Teachers across England overwhelmingly reject derisory pay offer

Tania Kent

Indicative ballots conducted by three of the four main education unions in England have returned a resounding rejection of the government’s pay offer following six days of “intensive talks” beginning March 17.

The offer was well below the demands of teachers for a fully funded 12 percent wage rise. It consisted of a paltry £1,000 non-consolidated payment for 2022-23 and an average of 4.5 percent for 2023-24 with only 0.5 percent funded by the government. The ballots concluded April 5, with NASUWT still to announce its results.

Both the education unions and the government knew full well that educators would reject it and have used the “talks” to diffuse anger and opposition through political theatre and posturing, with the unions now calling for “fresh talks”.

Striking teachers in Cambridge, March 1, 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

The results of the indicative ballots were:

The National Education Union (NEU), the largest, announced April 3 through a live meeting from their annual conference in Harrogate that 66 percent of members turned out and 98 percent rejected the offer.

The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) announced April 4 that 87 percent of members rejected and 13 percent were in favour, with a 56 percent turnout in its consultative ballot.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) announced April 5 that 90 percent of members rejected the offer in a 64 percent turnout. Head teachers know that if the current offer goes through, they will struggle to pay staff from existing, overstrained school budgets as the deal is not fully funded. Analysis by the NEU shows that between two in five schools and three in five schools would have to make cuts next year to afford it.

The NEU have announced just two strike dates in response, on April 27 and May 2, with a further three strike dates in June and July. A new ballot for extending the strike action for the next school year will be sent out in June/July. The NEU rejected a motion from its conference floor which would have seen the strike dates coinciding with A-level and GSCE exams. “The press will have a field day if we go out on strike during exam weeks,” Wendy Harding, a member of the NEU’s executive, told the conference.

The NEU and other education unions claim to be opposed to the results-based culture of Britain’s education system and call for the overhaul of SATS, A-levels and GSCE’s, as ineffective measure for assessing children’s progress and placing unnecessary stress on teachers and pupils. To claim that teachers can win the right-wing press to their side, which for over a decade has done nothing but attempt to marginalise and demonise them and their concerns over a crumbling education service, is farcical.

Conservative Minister for Education Gillian Keegan denounced the threat of new strikes as “unforgiveable” and possible strikes by other education unions as “disrupting yet again, children’s education”. The NEU have made clear that the threat of action will be withdrawn at any time if the minister agrees to further talks. In response Keegan withdrew the paltry offer, said there is nothing on the table at all, and that pay would now be decided by the independent pay review body which would recommend pay rises for next year, at 3.5 percent currently. There would be no further “talks” until next year!

The calling of a few limited strikes interspersed by endless ballots has been a gift to the government from the union leaders. Teachers determined to fight for a living wage, to oppose the unbearable working conditions and for increased funding must strike out on a new road.

The government’s offer was nothing but a provocation. Keegan has repeatedly claimed “there is no more money” and offering a pay deal which will not be funded, throwing tens of thousands of schools further into deficit and possible bankruptcy—resulting in job losses and cuts in provision that would never be supported by teachers.

This agenda demands that workers make sacrifices in response to an escalating economic crisis, fueled by the impact of the pandemic and billions being made available to fund the war in Ukraine.

The unions direct teachers into a futile campaign in the hope the long drawn out process will lead to fatigue and opposition teetering out. The union bureaucracy is a privileged social layer whose interests lie in the defence of the capitalist system. They offer their services as a mechanism through which the government on behalf of big business can more easily go about imposing the crisis onto the backs of the working class.

The education unions, along with unions in the Royal Mail, rail, public sector, universities and the National Health Service have systematically isolated these struggles for over eight months now and blocked support for a general strike. They have imposed rotten deals and working conditions on their members.

The NEU were the only teaching union that organised strike action as the NASUWT and NAHT did not pass the government’s ballot threshold set by anti-strike laws. The NAHT have responded to the indicative ballot with claims that they are now “forced to hold a ballot for industrial action.” ASCL General Secretary Geoff Barton responded by stating that industrial action “is certainly an option that will be discussed, but we would emphasise that no decision on this front has been taken in either direction. It would clearly be much better for all concerned if the government responds with an improved pay offer and puts an end to the industrial dispute.”

The NASUWT shamelessly entered secret negotiations with the government only two days before the national strikes on March 15 and 16 were to take place, claiming that there was “nothing that should now stand in the way of detailed negotiations and getting a deal onto the table.”

They pleaded, “Avoiding further escalation of this dispute will not only require all sides to commit the time needed, but also to be willing to find solutions.”

