Yesterday, two powerful earthquakes shattered the Turkish-Syrian border region. A 7.7 magnitude quake centered in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş in the early morning was followed by a massive aftershock, of magnitudes 7.6 in the afternoon. The quakes, felt as far away as Lebanon and Cyprus, have left thousands dead and tens of thousands desperately awaiting rescue, buried under the rubble.
In Turkey, the quakes destroyed at least 6,200 buildings, killed 2,921 people and injured 16,000 in 10 cities, where over 15 million people live. Hospitals, roads and airports all have been destroyed or damaged, and damage to electricity transformers and natural gas lines is leading to widespread power and gas outages.
People and emergency teams search for people in the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaziantep, Turkey, Monday, February 6, 2023. [AP Photo/Mustafa Karali]
In Syria, devastated by the NATO alliance’s 12-year war for regime change, the confirmed death toll has already exceeded 1,300. The ongoing war is preventing rescue teams from reaching many areas. Parts of northwest Syria are under the control of the Turkish army and its Islamist proxies, while northeastern Syria is under the control of US forces and their Kurdish nationalist allies.
Tragically, with many people still trapped under collapsed buildings in both Turkey and Syria, the death toll is set to rise substantially. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to spend the night in freezing temperatures or in buildings damaged by the earthquake. The World Health Organization has warned that the death toll may rise eight-fold, to nearly 30,000.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has declared seven days of national mourning, but people across the earthquake zone are largely being left to cope on their own.
With only 9,000 Turkish rescue workers mobilized, no official teams have yet arrived in many places. Miners from various provinces are volunteering to go to the region to join search-and-rescue efforts. While the Turkish government boasts of producing killer drones and long-range missiles capable of hitting Athens, people trying to rescue their friends and loved ones from under the rubble are being to left to work with picks and shovels.
The callous reaction of the financial oligarchy to the disaster was summarized by the Istanbul stock exchange: After the earthquake, shares of cement companies soared.
The massive death toll from these earthquakes is an entirely preventable and widely foreseen tragedy. It is in reality not a natural disaster but a social crime for which the capitalist system bears responsibility.
Yesterday’s earthquakes occurred in the world's second-most seismic region, the so-called “Alpide Belt.” Located on major fault lines, it has a long record of earthquake disasters. The 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey killed nearly 18,000 people and injured tens of thousands more, according to official statistics.
Scientists have increasingly warned that yesterday’s disaster was imminent and implored public authorities to strengthen buildings, warning that failing to do so would come at a horrific cost in lives.
After the Elazığ earthquake in January 2020 in Turkey, Hüseyin Alan, the chairman of the Chamber of Geology Engineers, stated that besides İstanbul, 18 city centers—including Kahramanmaraş and Hatay, which suffered major damage from yesterday’s quake—are on “active faults with high potential to produce earthquakes.” In a major earthquake, buildings there would be “destroyed,” he stated.
Prof. Dr. Naci Görür, one of Turkey’s most respected geologists and advocates of building earthquake-resistant cities, has long pointed to the comparison between Japan and Turkey. He wrote that only four people died from earthquake damage from the 7.4-magnitude quake in Fukushima in 2022, while nearly 20,000 people died in the 1999 Marmara earthquake of the same magnitude. This underscores that virtually all the deaths in yesterday’s quake in Kahramanmaraş could have been avoided.
Görür has been drawing attention to the danger of major earthquakes in this region for years. In a TV program last night after the earthquake, Görür said his team had prepared a project to prevent these losses, but that the authorities had ignored it.
Görür once again warned of a major Istanbul earthquake. A magnitude-7 quake is expected in this mega-city of at least 16 million. While Istanbul city hall, controlled by the bourgeois opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), claims it would cause “only” 14,000 deaths, Görür predicts that the actual death toll could exceed 400,000.
Building earthquake-resistant housing is a critical global problem that capitalism has proved incapable of solving. A 2021 article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science by Chinese, Australian, US, Canadian and German scientists found that in 2015, a staggering 1.5 billion people lived in earthquake-prone areas. This number is rising rapidly, mainly in vulnerable countries of the Middle East and Central and South Asia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Today, the level of development of science and industry is such that earthquake-resistant cities could be built worldwide. Why has social infrastructure gone constantly neglected, the call to redesign cities and renovate buildings to make them earthquake-resistant gone ignored, as were appeals to prepare for post-earthquake rescue and treatment?
Yesterday’s earthquakes occurred at the epicenter of the US-led NATO powers’ three-decades long campaign of imperialist wars in the Middle East following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Syria has been devastated by a 12-year NATO proxy war that has cost over 500,000 lives and displaced over 10 million people.
Many Syrian refugees who fled Syria to save their lives and live in poverty in southern Turkey have been abandoned to their fate after the earthquake.
Dozens of NATO states have made token statements about sending aid to their NATO ally Turkey, while largely ignoring the victims of the same disaster in Syria, which remains under a crippling US sanctions regime that denies its population access to medical and other resources desperately needed not only to confront the current catastrophe but to sustain daily life.
