ($US22.25 billion) in the last fiscal year. Over the same period, 1,323 major companies brought in total net profits of ¥33.5 trillion ($US257.5 billion), another record.

Adding to the crisis workers face, in December the government announced plans to double military spending to two percent of GDP over the next five years as a response to the US war against Russia in Ukraine and preparations for war with China. The bill will make Japan the third largest military spender in the world.

Furthermore, COVID-19 continues to run rampant in Japan, with runaway cases and related deaths. Big business, however, is demanding workers foot the bill for the downturn in the economy with increased production and no wage increases.

The Japanese government and media have attempted to blame China’s previous COVID-19 lockdown strategy for the instability of the global supply chain and rising consumer prices. However, global inflation has been fueled by the orgy of speculation on stock exchanges around the world, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the criminal let-it-rip COVID policies—all of which have been actively support by the Japanese ruling class.

In Japan, Tokyo’s longtime financial policies have been a significant contributing factor. “Abenomics,” named for former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the 2013 quantitative easing policy that provides cheap money for businesses, added to Japan’s massive debt, the highest of any developed nation at ¥1.28 quadrillion ($US9.2 trillion), or 266 percent of GDP.

According to Takeshi Niinami, the CEO of Suntory Holdings, “There’s huge pressure from society and the government to raise wages, but we need to increase productivity.” In other words, big business is demanding the increased exploitation of workers’ labor-power, foisting the crisis of capitalism onto the shoulders of workers.

The lower yen has effectively increased the prices of all kinds of basic consumer products while workers’ real wages fell last year. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, in November, real wages fell 3.8 percent compared to the previous year, the biggest drop since May 2014. For workers in rural Japan, who endure even lower wages than those in metropolitan prefectures, the rising cost of oil and gas has especially been a burden.

According to Teikoku Databank, companies raised the prices on more than 20,000 food products in 2022 by an average of more than 13 percent. This trend shows no sign of reversing, in fact, it is predicted to intensify. In a December survey of 46 of the largest consumer product companies in Japan, 59 percent stated they intend to hike prices this year.

For working people who have been used to stable prices for three decades, sharp rises have produced public concern and anger. The BBC cited one example: “When the price of Japan’s everyday snack—umaibo—which was always priced at 10 yen since its creation 43 years ago—went up by 20 percent, it sent a shockwave through the nation.”

The government has responded by advancing a ¥39 trillion ($US 264 billion) economic stimulus package in October 2022. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan, approved by Japan’s corporate elite and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), supposedly assists workers struggling with their household bills. However, most of the money went to subsidies for energy companies and incentives for businesses.

This has not stopped Japan’s electricity companies from planned price increases this spring. Seven of the ten largest energy companies in the country have recently applied to the industry ministry to raise the energy bill for households by 30 to 40 percent over the next fiscal year.

One couple interviewed by NHK in Tokyo explained that their electricity bill for December was already 50 percent higher than the year before, while their gas bill was 20 percent higher. Combined with increased prices for gasoline and groceries, which have each grown by ¥20,000 ($US156), the parents fear they will no longer be able to pay educational expenses for their young daughter.

Japanese workers have voiced their opposition and anger towards these conditions on Twitter. Many were concerned for how the dramatic increase will affect their health in the freezing winter months and the incredible heat of the summer.

“Now electricity bill is gonna increase about 30%? MY GOD how are we supposed to live? It’s not like our paycheck is also gonna increase. Is government telling us we should all die? Are they insane? Like [people] will actually die from this!” writes Chinatsu, an office worker and mother.

Michael, an English teacher and father from Iwate prefecture, wrote, “Got the same news. It’s so friggin immoral to mess with people’s lives like this. And I’m betting the electricity is just the start. Just waiting on gas to come out of their hole too. Soon I'll be paying more than half my rent again in utilities. No more snacks for the kids.” In another tweet, he shared a photo of the letter he received from his regional power company warning of a 32.9 percent increase.

The latest round of record-breaking inflation and price hikes only widens the deep social inequality that exists in Japan. Based on 2020 data, Japan’s poverty rate is the second highest among G7 nations and the 9th highest among OECD countries, according to an OECD survey.