In Northern Ireland, after 12 months of “negotiations” over pay, working conditions and funding, the education unions have set April 26 for a national strike the day before the NEU strikes will be held. The NAHT will participate in the strike for the first time in its 125-year history. The four other teaching unions in Northern Ireland have held a single half day strike on February 21, following 12 months of “failed negotiations” which produced nothing in securing the demands of teachers. The unions involved are NAHT, NASUWT, NEU, Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) and the Ulster Teachers’ Union (UTU).

Each of these struggles are being treated as isolated events, aimed only at forcing “talks”. While the results of the ballots reveal the anger and opposition that exists to the devastating impact of over a decade of austerity, after months of determined struggle teachers have won nothing.

Netanyahu attacks on all fronts to suppress anti-government protests by war-fever

Jean Shaoul

Israeli security forces launched a horrific attack at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem for a second consecutive night early Thursday morning.

Tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets were fired at 20,000 Palestinian worshippers, while armed soldiers forcibly removed worshippers gathered there for Ramadan prayers, beating them with batons and rifle butts.

Israeli police deploy in the Old City of Jerusalem, hours after police raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. [Photo: Mahmoud Illean/WSWS]

Less intense than the first ferocious raid when at least 37 people were injured, the second raid injured six people, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which said that Israeli forces prevented medical staff from attending to the wounded.

The second round of violence came the day after the arrest and removal of around 450 worshippers in a police raid and a ban on Palestinians under the age of 50 entering the Mosque. Itamar Ben Gvir, the fascist national security minister who heads Jewish Power, praised the police.

Israel’s onslaught provoked outrage throughout the Arab and Muslim world amid appeals to ease tensions from the United Nations, US, Canada, the European Union and Turkey.

Militant groups in Gaza launched several rockets into Israel, most of which were intercepted or fell without causing damage or injury. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched attacks on the besieged enclave. Hamas, the clerical group that controls Gaza, condemned the Israeli raid and called for Palestinians to demonstrate in response, but stopped short of calling for a military confrontation.

Ramadan, which this year coincides with Passover, has in the past few years seen Israeli soldiers attack worshippers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, preventing them from following the custom of spending the night inside the mosque for Itikaf.

In May 2021, similar attacks, along with provocations by far-right groups and attempts to evict six Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, sparked a murderous 11-day assault by Israel on Gaza’s defenceless population. Israeli air strikes killed 261 Palestinians, including 67 children, injured 2,200 more and displaced 113,000 Palestinians from their homes. This led to protests and riots in the West Bank and within Israel’s predominantly Arab towns and cities.

This week’s attacks at the al-Aqsa Mosque, the occupied West Bank and on Israel’s own Palestinian citizens, as well as against Iran and Syria, are the spearhead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to whip up war fever within Israel. As the protests against his efforts to give his far-right government dictatorial powers continue into their fourth month, he is determined to block attempts, as yet small but growing in the wake of the pogrom-like settler attack on the West Bank town of Huwara, to unify Palestinian and Jewish workers and youth against his government.

Netanyahu calculates he can create some kind of national “unity” based on militarism to deflect political tensions towards Israel’s “external enemies”, the Palestinians and Iran. On Sunday, he told a cabinet meeting, “Israel’s internal debate will not detract one iota from our determination. Strength and ability to act against our enemies on all fronts, wherever and whenever necessary.” He has announced the convening of the security cabinet, the first time since February.

Police have released at least 397 of the approximately 450 Palestinians arrested during Tuesday night’s raid but have banned them from entering Al-Aqsa Mosque for a week. Forty-seven detainees from the West Bank have been transferred to the Ofer military prison, while six Palestinians from East Jerusalem are being held and interrogated. According to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs, “The conditions of arrest and detention are humiliating and inhumane, and no medical attention is being provided to the injured detainees.”

The police escorted dozens of Israeli settlers as they entered the al-Aqsa courtyards Thursday morning, prompting fears that preparations are being made to divide the mosque between Muslims and Jews, as the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron was divided in the 1990s.

Far-right groups, including the Temple activists determined to carry out Jewish prayers at the compound outlawed under an international agreement governing the site—seek to replace the Mosque with a Jewish temple. Earlier, they called for mass stormings throughout the week-long Passover holiday and announced their intention of performing a Passover animal sacrifice, something Ben-Gvir has repeatedly called for. On Wednesday, the police detained “a number of people” near the Mosque with “lambs or goats that they were suspected of intending to sacrifice at the site for the Passover holiday.”

Adding to the tensions in Jerusalem, an Israeli settler shot a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in the arm with live ammunition in Jerusalem’s Old City.

In the West Bank, Israeli security forces used poisonous gas to disperse marches and angry confrontations with Israeli settlers for a second night in Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem and Jericho, injuring at least 12 people in Nablus, dozens more in Beit Ummar near the southern city of Hebron and wounding another with live fire.