In reality, the leaders of the imperialist governments, who hypocritically offer condolences to earthquake victims, are primarily responsible for the war in Syria and the catastrophic squandering of social wealth on war, rather than on public health and safety.
All major social issues today, including averting natural disasters, are by nature global problems requiring a socially-coordinated solution. Yet the private profit interests of the bourgeoisie and the division of the world into rival nation-states stand in the way of any progressive response. This is why there has been no worldwide scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic or to global climate change.
Instead, the imperialist powers, whose criminal “let it rip” policies on the COVID-19 pandemic have led to the deaths of over 21 million people globally, now threaten all humanity with World War III by escalating their war on Russia in Ukraine.
According to the UK-based predictive health analytics company Airfinity, as of February 6, 2023, the estimated cumulative deaths from COVID-19 in China since December 1, 2022, have reached 1.3 million. In just over two months, pandemic fatalities in China have surpassed the figure for official deaths in the US since the pandemic began three years ago. The US toll stands at 1.13 million, with close to 500 people dying each day.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to insist on adhering to an extremely narrow definition of COVID-19 deaths, releasing figures which are acknowledged to be vast undercounts by every reputable scientific body with their wide experience in the behavior of the coronavirus, including its latest iteration of Omicron.
Reuters noted on February 4, 2023, that Chinese health officials reported that between January 27 and February 2, only 3,278 COVID-related in-hospital deaths had occurred. And among these deaths, only 131 deaths were related to respiratory failures, bringing the cumulative tally since December 8 to 82,238.
People look after their elderly relatives receiving medical treatment at an emergency hall of a hospital in Beijing, Saturday, January 7, 2023. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]
Since China officially lifted its Zero-COVID policy on December 7, a tsunami of infections has washed across the country. Government officials called it the exit wave, expressing the hope that the country would emerge from the “dynamic” public health efforts it had mounted to protect the lives and well-being of its population.
It was the unrelenting pressures imposed by global finance capital to bring online its economic engines, and not protests by a mere several hundred university students decrying the infractions on their liberties by the Zero-COVID policy, that were decisive in the about-face.
Given the popularity of the Zero-COVID policy among the Chinese working class, officials sought to assure them that Omicron was truly mild, a lie perpetrated by every other national government that used the highly contagious and deadly strain to carry out a strategy for mass infection and an end to pandemic restrictions.
The new policy in China required a complete cover-up of the real toll in terms of excess deaths that the population was forced to accept in the bureaucracy’s deal with the West. This was exemplified by China’s Vice Premier Liu He’s address to the billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos, proclaiming that China was open for business again.
As the Airfinity update noted, the Omicron surge spread with such ferocity that instead of a second wave during and after the Chinese Lunar New Year, the country experienced one enormous wave of infection peaking in mid- to late-January. Accordingly, they revised their estimates of daily deaths up to 36,000 per day at the peak, accounting for the scale of infection and the impact on health systems as they sought to absorb the massive number of severely infected people.
In particular, rural China faced the hardship of both having a much older population and lacking sufficient health care resources—including basic medications like ibuprofen to reduce high fevers being out of stock—to manage the crisis. As one physician, Dong Chunhong, in the rural region of China’s Shaanxi province recounted in the Telegraph, “People came knocking on my door until midnight. I was exhausted. My whole family had a fever. I wasn’t feeling well, but I still had to serve my people.”
Dong added that the tiny village of Gongjiahe that he lives in has 1,136 people. He believes more than half were infected and 90 percent survived, although he imagined many died at home without his knowledge.
Anecdotal stories about loved ones succumbing to the virus have become legion in press reports. Either hospitals are too crowded to accept more patients or resources are lacking at fever clinics to treat patients. Many of the infected end up waiting at home in the hopes of recovering. However, as their health begins to fail and their need for oxygen becomes acute, they are brought back to hospitals and clinics for immediate attention. Not surprisingly, their families are told their loved one passed away from heart disease. As one man examining his wife’s death certificate mused, “I didn’t know she had such a disease.”
A report released in mid-January by Peking University had estimated more than 900 million people (64 percent) in the country had been infected, with numbers expected to rise during the mass internal migration of the Lunar New Year, which will drive the virus deeper across the country. Notably, their estimates had placed the level of infections in some rural and remote provinces at upwards of 80 to 90 percent, corresponding to a level of deaths that remain uncounted.
In a grim report, attempting to contextualize the hidden deaths in China during the exit surge, the New York Times examined the obituaries of scholars and scientists published over the last four years by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
As the report noted, there are about 1,700 members distributed almost equally between the two institutions. Although the obituaries didn’t specify the exact cause of death other than “illness,” there was an appreciable jump in deaths during the surge weeks compared to previous months (during Zero COVID) on the order of more than five-fold higher. In total 40 scholars and scientists—molecular biologists, nuclear physicists, wildlife scientists, etc.—perished in the two months straddling the New Year when previously on average about three died per month.
The Times report added, “The data drawn from the obituaries are far from conclusive … still, obituaries published by other institutions showed similar spikes in late December and early January. From 2019 to 2021, the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the top engineering schools in the world, had published between one and three obituaries for professors and staff members in those months. Between December and last month, it announced 29 deaths.”