Washington announces basing of US troops in the Philippines

John Malvar

On February 1-2, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited the Philippines where he met with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and announced that Washington would be expanding its military presence in the country under the terms of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) and resuming joint military exercises in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin walks past military guards at the Department of National Defense in Camp Aguinaldo military camp in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines on Thursday February 2, 2023. [AP Photo/Rolex Dela Pena/Pool Photo via AP]

While Washington is waging a war with Russia in Ukraine, most recently announcing the deployment of M1 Abrams battle tanks, it is at the same time preparing for and provoking war with China. Austin’s Asian tour of the past week demonstrated how far advanced these preparations have developed. Prior to his arrival in the Philippines, Austin met with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol who recently publicly spoke of the possible deployment of US nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.

In Manila, Austin declared that China’s “threat to international order” was “unprecedented.” This claim stands reality on its head. It is Washington, not Beijing, that is rapidly ramping up preparations for war in the Pacific. The Biden administration is deploying more fighter jets and bombers to South Korea, shifting US troop deployments in Japan to a more immediate war footing, and restoring military bases in the Philippines, all the while openly targeting China. In the process the White House is deliberately resurrecting Japanese militarism, pushing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to scrap the country’s constitutional limits on armed forces and expand its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. In December 2022, Japan became the third largest military spender in the world.

Washington’s preparations for war with China, are focused above all on Taiwan. The Philippines, immediately to Taiwan’s south, is critical to these plans.

The United States suffered a serious blow to its military presence in the region in 2016, when then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, looking to improve economic ties with China, announced shortly after taking office that he was ending joint military patrols in the disputed South China Sea and putting all implementation of basing arrangements for US forces on hold.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who took office last year, had campaigned claiming that he would continue Duterte’s orientation to China. Within months it was clear that a reorientation back toward Washington was underway. There is profound concern throughout the region that the tensions over Taiwan, stoked by the Biden administration, will erupt into war. The Philippines would inevitably be directly caught up in this conflict. Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Romualdez expressed Manila’s dilemma when he recently told the Associated Press, “We’re in a Catch-22 situation. If China makes a move on Taiwan militarily, we’ll be affected—and all ASEAN region, but mostly us, Japan and South Korea.”

As he had in South Korea, Austin declared to the Philippine press that the US had an “ironclad commitment” to the country. Washington’s expanded military presence, he asserted, “makes both of our democracies more secure.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Washington’s only ironclad commitment is to protect its own imperialist interests. Its military presence destabilizes the region and undermines democracy. The basing of US troops in the country is a direct violation of the Philippine constitution.

The stationing of US forces in the Philippines is already underway. Austin visited Camp Navarro on the southern island of Mindanao, where a US Joint Special Operations Task Force is currently deployed.

Austin announced that the Marcos government was adding four new locations for the forward deployment of US troops and military supplies in addition to an existing five. While the precise locations have not yet been specified, then Philippine Military Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Bartolome Bacarro, told the press in November 2022 that Washington had requested two locations on the Luzon strait, the portion of the country closest to Taiwan.

Austin also stated that the US and Philippine militaries would be resuming the joint military exercises in the disputed South China Sea, which Duterte had ended in 2016. These war games directly target China in waters claimed by Beijing and are very provocative.

While Austin presented the war preparations of Washington as serving some commitment to the defense of “democracy,” he said not a word on human rights or the bloody legacy of the Marcos dictatorship, which is being rehabilitated by Marcos Jr.

With the full backing of Washington, Ferdinand Marcos Sr imposed martial law on the country in 1972 and used its draconian powers to oversee the brutal apparatus of military repression. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Marcos dictatorship, while the United States increased its military aid to his regime and declared its support for his—in the words of then Vice President George H. W. Bush—“adherence to democratic principles.” The paramount concern for Washington was the preservation of its vast military complexes at Clark Airbase and Subic Naval Base.

Marcos Jr has declared that the martial law rule of his father was a “golden age” in Philippine history. Under the current presidency, activists and political dissidents are routinely arrested as “terrorists.” The day before Austin’s arrival in the country, the government’s Anti-Terrorism Council issued a public declaration that a community doctor working with a deeply impoverished indigenous community was a “communist” and a “terrorist,” charges which could likely result in her death in a state-backed extrajudicial assassination. Washington had nothing to say about any of this.

Prior to his election, Marcos Jr faced subpoena and arrest in the United States for contempt of court in a case involving his family’s gross violations of human rights. The Biden White House arranged for Marcos Jr’s safe travel to the United States where the US president held a friendly meeting with him in New York. Washington sheds tears for human rights only when it serves its war aims and imperialist ambitions.