Within Israel, police suppressed angry protests over the storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Umm al-Fahm, a Palestinian city on Wednesday night, with stun grenades and arrested at least 12 people. Other protests broke out in the neighbouring northern towns of Reineh and Kafr Manda.

In the last week, Israel has launched four air strikes on Syria, killing two Iranian officers. The IDF followed up Tehran’s retaliatory launching of an unmanned drone into northern Israel from Syria with another airstrike near Damascus Tuesday morning that killed two civilians.

Syria’s foreign ministry warned that Israel’s attacks risked dragging the region toward “total escalation” and accused Tel Aviv of striking Syria in order to “escape its internal problems through aggressions and crimes outside its borders.”

On Tuesday, Iranian Revolutionary Guard spokesman Ramazan Sharif speaking in central Tehran at the funeral processions of the slain guards pledged to avenge their deaths.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi boasted that Israel was “ready” to attack Iran and could do so even without support from the United States. i24NEWS quoted Halevi as saying, “We are ready to act against Iran. The Israeli army has the ability to strike both in distant countries and near home.”

On Thursday afternoon, dozens of rockets were fired on Israel from Lebanon, injuring two and causing a few fires. While no organisation has taken responsibility, Israel assumed they must have been fired with Hezbollah’s approval and shelled the southern Lebanese town of al-Qlaileh. The Iran-backed militia and political group had said it would support “all measures” taken by Palestinians to defend al-Aqsa.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, whom Netanyahu had sought to sack on March 26 for calling on him to halt the judicial overhaul because of the anger it had caused within parts of the armed forces, has now appeared alongside him. The man the self-proclaimed leaders of the opposition movement heralded as Israel’s saviour warned Iran that Israel would “not allow the Iranians and Hezbollah to attack us… We will push them out of Syria to the place they ought to be, and that is Iran.” On Wednesday, he insisted that that the IDF was preparing “for every possibility.”

Gallant’s backing of Netanyahu’s fascistic onslaught against the Palestinians and bellicosity against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, confirms that the official opposition in no way represent an alternative to dictatorship and authoritarianism, much less to war against the Palestinians and Iran.

Netanyahu knows that opposition leaders Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz and the host of former generals, security and intelligence chiefs and business executives that head the movement have no essential policy disagreements with him. Their opposition stems from their fear that he and his fascist coalition partners are undermining Israel’s thin democratic veneer and risking splintering an already deeply polarised society, one of the most unequal in the OECD group of advanced countries.

As loyal defenders of the Israeli bourgeoisie and Zionist state, they will agree some cosmetic changes to his plans to neuter the judiciary to demobilise the largest protest movement in Israel’s 75-year history and prop up the rule of Israel’s oligarchs against the people. In the event of a Palestinian insurgency or an external war, they will do their utmost to block any attempts by the protest movement to reach out to the Palestinians and oppose Israel’s system of apartheid rule within Israel and military rule over the occupied Palestinian territories.

The great “unwinding” of Medicaid enrollment will leave millions without health coverage

Benjamin Mateus

The following ominous message is posted on the Medicaid.gov web site:

The expiration of the continuous coverage requirement authorized by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) presents the single largest health coverage transition event since the first open enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act. … When the continuous requirement expires, states will have up to 12 months to return to normal eligibility and enrollment operations.

With the ending of the COVID-19 federal public health emergency, upwards of 22 million people (including 7.3 million children) are at risk of losing their health coverage by next year. The process of what Washington bureaucrats have euphemistically called the “Medicaid unwinding,” a return to the pre-pandemic normal, began officially on April 1, 2023. Tens of millions of people will be required to submit paperwork to state authorities to determine their eligibility to stay on the government program.

Nursing home residents wait in line to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a nursing home facility, on Friday, Jan. 15, 2021 in Harlem neighborhood of New York. [AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura]

Five states—Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire and South Dakota—are the first out of the gate to begin terminating Medicaid coverage through a process of mass disenrollment. Come May, an additional 14 states—Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico—will follow suit. 

It is unlikely that many of those disenrolled will be able to be reenrolled or find additional insurance coverage, as the monumental process of states “redetermining” who is eligible are facing a massive reduction of staff and resources. Although states must make a “good faith” effort to contact enrollees, or a suspension of the terminations by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicated that 8.2 million people will most likely no longer qualify, and only 2.7 million may be able to procure coverage under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

The Medicaid program, enacted into law under the Social Security Amendments of 1965, is partially funded and primarily managed by the states, which have a wide latitude in determining eligibility and benefits. Medicaid was essentially designed to provide health coverage for the poorest and most disenfranchised, including children, pregnant women, low-income adults, the elderly and people with disabilities. 