Aside the combined loss of cumulative knowledge and scientific accomplishments that such distinguished institutions produce for the benefit of society, one must acknowledge, given their prestigious positions with potential access to a better standard of health care, that the toll on the working class of China has been even higher during the last few weeks of mass infection.
A brief glimpse into the social media platform Weibo provides context into how the population is reeling from the betrayals by their government leaders in protecting them and their families from the ravages of the infection.
In response to a post on January 16 from Zhejiang province on the death of their grandfather, responses included, “One could really say that your grandfather was murdered by those health care experts who promoted that [Omicron] is a mere cold, that [infections] are all asymptomatic and the Zero COVID should be lifted.” Another wrote, “I was at the hospital a couple of days ago but could not get access to a bed. I had to stay in the emergency room. It was filled with elderly people, and basically every day we had someone pass away … my whole perspective about life was challenged during that couple of days.”
Indeed. As such grievances are being shared by the population, which is going through a shared catastrophic and horrific experience watching family members become sickened or die, in the financial sector there is only jubilance as the shares for Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker and a major iPhone assembler for Apple, jumped more than 48 percent year-on-year.
Revenue in January reached a record high of more than $22 billion, according to Reuters. A statement issued by the company notes that operations at the Zhengzhou campus, site of worker protests against unsafe public health conditions, are back to normal. In the cold rhetoric of finance, Foxconn said, “Based on market consensus for first quarter 2023, January revenue came in slightly ahead. The outlook for the first quarter will likely reach market expectation.”
An estimated 50,000 people joined a demonstration in Copenhagen Sunday against the Danish government’s plan to scrap a public holiday to help fund increased military spending. The proposal emerged out of weeks of closed-door talks between the Social Democrats and their right-wing coalition partners and aims to help hike Danish military spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2030.
Social Democrat Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, together with her right-wing Liberal and Moderate party coalition partners, intend to scrap Store Bededag (Great Prayer Day) as a public holiday from 2024. The holiday has been recognised since the 17th century, when it was introduced following the Reformation to replace several holidays previously recognised by the Catholic Church. The holiday takes place on the fourth Friday after Easter.
The vast majority of those participating in Sunday’s protest were much less concerned with the religious significance of the day than they were with the fact that they stand to lose a paid public holiday to fund the military and weapons of war. According to Danish public broadcaster DR, an educator who addressed the rally said, “We need time to process what we experience every single day, and we need time to recover physically and mentally, and we need time where we can focus on our families and ourselves.”
A social and health care assistant added, “For too long we have put up with too much. All too often I see my colleagues being affected by stress, burnout, compassion fatigue due to a stressful day.
“That is why I’m standing here today, to demand my and my colleagues’ right: the right to be human; we should have time to recover, recharge, and be able to pay our bills.”
The Social Democrat-led government intends to enforce a huge hike in defence spending to reach 2 percent of the GDP by 2030. This is seen by the entire political establishment as essential to fund Denmark’s role in the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine, and the expansion of NATO capabilities in the Nordic, Arctic, and Baltic regions.
The government has calculated that it can generate 3.2 billion kroner (about €430 million) through increased tax revenues and reduced subsidies by adding an extra workday each year. The government has offered to increase wages by 0.45 percent to compensate workers for the loss of a paid holiday. However, this increase will not apply to anyone on social welfare programs or pensions. The savings the government will make by freezing these transfer payments amid high inflation amount to 700 million kroner of the 3.2 billion kroner that will be redirected to the military.
Sunday’s demonstration was called by the Danish Trade Union Confederation following a series of smaller local protests over recent weeks. Recognising the strength of public opposition to the government’s plan, most opposition parties have also come out against it. However, they all support the military spending increase, and are merely urging the government to find less provocative ways to make social spending cuts to fund it. For their part, the unions have close ties to the Social Democrats, who have made a major contribution to the rightward lurch of official Danish politics over recent years. In power since 2019, they have adopted the far right’s racist immigrant policy, expanded military spending, and provided weapons to Ukraine.
Eight opposition parties, ranging from the far-right Danish People’s Party and New Right to the pseudo-left Red-Green Alliance/Unity List (RGA) and Socialist People’s Party, issued a statement opposing the abolition of the public holiday.
Socialist People’s Party leader Pia Olsen Dyhr appealed to the government to enter “tripartite talks” with the unions and employers’ groups to agree on an increase of working hours throughout the year so that the public holiday could be retained. She also called for the decision on scrapping the public holiday to be postponed until after the next election, pointing to the fact that none of the parties in government campaigned in support of the move. Olsen Dyhr’s position was backed by former Liberal Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
The fact that all the opposition parties back the government’s attacks on social spending and workers’ rights to expand the defence budget is underscored by their unanimous backing for the war in Ukraine. Last march, when Frederiksen was leading a Social Democrat minority government backed by the RGA and Socialist People’s Party, she negotiated a plan to increase defence spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2033. The agreement, supported by the Socialist People’s Party, Liberals, and Conservatives, also committed to holding a referendum to abolish Denmark’s opt-out from the European Union’s defence policy. Although the RGA formally opposed the March agreement, it was only thanks to its sustained parliamentary support for the Social Democrats since 2019 that Frederiksen was in power to negotiate it. At its party conference in May, the RGA agreed to drop its firm opposition to Danish NATO membership to underscore the party’s support for the imperialist war on Russia.