As under the Marcos dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, Washington’s concern in the Philippines is not democracy or human rights but establishing and maintaining a military presence to advance its war plans.

The US bases in the country were a flagrant violation of Philippine sovereignty, a military extension of its neo-colonial rule. The US exercised direct rule over these bases and the millions of US troops stationed on or cycled through them were not subject to Philippine jurisdiction. Scores of Filipinos were killed by US serviceman, thousands raised accusations of rape, but not a single American was prosecuted under Philippine law. A vast network of prostitution and vice grew up around the bases, with the direct support of the US military brass. Washington staged the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from its bases in the Philippines.

In 1991, the Philippine Senate voted to end the lease of the US military bases and the future establishment of foreign military bases in the country was barred by the constitution without the approval of a two-thirds majority of the Senate. It is for this reason that the New York Times wrote that Austin’s announcement would mark “the first time in 30 years that the United States will have such a large military presence in the country.” For 30 years, the basing of US troops in the country has been banned. The Biden and Marcos Jr administrations are poised to reverse that.

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which Austin and Marcos now invoke, is an executive agreement signed by the defense secretary of the Aquino administration and the ambassador of the Obama administration in 2014. It was an end run around the constitution, presenting the basing of US troops as a “rotational presence,” which did not require legislative ratification. In early 2016, the pliant Philippine Supreme Court, duly chastened by corruption charges, ruled that EDCA was constitutional. Washington rapidly moved to deploy troops but Duterte was elected four months later and relations soured. After six long years, with the newly elected Marcos, the United States is moving again to establish bases.

Austin told the press that the EDCA arrangement is not about “permanent basing, but it is a big deal. It’s a really big deal.” The denial that this is permanent basing is a necessary subterfuge to enable the “big deal,” the United States is re-establishing its military bases, critical to its war aims in the Asia Pacific region, in its former colony, the Philippines.

The ten pages of EDCA authorize the deployment of unlimited numbers of US troops and supplies to a set of “agreed locations.” These locations will be governed by the United States. Filipinos will not be allowed to enter any US-controlled location. Only one Filipino military representative will be allowed access, and only with permission secured in advance from the US commander.

US forces are also guaranteed access to all “public land and facilities (including roads, ports, and airfields), including those owned or controlled by local government” as needed. US troops and civilian contractors are subject to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the US government. Should they be accused of a crime, the Philippine legal system will have no jurisdiction over them.

The US will pay no rent for the use of these facilities and if they choose to vacate a facility, the Philippine government is obligated to reimburse the US military for any “improvements.”

These are military bases. No euphemism about “indefinite rotational presence” can disguise this reality. The terms of EDCA smack of a restored colonial presence. Washington is reenacting historic crimes and dredging up the reactionary filth of the past in pursuit of its war ambitions against China.

US sends long-range missiles to Ukraine

Andre Damon

The White House announced Friday that it would send long-range missiles capable of striking nearly 100 miles into Russian territory to Ukraine, in one of the most significant escalations of US involvement in the war with Russia to date.

Following Washington’s tradition of the “Friday afternoon news dump,” the announcement was timed so as to garner as little public attention as possible.

The pliant American media supported the Biden administration’s goal of keeping the American public from understanding the consequences of this action. This massive escalation of the war against Russia received effectively no media coverage. It was not featured on the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post, and was not reported on the evening cable news shows.

The weapons system, known as the ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb, is a rocket-launched maneuverable glide bomb with double the range of the HIMARS missiles Washington has already provided.

Airmen with the 3rd Munitions Squadron assemble a rack of inert small diameter bombs during readiness training at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Feb. 9, 2018. The small diameter bomb is a precise and accurate weapon that allows the the F-22 Raptor to deliver decisive air power. (U.S. Air Force photo by Alejandro Peña)

The announcement marks a repudiation of Biden’s pledge in May that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders,” and his declaration that “We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia.”

The announcement is the latest in a whirlwind escalation of US involvement in the war over the past week. On January 26, the White House declared that it would send 31 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine, as part of a coalition of NATO countries sending over 120 main battle tanks in the first “wave.”

No sooner was this announcement made than the White House revealed that it was in discussions to send F-16 fighters to Ukraine, against the backdrop of demands by Democratic and Republican politicians and dominant sections of the US media to send the aircraft.