Residents of many nursing homes are being evicted because facilities can now stop accepting Medicaid patients because the state-sponsored programs pay so little, making it unprofitable to do so. The cases of Shirley Holtz, 91, who died on Monday, and 15 other residents who were evicted from the Emerald Bay Retirement Community near Green Bay, Wisconsin, demonstrate the situation faced by many Medicaid recipients.

Eric Carlson, an attorney and advocate for the nonprofit Justice in Aging, told the Washington Post, “It’s a good illustration of how Medicaid assisted-living public policy is still in its Wild West phase, with providers doing what they choose in many cases, even though it’s unfair to consumers. You can’t just flip in and out of these relationships and treat the people as incidental damage.” But this is precisely what it happening, and Medicaid and the federal government do not even track these evictions.

It is fair to say that the “unwinding” of Medicaid in fact means that the most vulnerable and destitute of people are being thrown off the proverbial cliff even as the COVID pandemic continues to rampage, despite the declarations by Joe Biden that the “pandemic is over” and that the virus “no longer controls our lives.” Clearly, the president’s vow to “follow the science” of the pandemic when elected was tempered by the more important need of the ruling class to protect corporate profits and the financial markets. According to the mentality of eugenicists like Thomas Friedman and Ezekiel Emanuel, those older Americans who have died from COVID, along with those now being evicted from nursing homes, are an economic drain on society and it is best that they die as soon as possible. 

The entire focus of the Biden administration has been to normalize the death and suffering brought on by the government’s complete disregard of the dangers posed to the public by the coronavirus. Mitigation measures that provided the smallest modicum of protection against the virus have been ended piecemeal, culminating in the current cutoff of emergency Medicaid enrollment.

During his State of the Union address on February 7, Biden offered only the briefest platitudes to the more than 1.3 million Americans killed in the pandemic, stating, “While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people and the ingenuity of medicine, we have broken the COVID grip on us.” He then let slip, “And soon we’ll end the public health emergency.”

Three years ago, on March 18, 2020, when COVID had surpassed just 12,000 official cases and the death toll was still under 200, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) was signed into law, which provided states with increased Medicaid funding. The law barred states from disenrolling anyone during the COVID pandemic and suspended the requirement for “redetermining” if someone remained eligible to receive the benefits.

Beyond the essential health supplement provisions to treat complications from COVID infections, the FFCRA also provided access to lunch for students and supplemental nutrition assistance program waivers. Additionally, it extended emergency paid sick leave and tax credits for qualified wages, along with family leave to care for those affected.

Medicaid enrollment reached its peak in 2017, when the number of those eligible had reached 74 million. It then began a slow decline, with 72.7 million on the program in 2019. By December 2022, total Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) enrollment had grown to 92.3 million, accounting for almost 28 percent of the US population. It is estimated that the number enrolled by March 2023 was 95 million, before the provisions of the FFCRA ended on March 31, 2023.

The numbers reflect both the rise in number of people seeking health coverage and the halting of “churning,” a process by which beneficiaries are disenrolled, either because they were deemed to have earned too much or failed to appropriately complete the renewal process, only to be reenrolled a short time later. The Kaiser family Foundation added that even “eligible individuals are at risk for losing coverage if they do not receive or understand notices or forms requesting additional information to verify eligibility or do not respond to requests within required timeframes.” 

Health coverage gaps can be catastrophic considering the mass disabling event known as Long COVID, which has no precedent in human history. The hundreds of millions infected or reinfected by COVID face deleterious consequences from these infections, which increase cardiac, respiratory and metabolic disorders. Jennifer Tolbert, an associate director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the New York Times, “Those people don’t have anywhere else to go. … The consequences would be severe for people with chronic health conditions for whom a week or a month without insurance could be especially risky.” 

Among those killed by COVID, mortality from infection has been five times higher for adults of low socioeconomic status (72.2 deaths versus 14.6 deaths per 100,000), according to a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Life expectancy in the US has been on a downward trajectory for nearly a decade, impacting the poorest most severely. Most devastating are the deaths among young people. Statistically, one in 25 Americans five years old today will not make it to their 40th birthday, according to John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times.

A long-term longitudinal study published in 2011 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found a disturbing difference in well-being and mortality between the wealthiest and poorest in society. The authors wrote, “The less wealthy may be more subject to poor physical and social environments, which can encourage health-damaging exposures. In addition, the lack of safety net associated with having little or no wealth can cause chronic stress among the poor, which in turn can trigger a series of biologic events, through central nervous system activation of autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune response resulting in poor health.” And those without health insurance have higher rates or mortality. Long COVID, long-term poverty and social inequality are all manifestations of the same disease—capitalism.