After Frederiksen’s Social Democrats emerged from the 1 November general election as the largest party, she negotiated with the Liberals and Moderates a shorter timetable for the military spending increase. When the Social Democrat/Liberal/Moderate coalition programme was unveiled on December 14, it contained the commitment to reach the 2 percent defence spending goal by 2030, and specified the abolition of the Store Bededag public holiday as the means by which three years could be cut from the original timetable. The coalition agreement, the first between parties from Denmark’s traditional “left” and “right” blocs in over four decades, also included a major income tax cut for high earners and plans to restructure the health care system to expand the role of private providers.
The emergence of mass popular opposition in Denmark to the ruling class’s subordination of all areas of social life to militarism coincides with an upsurge of workers’ struggles across Europe against the drive to make them pay for imperialist wars. In France, millions of workers are expected to participate Tuesday in nationwide protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s assault on pensions, which is aimed at slashing public spending on the elderly to fund an increase in French military spending. In Britain, strikes by National Health Service workers, rail workers, and teachers are resisting real-terms wage cuts, public spending austerity, and privatisation by a Conservative government determined to sharply increase defence spending.
During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. In recent times, a number of countries, including the US and France, have launched data-gathering balloons. The Chinese military last year reported favorably on many uses for such balloons, including for surveillance, communication, weather information, and communication. The detection yesterday of a Chinese balloon hovering over Montana, where the US houses ICBMs, probably falls into the category of military surveillance, though the fact of the matter remains to be determined.
To my mind, the US has overreacted to the discovery, postponing an important visit to Beijing by the secretary of state. Granted, a Chinese high-altitude balloon should not have been floating over US territory; as Secretary Blinken said, it violated sovereignty and international law. Still, there are mitigating circumstances, to wit:
+ This is not the first time Chinese balloons have appeared in US skies, without incident.
+ The US routinely deploys spy planes and satellites over Chinese territory.
+ The data presumably collected by the Chinese balloon may not be all that sensitive; China has far more sophisticated ways of acquiring military intelligence.
+ Most importantly, the incident does not warrant the postponement of Blinken’s visit.
Even assuming the worst—that the Chinese balloon was for intelligence gathering and not (as Beijing claims) for weather reporting—the incident could and should have been treated as a diplomatic episode. We should recall other serious US-China encounters, such as the US shooting down of a Chinese jet over Hainan Island, and the US bombing of a target in Serbia that turned out to be the Chinese embassy. Both those incidents resulted in loss of life by the Chinese, and consequent US apologies.
In all these incidents, the common thread is diplomacy. The job of diplomats is to reach an understanding that bad conduct will not be repeated, and that an incident is not an act of war. If US-China relations were positive today, the tension of the latest incident would not have stopped Blinken from going to Beijing. In the balloon incident, the Chinese did apologize. That should have been sufficient to justify the trip, whose purpose is to reduce tensions and promote mutual understanding.
Last Thursday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. This was Netanyahu’s first official foreign visit since he once again became Prime Minister on December 29 last year.
While no official remarks or transcript were published after Macron and Netanyahu’s meeting, the details of the conversation given to the major newspapers by government officials make clear that the purpose of the meeting was to plan the escalation of NATO’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s provocations against Iran.
French president Emmanuel Macron, right, welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to their meeting at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, France, Thursday, February 2, 2023. [AP Photo/Michel Euler]
The meeting took place amid the efforts of imperialist powers to drastically escalate the war in Ukraine. In the first week of January, Macron became the first NATO leader to announce the delivery of tanks to Ukraine, which has now led to the delivery of 120 advanced battle tanks and even more advanced missile systems to the front lines by EU powers and the United States. It is now widely expected that, in a further escalation, NATO countries will soon deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.
In this context, Netanyahu used the meeting to play his “Ukraine card,” agreeing to send Israeli armaments to Ukrainian forces at his meeting with Macron. In exchange, he sought assurances from France and her European allies that the 2015 Iranian Nuclear treaty will not be revived, and that European powers will continue to turn a blind eye to Israeli bombing raids against Iran, the far-right character of Netanyahu’s government, and its repressive measures at home.
According to a source quoted in Le Monde who had knowledge of the meeting, Netanyahu promised the French president that Israel would deliver “military things” to Ukraine. Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen is due to travel to Kyiv next week to finalize the delivery of Israeli arms to the Ukrainian army.
In return, “Macron expressed his readiness to weigh sanctions on the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.)” In Friday’s press conference after Thursday’s meeting, Netanyahu stated that, “France and Israel are drawing much closer in the way they see the Iran threat.”
The two leaders both lead crisis-riddled regimes that are reviled by broad sections of their populations. As their meeting took place, millions of French and Israeli workers and youth were protesting their respective governments. Indeed, it is more or less apparent that Netanyahu hoped his first official state visit would provide favorable publicity as new Prime Minister and allow him to gloss over massive internal opposition to his regime.