The expected announcement of the new long-range weapons comes as press reports indicate that the Biden administration is discussing openly endorsing a Ukrainian assault on the predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula of Crimea, which Russia has claimed as its territory since 2014.

While the Biden administration endorsed the Zelensky government’s Crimean Platform back in 2021, which entails the “retaking of Crimea,” since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Washington had toned down its explicit endorsement for the official war aim of the Zelensky government in order to hide the massively escalatory character of its involvement in the war.

Now, however, the New York Times reports, “(T)he Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”

The Times writes that “the Biden administration is considering what would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula.”

In an article for the think tank magazine Foreign Affairs, entitled “What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea,” United States Army lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman declared that “Washington should give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively.” Vindman is the former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council.

In the article, Vindman explained how a NATO-backed Ukrainian offensive against Crimea would proceed:

The first step would be to pin down Russia’s forces in the Kherson and Luhansk regions and in the northern part of Donetsk. Next, Ukraine would free the remainder of Zaporizhzhia Province and push through southern Donetsk to reach the Sea of Azov, severing Russia’s land bridge to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces would also need to destroy the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula and allows Moscow to resupply its troops by road and rail.

What none of the planners of this offensive admit, however, is that its implementation will require a massive expansion of NATO involvement in the war, including not only the deployment of advanced weapons systems, but the direct deployment of NATO troops.

Last week, explaining the deployment of the M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the WSWS outlined how  such a scenario could unfold:

The significance of Biden’s announcement lies less in the battlefield impact of the tanks than in the consequences of deploying them. The turbine-driven Abrams tanks will require a massive logistical network inside Ukraine, involving large numbers of specialist American contractors. Attacks on these supply networks and American personnel servicing the tanks will then be used to press for implementation of a “no-fly zone” and the deployment of US and NATO troops to Ukraine.

Just one week after these words were written, the initial stages of this scenario are already being put into place.

On Friday, Politico reported that “A group of former military officers and private donors is raising money to send Western mechanics close to the Ukrainian frontlines, where they will repair battle-damaged donated weapons and vehicles that have been flooding into the country.”

The report continued, “The plan is to find 100 to 200 experienced contractors who would travel to Ukraine and embed themselves with small units near the front lines. Under the project, called Trident Support, those contractors would in turn teach the Ukrainian troops how to fix their equipment on the fly.”

The claim that this initiative is being led by “retired” officers is merely a fraudulent pretense distancing the Biden administration from this deployment. While the deployment of the contractors may be “voluntary,” threats to the safety of the hundreds of American personnel on the front lines maintaining American vehicles could serve just as well as a pretense for US escalation of the war.

France and Australia to make artillery shells for Ukrainian army

Mike Head

The Australian and French governments have agreed to a deal to jointly manufacture and supply thousands of artillery shells to the Ukrainian army, the defence and foreign ministers of the two countries announced on Monday. The plan, unveiled at a “2+2” ministerial meeting in Paris, reportedly involves the Australian supply of explosives for the shells, to be made in France.

“Several thousand 155mm shells will be manufactured jointly” by French arms supplier Nexter, French Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu said. His Australian counterpart and deputy prime minister Richard Marles said the plan would come with a “multi-million-dollar” price tag, but neither provided an actual figure.

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna (second right) and French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, (second left) pose with Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles (left) and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong prior to their joint meeting at the French foreign ministry in Paris, Monday, Jan.30, 2023. [AP Photo/Yoan Valat, Pool via AP]

The agreement marks a further significant stepping up of both governments’ involvement in the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, in line with the dangerous escalation by the US and Germany, marked by the deployment of advanced heavy tanks.

It came soon after the January 4 announcement by French President Emmanuel Macron that France would deliver AMX-10 RC light tanks to the Ukrainian military. That was the first dispatch of Western tanks, soon followed by Washington and Berlin.

It also came on the heels of the Australian Labor government sending 70 military personnel two weeks ago to join Operation Interflex, a UK-led mission that has already trained around 10,000 Ukrainian troops. That took Australia’s military contribution to at least $655 million, including the supply of 90 Bushmaster armoured vehicles, making it one of the largest non-NATO contributors to the war.

Several types of artillery sent to Ukraine from the NATO powers fire 155mm shells, including French-made CAESAR truck-mounted guns, the British-built M777 howitzer and the German Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled gun.