Although President Biden had announced he would formally declare the end of COVID public emergency measures on May 11, 2023, the provisions in the FFCRA that linked enrollment in Medicaid and the pandemic were decoupled by the $1.7 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, ending the Medicaid disenrollment restrictions imposed on states “on or after April 1, 2023.” 

Politicians of both big-business parties are all too eager to provide limitless funds for the war industry but have no qualm in throwing millions of Americans under the bus by discontinuing their only lifeline to obtaining what is exorbitantly expensive health coverage on either the private insurance market or the ACA marketplace. They also face the bureaucratic nightmare of attempting to prove their eligibility for a program to provide them with what is a basic human right—quality, accessible health care.

German Economy Minister Habeck in Kiev: German big business makes grab for Ukraine

Johannes Stern

The war in Ukraine is not about defending “democracy” and “freedom,” as official propaganda claims. As in any war, the imperialist powers are pursuing geostrategic goals and tangible economic interests. This was underlined by the trip of the German Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) to Ukraine earlier this week.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, shakes hands with German economy and climate minister Robert Habeck in the village of Yagidne, Chernihiv region, Ukraine, on April 3, 2023. [AP Photo/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office]

It was Habeck's first trip to Kiev since the war began. He said he wanted to come only if he could bring something with him: “An economic delegation that gives Ukraine the hope that there will be a reconstruction after the war.” This involves massive profits for the German economy and the division of the spoils of war.

The war propagandists in the media openly say this. “With armaments, with maintenance and reconstruction, money can be made. No wonder the Europeans are also showing their ugly side here, ”commented Stefan Kornelius, a leading political commentator at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on Habeck's trip and the increasing competition between the imperialist powers.

The G-7 countries are already “openly discussing who would take control of the post-war Ukraine.” He continued: “Whoever pays calls the tune.” The German government therefore has no reason to lament and complain, but should “coolly acknowledge that this war, despite all common political outrage, also promotes the states’ self-interest.”

In fact, German imperialism, which attempted to annex Ukraine during the First and Second World Wars, is aggressively pushing ahead. Already last August, the Eastern Committee of the German Economy set up a working group “Recovery Ukraine,” which published the dossier “Rebuild Ukraine” in September. It includes “proposals of the German economy for the reconstruction and modernization of the Ukrainian economy.” In October, the German government held a conference on “Reconstruction of Ukraine” in Berlin.

Now the plans are being put into action on the ground. Habeck's delegation consisted of seven leading representatives of the German economy – including Siegfried Russwurm, President of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Martin Wansleben, Managing Director of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) and a representative of the federal state’s bank, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) – and they made no secret of their interests.

Habeck himself sees the Eastern European country as a potentially important energy supplier. Germany and Ukraine have been partners in this area since 2020, he stressed, after visiting a substation of the energy company 'Ukrenergo.” The Ukrainians’ “strategic plans” are to “make the energy system broader and more decentralized.” In this respect, “two things fit together quite well: the need for security and a sustainable energy system.” Ukraine could become an energy exporter to Europe.

The hunger of German imperialism is not limited to questions of energy. In an interview with ZDF’s Heute Journal, Habeck announced that the German pharmaceutical and chemical giant Bayer will invest €60 million in Ukraine. In addition, the building materials company Fixit Group will “expand its capacities in building materials production in Ukraine, almost doubling it.” This is also urgently needed for the repair of roads, buildings and bridges.

In order to secure Berlin's control over the reconstruction, Habeck promised the companies a substantial investment guarantee. “Should this factory building be destroyed, for example by missile attacks, the German state guarantees or is liable,” the economy minister promised. For war zones, “we usually don't do that, but in this case we do.”

In order to raise the enormous sums that the reconstruction will cost – estimates range from about €400 billion to over €1 trillion – a “triad” is needed: Ukraine must “create good investment conditions,” there must “be guarantees from the public sector,” and then “private capital must want to go to Ukraine.”

“Good investment conditions” are a euphemism for the brutal exploitation of the working class. Already last summer, the Zelensky regime promised potential donors that it would achieve annual GDP growth of more than 7 percent by 2032. Since then, Kiev has continued to attack the rights of Ukrainian workers, who were already among the poorest and most exploited in all of Europe before the war.

Moreover, the exploitation of Ukraine is directly linked to the plans for the subjugation and plunder of Russia. In February, the Baltic states and Poland called on other Western governments to use Russia's central bank reserves, about $300 billion of which are stored abroad, for Ukrainian reconstruction. Habeck did not comment on this proposal – which would be illegal and an act of robbery – but made it clear that the German government is seeking the military defeat of nuclear-armed Russia.