In Israel, demonstrations against Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government and its proposed judicial reform have continued into their fifth week. On Saturday, tens of thousands marched in 20 cities across the country, protesting Netanyahu’s attempted reform to emasculate the judiciary and block prosecution of Netanyahu himself, and against his government, which is made up of far-right nationalists, racists, and homophobes.
In France, Macron oversees an equally fragile regime. The president is facing mass protests of workers and youth against his overwhelmingly unpopular pension reform and rapidly declining standards of living. On January 31, 2.5 million people marched against the reform, according to the French unions, and even the government’s own figure of 1.27 million protesters was a record. This followed a one-day strike on January 18 that was also supported by millions.
The closed-door meeting took place as Netanyahu’s government is waging a series of violent assaults on the Palestinian people, with 32 people killed by Israeli forces or settlers in January alone. This included the Israeli security forces’ raid on the Jenin refugee camp on January 26, which killed 10. Netanyahu’s new offensive is part of his government’s use of state violence to massively expand settlements in the West Bank and suppress any domestic opposition to annexation of Palestinian territories.
Even behind closed doors, Macron did not condemn the murderous policies of the Israeli state. Instead, he cautioned Netanyahu: “If you continue what you are doing in Palestine, it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia to accept an agreement with you.”
In other words, Macron only objects to an escalation of violence against Palestinians insofar as it threatens the NATO-backed axis of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran in the Middle East. Indeed, in 2022 Macron’s government denounced charities and organizations which label the Israeli state’s persecution of its Palestinian population and the privileged legal status of Jewish citizens as apartheid.
Macron is clearly concerned by the instability of Netanyahu’s regime. According to the leaked remarks, the French president told Netanyahu that the judicial reform “opens a crisis unprecedented since the birth of the state in 1948,” and warned that if it goes through, “Paris should conclude that Israel has moved away from a common conception of democracy.”
Macron’s criticisms, though they make clear that the imperialist bourgeoisies are well aware of the anti-democratic character of the present Israeli regime, are shot through with hypocrisy. In alliance with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, the “president of the rich” has overseen his own battery of anti-democratic laws, including the discriminatory anti-Muslim law and the Global Security Law, which outlaws taking photos or video of police.
Macron’s refusal to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s judicial reform or Israel’s murderous suppression of Palestinians, despite his misgivings about their geopolitical consequences, flows from the bloody policies of the NATO powers themselves. Above all, they now seek to secure extensive Israeli support for imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine. Macron’s own pension cut aims to free up the state budget to fund French imperialism’s rapid rearmament and delivery of weapons to Ukraine without cutting into the wealth of the super-rich.
Macron and Netanyahu are widely aware of mass opposition to their regimes and the NATO-Russia war. That is why these two “democratic” leaders met behind closed doors in order to plan the next stage of escalation of the war in Ukraine and how to continue efforts to provoke the bourgeois-nationalist Iranian regime into an action that can be seized upon to justify all-out war against Iran.
The fact that two such widely reviled politicians can come together and plot military attacks on major powers like Russia and Iran must be taken as a warning by masses of workers internationally. The danger that the Ukrainian war could spread across the entire Middle East, and turn into a direct conflict between major, nuclear-armed powers, is very real.
Moreover, neither Macron nor Netanyahu see the eruption of political opposition and social protest in the working class and youth in any way as a reason to change their policies. Instead, they are trying to create conditions to double down on their reactionary policies by accelerating their military escalation and demanding that the population rally to them and to the armed forces in order to prosecute the wars which they themselves are playing a decisive role in launching.
As the US expands the US/NATO war against Russia and prepares for war with China, the military faces a growing shortage of new recruits. Large numbers of young people are increasingly wary, if not hostile, to service in the military. In response, school authorities and the armed services are forcing children by the thousands, probably tens of thousands, into the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) at their high schools.
The collusion of high schools in the implementation of mandatory JROTC enrollment, a violation of both international law and military rules, was highlighted by the New York Times in December. Attempting damage-control, four Democratic lawmakers—senators Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and representatives Ted Lieu (California) and Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania)—have asked the Department of Education and Department of Defense to respond to a series of questions.
In its December feature, the Times reported that hundreds of public records requests had proven that “thousands of public school students were being funneled into the [JROTC] classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.”
Andreya Thomas told the Times that she was auto-enrolled as a freshman at Pershing High in Detroit. She said she pleaded to be allowed to drop JROTC, but school administrators refused. She was not alone in being involuntarily enrolled into JROTC. Ninety percent of the school’s 2021-22 freshman class was enrolled. Thomas frequently skipped the class and got a failing grade, but was nevertheless put back in for her sophomore year. She said recruiters pushed the claim that a military career could help pay for college.
Renaissance High School color guard, Detroit, Michigan. [Photo: US Army]
Three other high schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District enroll more than 75 percent of their ninth-grade students in military training. Detroit is far from unique. The list of schools that force students into JROTC spans the US.