Marles declared that the ammunition supplies fit into “the ongoing level of support both France and Australia are providing Ukraine to make sure Ukraine is able to stay in this conflict and… see it concluded on its own terms.” That language indicates an indefinite commitment, echoing similar aggressive statements from the Biden administration.

Lecornu said the aid would be “significant” and “an effort that will be kept up over time,” with the first deliveries slated for the first quarter of 2023, that is, within two months.

Such comments underscore the intent of the US-led powers to deliberately stoke and ramp up the war, using Ukraine as a battleground for a drive to defeat and dismember Russia, having goaded Putin’s oligarchic regime into a disastrous invasion.

Monday’s meeting was the first Australia-France Foreign and Defence Ministerial Consultations since the diplomatic rupture caused by the September 2021 AUKUS treaty between the US, UK and Australia. Australia dumped a $90 billion contract to purchase French submarines in favour of a deal with the US and UK to supply nuclear-powered attack submarines.

The resumption of strategic and military ties between Australia and France, which has colonies and bases across the Indian and Pacific oceans, highlights the reality that the war against Russia is regarded by the US and all its imperialist allies as a prelude to one against China for control over the entire strategic and resource-rich Eurasian landmass.

By repairing relations with France, which began with a visit to Paris last July by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Labor government in Australia is assisting the Biden administration to strengthen a network of military alliances encircling China, while bolstering the interests of Australian and French capitalism in the region.

Marles said the signed agreement was the opening of “new cooperation between the Australian and French defence industries.” He said the meeting also agreed to “grow and deepen the relationship between our two defence forces” and the two countries would have greater access to their respective defence facilities in the Indo-Pacific region.

As indicated by the joint statement issued by the four ministers, the two imperialist powers regard this collaboration as part of a wider alliance, focused on the Indo-Pacific, directed against China as well as Russia.

The statement declared that “France and Australia agreed to continue to work together” to “address shared security challenges” in the Indo-Pacific region. While not explicitly naming China as the target, the statement left no doubt about that. It employed all the catchphrases used by the US and its allies against China, including vowing to support “freedom of navigation” naval operations and overflights in Chinese-controlled areas of the South China Sea.

The statement effectively lined up behind Washington’s escalating steps to provoke China into a conflict over Taiwan by eroding the 50-year-old “One China” policy, whereby the Chinese government was in effect recognised as the legitimate government over all of China, including Taiwan.

While claiming to support the “status quo” and “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the statement pledged to “support Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the work of international organisations” and “continue deepening relations with Taiwan in the economic, scientific, trade, technological and cultural fields.”

French imperialism, which once directly controlled a vast colonial empire, notably in Africa and Indochina, remains a major nuclear-armed power across the Indo-Pacific. It retains colonial rule over territories with about 1.65 million citizens and five permanent military bases manned by 7,000 personnel, from the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotte and Reunion, to the Pacific Ocean islands of New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia.

During a visit to the region in 2018, Macron called for a new Indo-Pacific “axis” directed against China, signaling moves alongside other European imperialist powers, particularly the UK and Germany, to assert their own predatory interests in the region under conditions of rising Chinese influence and Washington’s aggressive moves against China.

Monday’s statement signaled a heightened involvement of French forces in allied military exercises and operations in the region. “The ministers welcomed Australia’s increased involvement in the Croix du Sud multilateral exercise this April and Australia’s support for France’s first full participation in Exercise Talisman Sabre in 2023, following its participation as an observer member in 2021.”

Croix du Sud is a French military exercise held every two years in New Caledonia and surrounding waters. Talisman Sabre is a major US-Australian exercise, involving thousands of troops, held in Australia every second year since 2005.

In 2021, the French nuclear attack submarine Émeraude, along with the naval support ship Seine, conducted patrols in the South China Sea.That year, France also sent an amphibious assault ship, the Tonnerre, and the frigate Surcouf to pass through the disputed waters twice during its annual Jeanne d’Arc mission, and French SIGINT ship Dupuy de Lôme sailed through the Taiwan Strait.

This week, French naval sources said the country’s navy was working toward a Pacific Region deployment in 2025 for its Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group, which carries nuclear weapons.

Ever since taking office last May, the Australian Labor government has outdone its Liberal-National predecessor in placing the country on the frontline of US war plans, joining NATO and other US-led alliance summits, bullying Pacific island states into security pacts aimed against China and spending billions on new military hardware—at least $4 billion in the first three weeks of 2023.