“We believe that Ukraine will be victorious, that it will be rebuilt, that there is an interest of Europe not only to support in need, but that Ukraine will also be a strong economic partner in the future,” Habeck said. There should be “no surrender on Putin's terms,” but the “restoration of an order that implements peace.”

Habeck's argument is cynical and mendacious. The imperialist powers, which have been at war continuously for almost three decades and have bombed entire countries, are not interested in peace, but in the expansion of war. “It would have been right to support Ukraine militarily earlier,” said Habeck, who was one of the few German politicians who called for “defensive weapons” to be delivered to Kiev before the Russian invasion. “The decisive factor is how quickly the promised tanks and the promised ammunition will arrive in Ukraine.”

The widening of the war, which is increasingly directly creating the danger of nuclear escalation – on Tuesday the Kremlin confirmed the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons to Belarus – is accompanied by aggressive propaganda about Russian war crimes. Habeck and Zelensky visited the basement of a school in the village of Jahidne. The Ukrainian president claimed that Russian soldiers crammed 350 residents inside, killing eleven Ukrainians. Another dozen were shot.

These claims cannot be verified. But atrocity propaganda is an important instrument of warfare. The opposing side is accused of horrific crimes that are either fictitious or massively inflated in order to dehumanize the enemy and seek its complete destruction.

“All you can wish for the President of Russia is to spend his remaining days in the basement with a bucket instead of a toilet,” Zelensky said. Habeck explained that he could understand Zelensky.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is reactionary, but the main responsibility for the war lies with the imperialist powers. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, NATO has been systematically encircling Russia. In early 2014, Washington and Berlin organized a right-wing coup in Ukraine to install an anti-Russian regime in Kiev. Even then they relied on fascist forces, which now play a central role in the war.

The propaganda about Russian war crimes in Ukraine cannot hide the fact that NATO is arming a government in Kiev that worships Nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych and celebrates members of fascist army units and militias as “heroes of Ukraine.” All this is done with the full support of the Federal Government and, above all, the Greens.

Shortly before Habeck's visit, Green leader Marieluise Beck posted a selfie on Twitter with a certain “Kateryna P.,” praising her as “an adorable, highly creative young woman.” Her husband had fought “with Azov for a life of freedom instead of dull Russian terror. Those who are willing to give their lives for dignity and freedom are often the best. They are fighting for us too.”

Beck's hero is the former commander of the fascist Azov regiment Denys Prokopenko, who played a central role in the Battle of Mariupol. Prokopenko makes no secret of the fact that he sees the war against Russia as part of a far-right historical mission.

His grandfather fought against the Soviet Union in World War II in Finland, and Prokopenko writes: “It feels like I continued the same war, only on another section of the front, a war against the Kremlin's occupation regime. My grandfather had such a terrible hatred of communism, of Bolshevism, of the Sovok.”

During World War II, the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists collaborated with the Nazis and committed horrific crimes. One of the most heinous was the massacre of Babyn Yar, which killed more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children. In total, the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union cost the lives of about 27 million people. The third German attempt to control Ukraine and Russia follows in this dark tradition.

Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaçi on trial for war crimes

Peter Schwarz

From March 24 to June 9, 1999, NATO bombed Serbia for 77 days. It was the first major war on European soil since the Second World War—even this fact is suppressed and denied today in view of the war in Ukraine.

War propaganda was in full swing at the time: NATO was laying waste to Serbian cities in order to defend “human rights” and to stop the “ethnic cleansing” Serbia was accused of carrying out in Kosovo. Greens, liberals and pseudo-left groups, who only a few weeks before had been invoking pacifism, eagerly took up this propaganda and switched to the war camp with flying colours. In Germany, the Greens and Social Democrats organised the first military combat mission involving German armed forces since Hitler’s defeat in 1945.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi, right, shakes hands with US Vice President Joe Biden during a joint press conference in the Kosovo capital of Pristina on Wednesday, August 17, 2016. (AP POOL Photo/Visar Kryeziu) [AP Photo]

Now, the man whom Joe Biden embraced in 2009 and called the “George Washington of Kosovo” is facing a special court as a war criminal. On Monday, the trial of Hashim Thaçi, the co-founder and spokesman of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later Kosovo’s foreign minister, head of government and president, began in The Hague.

The 70-page indictment accuses Thaçi and three other high-ranking KLA members—Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi—of being responsible for more than a hundred murders and numerous other war crimes in 1998 and 1999. All four are accused of having personally participated in threatening or abusing prisoners. The prosecution has handed over 56,000 documents to Thaçi’s defence lawyers that prove these accusations.