Florida parent Julio Mejia told the Times that his daughter was initially refused permission to drop JROTC. Only after he met with several administrators personally could he secure her release from the program.
Cities whose schools enroll more than 75 percent of students include: Vincent, Alabama; Spring, Texas; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Cape Coral, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee; Port Gibson, Mississippi; San Diego, California. Cities where more than half of all students are slotted into ROTC training include Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston Miami, St. Louis and Washington D.C.
The education news outlet Chalkbeat has documented widespread mandatory JROTC enrollment in Chicago. A 2021 report cited the military’s massive presence, enrolling 7,800 students at 44 schools. That Chicago Public Schools boasted the highest proportion of students in military courses in the nation was a “point of pride” for Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, said Chalkbeat. Outraged Chicago parents exposed the mandatory practices and forced an end to the requirement, after revealing that at four schools, 100 percent of children were enrolled.
Repeatedly, attention has been called to JROTC’s legal and ethical violations. The New York Civil Liberties Union questioned the Buffalo school district on its violation of students’ rights in 2005; San Diego parents exposed similar practices in 2008.
In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a lengthy report titled “Soldiers of Misfortune,” which indicted the US for violations of the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the “Rights of the Child,” ratified by the US Senate in 2002, by targeting children under 17 for military recruitment. The ACLU wrote: “Public schools serve as prime recruiting grounds for the military, and the US military’s generally accepted procedures for recruitment of high school students plainly violate the Optional Protocol.”
The ACLU also cited the Department of Defense’s database assembled under the provisions of the bipartisan-supported “No Child Left Behind Act,” enacted in 2001, which authorized the Pentagon to collect data on 16-year-olds and provide it to recruiters. The ACLU also pointed to the pre-JROTC program, Middle School Cadet Corps (MSCC), which enlists those as young as 11.
“Soldiers of Misfortune” substantiates its argument by citing the Army recruiters’ handbook, which is distributed to over 10,000 recruiters. It states, “If you wait until they’re [high school] seniors, it’s probably too late.”
These recruiters are assigned responsibility for all youth attending a specific high school and instructed to “effectively penetrate the school market,” and “be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you are in constant demand.”
Recruiters are advised to maximize their effectiveness by “offer[ing] their services as assistant football, basketball, track, baseball or wrestling coaches,” to “offer to be a chaperone or escort for homecoming activities and coronations,” to “[d]eliver donuts and coffee for faculty once a month,” to “participate visibly in Hispanic Heritage and Black History Month activities …” to “befriend student leaders, such as the student president or the captain of the football team, whom recruiters can develop into ‘COIs’ (centers of influence) that can encourage other students to enlist.”
The violations of the rights of students and their parents have been so egregious that even some military personnel have objected. JROTC instructor and retired Army Major William White taught in three states and said enrollment was a constant emphasis. He told the Times, “Kids were forced into the program,” admitting that even he faced blowback when he tried to help children exit the course.
The Times also reported that at least 33 of the program’s instructors were charged in sexual misconduct cases involving students. As a result of the recent spotlight, the Pentagon has admitted to 114 allegations of violence, sexual abuse or sexual harassment by JROTC instructors over the last 10 years.
A map of JROTC locations, color coded by Brigades, at high schools across the United States. [Photo: US Department of Defense]
However, according to Jackie Speier, a former Democratic congresswoman from California, the abuse is far more rampant. “It is chilling to think that after we have been addressing this issue for over 10 years within the military—where we know that cases exceed 20,000 to 30,000 a year and only 5,000 report, and we know that the chain of command has been part of the problem—to come and see this going on in our classrooms, in high school, is traumatizing to me, to be quite honest,” she said.
But no matter how often the military is called on the carpet, the programs continue to expand.
What is JROTC?
JROTC cadets (children between the ages of 12 and 17) undergo military-style physical fitness training, drill like a soldier, learn marksmanship and military history, and wear uniforms. In short, students experience “a taste of the military” under the direction of a retired service member. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” said Florida parent Julio Mejia.
The government has long invested in JROTC and its college-based companion program, ROTC, precisely to indoctrinate patriotism, “discipline” and obedience to authority, and, above all, to increase military enlistment.
JROTC originated in 1916 during World War I, a war that cost the lives of over 100,000 Americans and 20 million worldwide. The high school training program was significantly expanded in 1964 in line with the demand for more US servicemen in Vietnam. That war cost the lives of about 1.3 million people, including over 50,000 Americans.
Presently, six of the eight branches of the US military (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Space Force) have JROTC programs that train half a million students a year. (The Space Force program is still in the development stage.)
Unsurprisingly, these programs target the socio-economically disadvantaged, who have fewer options for higher education or are particularly worried about student loan debt. According to statistics presented by the Times, 40 percent of JROTC programs are in inner-city schools, serving a student population with a 50 percent proportion of minorities. Especially high enrollment was reported (between 75 and 100 percent of an annual class) in low-income areas of Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Alabama. JROTC has been an essential component of the “economic draft,” channeling military volunteers drawn from impoverished sections of the working class.