The visit to Paris by Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong was just the first part of a bigger mission. It centres on talks in London and Washington to seek to finalise the AUKUS arrangements for the far-greater Australian purchases of submarines, hypersonic missiles and other weaponry.

Ukraine cracks down on military “deserters”

Jason Melanovski

Amidst a major escalation of the war in Ukraine by NATO, the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has begun cracking down on “refuseniks,” or deserting soldiers, as bloody fighting continues with Russian forces for control of Bakhmut.

Under the newly signed law draft Law 8271, soldiers directly disobeying an order, threatening a senior officer with violence or deserting one’s unit would face five to 10 years in prison. Convictions of desertion in the face of fire will carry a minimum of five and a maximum of 12 years in prison.

The law enforcing stricter penalties on soldiers convicted of abandoning fighting positions or defying their commanders was initially ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in December and publicly supported by the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valeriy Zaluzhny. 

Zaluzhny—an admirer of the far-right fascist hero Stepan Bandera—complained at the time that Ukrainian soldiers could theoretically flee an assigned position or defy a commander and face little more than a 10 percent deduction from his military salary.

Earlier in December, Andrey Marochko, an officer with the Russian-backed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), had alleged an increase in desertion rates among Ukrainian forces.

“There have been increasingly more saboteurs and people deserting their positions [in the special operation zone], as well as more wrangling with commanders and hazing. Incidents of taking drugs and alcohol have also increased. Besides, social tensions have grown sharply in Ukraine,” Marochko said. While Marochko certainly has a strategic incentive to make such statements, the introduction of the law shortly thereafter lends credence to his remarks.

Zelensky signed the law on January 25 despite widespread criticism from Ukrainian citizens and soldiers who rightfully view the Ukrainian justice system as corrupt and controlled by the wealthy.

Following the initial introduction of the law in December, an electronic petition appeared calling for Zelensky to veto the proposal and quickly gathered the necessary 25,000 signatures for Zelensky’s consideration.

According to the author of the petition, Tetiana Kostohryzenko, “the command will gain leverage to blackmail and punish the military with prison for almost any criticism of their decisions, even if the decisions are incompetent and based on unsuccessful combat management.”  

A total of 34,941 Ukrainians signed the petition leading up to Zelensky’s signing of the law. Despite the appeal garnering the necessary signatures for an official response from the president’s office, Zelensky completely ignored public opposition and signed the bill into law anyway.

According to Ukrainian media outlets such as the Kyiv Post, Zaluzhny, who maintains extremely close ties to the US military, is widely viewed as a potential rival to Zelensky in the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. A Zelensky veto of the measure could have potentially undermined his own support within the Ukrainian military and the United States government.

The law is clearly intended to bolster the Ukrainian military command’s control over its troops as it is nearing a “very active phase of the war” with “intense operations” expected at the front in February and March, according to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense.

Speaking to the Freedom channel, Andrii Yusov, representative of the Chief Intelligence Directorate, revealed that the Ukrainian military foresaw “a difficult situation” developing at the front due to a Russian offensive and is counting on further weapons shipments from the West as the war escalates in the coming months.

Yusov’s comments essentially suggest that thousands or more Ukrainian and Russian soldiers will lose their lives in an imperialist-backed war with no peaceful resolution in sight.

While both Ukrainian and Western officials have attempted to hide the scale of death within the military, Ukrainian casualties likely equal or exceed Russian losses. 

In November, US General Mark Milley nonchalantly revealed that 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded in just eight months of fighting while speaking at the Economic Club of New York City.

“You are looking at well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” Milley said. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side.”

Milley speaks regularly with his Ukrainian counterpart Zaluzhny and is well aware of the mass casualties taking place on the battlefield as the US government continues to escalate its direct involvement in the war.

The drive to crack down on evaders is also taking place as videos of the forced mobilization of Ukrainian men have spread on social media. In one video a man is shown being grabbed in an apartment by two men dressed in military clothing, while a small child intervenes. While such videos are denounced by the Ukrainian government as “fakes,” they correspond with reports of haphazard and arbitrary forced mobilization over the previous summer and fall. Such reports were even taken up by the New York Times, which admitted at the time, “Recruiters approach young men on the street, but the standards are not always clear, and there are reports of unwilling men being signed up while some eager to fight are turned away.”

Approximately 2,500 cases of draft dodging have been opened so far in Ukraine during the war with 400 indictments.