The indictment describes in detail the brutality with which the KLA acted against Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians. Kosovo Albanians who opposed their policies and supported Thaçi’s rival Ibrahim Rugova, who advocated a peaceful solution to the conflict with Serbia, were mercilessly persecuted. The KLA ran numerous detention centres where several hundred inmates were held and, according to witnesses, abused with torture, mock executions and death threats.

Victims were beaten with guns, baseball bats, metal tools and wooden sticks and tortured using electric shocks or feigned drowning. Other prisoners and family members had to watch the torture or were forced to abuse one another. Others were shot by the dozens.

The killings continued even after NATO forced Kosovo to secede from Serbia and stationed its 50,000-strong Kosovo Force (KFOR) there. The KLA took revenge on Serbs, Roma and Rugova supporters, dozens of whom were murdered. Thaçi, whose wartime name was “The Snake,” was considered their strong man.

The Thaçi trial is an object lesson in imperialist war propaganda, which stops at no lie to camouflage its predatory and criminal aims. This applies not only to the war in Yugoslavia at the time but also to today’s war in Ukraine.

Here, too, criminals are celebrated as freedom fighters—who, like the members of the Azov Battalion, wear Nazi insignia and for eight years persecuted all those in eastern Ukraine who spoke Russian or had sympathies for Russia. Here, too, politicians—who hang on the apron strings of oligarchs and Western puppet masters, or like Ukraine’s President Zelensky unscrupulously send tens of thousands of young soldiers to their deaths for NATO’s goals—are glorified as democrats and freedom fighters.

The positive and negative signs are simply reversed. For example, for nine years, not a day has gone by without the media proclaiming that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was unacceptable under international law and historically unprecedented. But the immediate objective of the 1999 NATO war was to force Kosovo’s secession, which was indisputably part of Serbian territory under international law. After the war it was placed under international administration, and in 2008, against Serbia’s declared will, it proclaimed its state independence, which was immediately recognised by the US and most European states.

With the secession of Kosovo, a destitute province with 1.8 million inhabitants, the imperialist powers completed the division of Yugoslavia into seven powerless petty states completely dependent upon them. Above all, Serbia, traditionally politically and culturally linked to Russia, was thus to be isolated and weakened.

Hashim Thaçi played a key role in this criminal enterprise. In 1999, Madeleine Albright and Joschka Fischer, the foreign ministers of the US and Germany, invited the KLA spokesman to the Rambouillet Conference, where he provided NATO with the alibi for bombing Yugoslavia.

It was already known at the time that Thaçi’s KLA was carrying out terrorist attacks against Serbian targets and political opponents and financed itself through criminal enterprises, such as trafficking in drugs, women and human organs. The CIA had even classified the KLA as a terrorist organisation before NATO enlisted its services and reclassified it as a “liberation movement.”

After NATO forced the secession of Kosovo, it relied on Thaçi and the KLA to maintain “peace and order” there. After independence, Thaçi became foreign minister, prime minister and finally president of the new country, establishing a corrupt and criminal oligarchic regime.

While many Serb politicians were arrested and hauled before The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Thaçi and the KLA leaders were under American and European protection. In Kosovo itself, they spread a climate of fear.

“Almost no one dared to testify against KLA veterans,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine described the situation in Kosovo after the Yugoslav war. “And those who did take the risk fared badly: Inexplicable car accidents with fatal outcomes, ‘suicides’ and sniper attacks could be the result.”

The Chief Prosecutor of The Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, also reported intimidation and terror in her memoirs published in 2009: “Witnesses were so fearful and intimidated that they were afraid to even talk about the presence of the KLA in some areas, let alone actual crimes.”

Those who spoke anyway put their lives in danger and had to be taken to other countries with their families, Del Ponte reports. Even members of the KFOR force and some Hague Tribunal judges were afraid of attacks.

The situation only changed when Swiss lawyer Dick Marty presented a comprehensive report on KLA crimes in 2011. Marty did this on behalf of the Council of Europe, to which 47 states belong and which is independent of the European Union.

The EU then appointed its own special investigator. It chose US lawyer John Clint Williamson, who was considered “credible” because he had co-authored the indictment against Serb leader Slobodan Milošević. After more than two years, Williamson concluded that Marty’s accusations were solidly substantiated.

Now the EU felt compelled to set up a special court in The Hague, formally part of Kosovo's judicial system but staffed by foreign judges and prosecutors and financed by European funds.

The special court investigated for over five years without any charges being brought. Presumably the whole thing would have fizzled out had it not been for conflicts between the US and the EU.

Richard Grenell, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 as special envoy for negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, worked closely with President Thaçi, while the EU leaned on his rival, head of government Albin Kurti. When Thaçi was about to leave for a summit meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at the White House in Washington in June 2020, the Special Court published the indictment. Thaçi had to cancel the trip and resign.