The military also targets school districts reeling from years of budget cuts. States have allowed JROTC classes to be categorized as “physical education,” thereby allowing schools to lay off PE teachers and substitute ROTC instructors. These military veterans, making on average $50,000 a year, are not required to have a bachelor’s degree or be certified to teach. About half of their salary is covered by the military, which also pays for students’ uniforms and other supplemental paraphernalia. In this way, ROTC, with hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal, bribes impoverished schools with budgetary fixes. For fiscal year 2021, the JROTC budget was about $428 million.
JROTC Air Rifle training. [Photo: US Army]
The military also provides textbooks, another cost savings for schools. But these learning materials are often little more than patriotic and pro-war propaganda. The New York Times report cited outright lies justifying the Vietnam War, false claims about the US bombing of Libya, the deceitful downplaying of the US downing of an Iranian passenger jet that killed 290 people in 1988, and more. Two different textbooks, reviewed by the Times, ascribe the US loss in Vietnam to “restrictions” by the top brass, echoing the fascistic outlook of Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who incinerated two-thirds of Japanese cities during World War II and later called for “bombing Hanoi back to the Stone Age.”
Some school administrators have deployed JROTC as a means to promote military discipline and rote obedience as an antidote to the terrible effects of the social crisis on youth, including widespread mental health problems.
It is no surprise that the rabidly right-wing National Rifle Association (NRA) funnels millions of dollars to JROTC programs and sponsors competitions at which military recruiters stand by. JROTC instructors often encourage cadets to join the NRA and have volunteered students to participate in NRA fund-raising events.
A military recruitment crisis
Young people have seen the US at war their entire lifetime, as American wars of foreign plunder have raged for over 30 years. From the Desert Storm invasion of Iraq in 1991 to the bombing of Serbia in 1999, the “war on terror” launched with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the “shock and awe” reinvasion of Iraq in 2003, and brutal bombings and interventions in Syria, Libya and more—the American project for global domination has metastasized into a NATO-US war against nuclear-armed Russia.
Many have seen family members return from these wars, suffering from PTSD or injuries, with inadequate medical care and no decent job prospects. This has had a deep-going social impact.
As a result, “Every branch of the US military is struggling to meet its fiscal year 2022 recruiting goals,” NBC reported, citing “multiple US military and defense officials, and numbers obtained by NBC News show[ing] both a record low percentage of young Americans eligible to serve and an even tinier fraction willing to consider it.”
The report continued: “The officials said the Pentagon’s top leaders are now scrambling for ways to find new recruits to fill out the ranks of the all-volunteer force,” adding that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks considered the shortfall “a serious issue,” on which they “have been meeting … frequently with other leaders.”
The “concern” on the part of Democratic Party stalwarts Sanders and Warren will prove to be just another in a long line of cover-ups of abuse of young people by JROTC. The real concern of the Democrats is sufficient staffing and munitions to project US power across Asia and the world, as the ruling class engages in further wars on behalf of Wall Street.
More than ever, the Democrats support the military’s escalating demands for new recruits. All of the above-cited lawmakers who contacted the departments of Education and Defense voted for this year’s record military budget of $858 billion. None of them, including the supposed “democratic socialist” Sanders, has suggested disbanding JROTC, nor will they.
In fact, a bill was introduced in the US Senate in 2020, co-sponsored by Democrats, to nearly double JROTC. From the standpoint of the military, the program is wildly successful.
Between 30 and 50 percent of graduating JROTC cadets join the military, as of 2000. General James L. Jones, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps, testified that the value of the JROTC program was “beyond contest.” He added, “Fully one-third of our young men and women who join a Junior ROTC program wind up wearing the uniform of a Marine.” Overall, students who attend a high school with JROTC are more than twice as likely to enlist.
Members of the Xavier High School Army JROTC march up 5th Avenue during the annual Columbus Day Parade, Monday, October 10, 2022, in New York. [AP Photo/Mary Altaffer]
Finally, it should be noted that in line with the Democrats’ escalation of US imperialist wars, the Democratic Socialists of America-aligned Jacobin magazine does its part to cover up the significance of JROTC’s vast military recruitment program. Far from calling for opposition to all imperialist wars and the dismantling of the military’s apparatus of mass murder and repression, a January 8 article titled “JROTC is preying on poor students,” by Seth Kershner and Scott Harding, meekly calls for “rein[ing] in the military’s presence and power in public schools.”
The authors suggest, “In their communication with parents, and their training [sic] for high school principals, JROTC leaders should acknowledge what their program is designed to do: prepare America’s children for military service.” They conclude that “fundamental reforms of the program can help challenge the growing militarization of public schools,” and imply that the problem is one of “lax oversight,” sexism and racism.
The notion of “reforming” the US military is perhaps the most ludicrous proposition the DSA has advanced in its role as supporter of and adjunct to the Democratic Party.
The Northeast US was hit with the coldest temperatures seen in decades over the weekend as an arctic air mass passed over the region. The polar vortex was accompanied by powerful winds, driving wind chills to dangerous levels.
Temperatures broke records over a century old early Saturday in Boston, where real temperatures hit −10 Fahrenheit, and in Providence, Rhode Island, which plunged to −9 degrees Fahrenheit (both about −23 Celsius), according to the National Weather Service (NWS). Temperatures dropped to 4 degrees in New York City, −6 in Hartford, Connecticut and −15 in Concord, New Hampshire, with strong winds making it feel much colder everywhere.
Thomas Moore, right, rests on his bed inside a shelter at Crossroads Rhode Island during a wave of frigid weather in Providence, R.I., Friday, February 3, 2023. A frigid Arctic front swept in from Canada, leading communities in the Northeast to close schools and open warming centers Friday. [AP Photo/David Goldman]
The summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the region’s highest elevation at 6,288 feet, plummeted to a low of −47 degrees (−44 Celsius) early Saturday morning, tying the previous record set in 1934. Wind chills atop the mountain approached −110 degrees (−79 Celsius). The NWS in Caribou, Maine, tweeted on Friday that it had received reports of “frostquakes,” tremors in the earth similar to earthquakes, caused by sudden cracks in the frozen ground.
According to poweroutage.us, 18,000 customers in Maine and New York state were without electricity Saturday morning; power had been restored to all but 5,000 customers by afternoon.
The frigid weather followed the month of January that saw record high temperatures in many areas of the region. While the cold snap might appear to contradict the growing evidence of global warming, many meteorologists argue that such wild gyrations in temperatures are actually an indication of climate change. Some scientists say the rapid warming in the Arctic may be increasing the likelihood that frigid polar air can dive southward.
In New York City, a Code Blue was in effect, meaning that no one seeking shelter should be denied. A cold emergency was declared through Sunday by Mayor Michelle Wu in Boston, where city and agency workers visited outside areas which many homeless people regularly frequent. Boston authorities reported that only 10 people chose to remain outdoors Friday night in the city’s largest tent encampment.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy ordered Boston’s South Station to remain open to the homeless to sleep after the private property manager of the train station had recently illegally locked them out by tying the doors shut with trash bags. Dozens of people slept on benches and up against walls in the station Friday night.
In late December, state housing officials sent a letter to the Massachusetts legislature warning that within months the state may run out of space and not be able to place homeless families in the state’s emergency shelter system unless action was taken.
Mike Kennealy, state housing and economic development secretary, and Jennifer Maddox, undersecretary for the state Department of Housing and Community Development, cited “decreased exits” from the shelter system and increased entries into it as reasons for the emergency housing shortage. They said the state would not be able to expand funding and operation of the existing network of 3,500 shelter units, meaning those seeking housing might be turned away.
Winter temperatures in colder regions of the country mean that many homeless individuals and families who have been sleeping in cars, emergency rooms, campgrounds, state forests and other places not fit for human habitation seek emergency shelter. As of mid-December, 294 homeless families were living in motels or temporary shelters instead of in more traditional shelter units.
Last year, Massachusetts had the third-highest number of homeless families in the country. The state also has a right-to-shelter law that requires the state government to immediately house certain families that apply for help. However, such laws are next to useless under conditions where the funding does not exist to meet the increased need.
Freezing temperatures only add to the crisis that exists due to exploding home and rental prices and under conditions where increasing numbers of people have been pushed into homelessness due to unemployment, low wages and the skyrocketing cost of living. The pandemic has only exacerbated this crisis.
In addition, thousands of immigrants have come to New England and New York after being sent there in provocations by the fascistic governors of Texas and Florida. In September, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered two planeloads of migrants flown to the Massachusetts offshore island of Martha’s Vineyard, where they were abandoned with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
The record-breaking cold weather has also exposed the deteriorating state of Massachusetts’ hospital system. On Saturday night, a pipe burst in the Boston Medical Center’s emergency department, flooding it and forcing it to be closed until Tuesday. Ambulances will be diverted to other hospitals until it can reopen.
This latest crisis comes as median ambulance response times in Boston for life-threatening emergencies such as cardiac arrest, arterial bleeds or unconsciousness have grown significantly over the past year, rising from just over 7 minutes to 7.7 minutes in December, according to Boston EMS records.
Response times citywide are the slowest since at least 2014. In some Boston neighborhoods, response times are even worse, hitting nearly 11 minutes in Hyde Park and 9.5 minutes in West Roxbury for urgent calls. In such emergencies, seconds can mean the difference between life and death.
According to a recent analysis by the Boston Globe, the delays are due not only to high call volumes and short-staffing of health care workers, who have left the profession due to deteriorating conditions, low pay and burnout during the pandemic. A central cause is hospital overcrowding, due to hospitals’ inability to quickly discharge patients to understaffed nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.
This hospital capacity crisis is slowing ambulance service by forcing EMS workers to stand in line until hospital teams can take over their patients’ care. EMTs call this “holding the wall,” according to Cataldo Ambulance Service, one of the busiest ambulance companies in Eastern Massachusetts.
David Franklin, a paramedic with Cataldo, told the Globe, “Sometimes ambulances are backed up at a hospital 12 deep, waiting for the hospital triage nurse to speak to others ahead of them in line.” Ambulance crews were forced to wait for up to two hours on some days in December at Massachusetts General Hospital, according to the Globe.