The fact that the trial finally opened two and a half years after the indictment was published does not at all mean that Thaçi will eventually be convicted. According to the presiding judge, the trial is expected to last several years. The accused are being defended by top US law firms. And several prominent individuals, including the NATO Supreme Commander in the Yugoslav war Wesley Clark and the former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, are expected to testify in support of Thaçi.

But even Thaçi’s lawyers do not deny that the crimes described in the indictment took place. They are pursuing a familiar defence strategy from the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals: The KLA units had indeed committed crimes, but Thaçi, founding member, commander and official spokesman of the KLA, had known nothing about them!

Will Leviathan Democracy Blindfold The World?

James Bovard

President Biden triumphantly saved world democracy last week, at least according to the White House scorecard.  Biden co-hosted another Summit for Democracy, a repeat performance after the December 2021 test run.   Biden sounded like a Quaalude Savior as he recycled his “inflection point of history” cliché. But the Summit proved again that politicians are perils to freedom regardless of their prattle.

Biden promised that “we are seeing real indications that we are turning the tide” in favor of democracy around the globe. Practically no one not on Biden’s payroll agrees.  Biden’s boast was like taking a victory lap around the deck of the Titanic.

Democracy last year “declined around the world for the 17th consecutive year,” according to Freedom House. Twice as many nations are veering “toward authoritarianism” as towards democracy, according to the Economist. Most shocking: the U.S. is now categorized as a less free nation than Mongolia, Mauritius, and 56 other nations, according to Freedom House (funded by the U.S. government, so they must be trustworthy).

Team Biden believes a big problem with democracy is that politicians don’t have enough power – “Weak state capacity.” In reality, elected rulers around the globe are turning themselves into dictators who increasingly repress their citizens.   Rather than representative governments, elected regimes have turned into Leviathan Democracies far superior to the citizenry.

Consider Biden’s record in the Oval Office. Federal judges and/or the Supreme Court have struck down Biden’s eviction moratorium for deadbeat renters, his $400 billion cancellation of federal student debt, his “climate change” decree shutting down power plants, his mask mandate for airline passengers, and his edict compelling all employees of large companies and all federal employees to get Covid vaccine injections.  But all of Biden’s decrees are supposedly “pro-democracy” because he won the 2020 election.

“Democracy delivers” was a key talking point for Team Biden at the Summit.  Any increase in government handouts presumably automatically increased government legitimacy. Unfortunately, “leashing politicians” is not on the Biden Bingo Card for Saving Democracy.  The American Bar Association recently warned that “the Rule of Law is in Decline Globally” but it is “not a central focus of the U.S. Government’s approach” on democracy. A top ABA official warned: “Discussing sustainable development in the absence of rule of law, … is at best delusional and at worst dishonest.” Three-quarters of nations representing almost 85% of the world’s population recently “experienced declines in rule of law,” according to the World Justice Project.    In lieu of “government under the law,” Team Biden offers “the People Centered Justice Multistakeholder Cohort’s Declaration and Call to Action.”   Sloshing out more government handouts to activist groups who score media headlines was “close enough for government work” to the Rule of Law.

Rather than a system of informed consent, democracy is degenerating into regimes which blindfold citizens and demand unlimited submission.   At the summit, government officials made it clear that freedom of speech is a luxury that democracy can  no longer afford.  Secretary of Anthony State Blinken declared, “The misuse of technology and the spread of digital authoritarianism must end. We must stand for an affirmative, values-driven, and rights-respecting vision of democracy in the digital era.”   “Affirmative” and “values-driven” become code words to legitimize pervasive government censorship.  Blinken “proposed a ‘delicate balance’ between ‘openness and security,’ ‘protecting speech and preventing incitement,’ and ‘fostering innovation and limiting the power of Big Tech,’” as Tom Parker observed for Reclaim the Net.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sermonized on a “Countering the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism” panel.  He was joined by YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, who could have boasted of  how Washington censors his channel.  An internal DHS document reveals plans to crack down on “inaccurate” information on “the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”  Any facts which embarrass Team Biden are automatically “inaccurate’ and ripe for suppression.  Federally-funded entities spearheaded the censorship of true information on Covid vaccine side effects to bolster Biden’s effort to inject every American.

Eight governments, including Ukraine and Poland, issued a call for more censorship on the first day of the Summit. They called for tech companies to take action “against disinformation that undermines our peace and stability” and to suppress posts that  “ weaken our support to Ukraine amid Russia’s war of aggression.”  The letter asserted that “hostile foreign powers are using [social media] to spread false narratives that contradict reporting from fact-based news outlets,” especially the endless reports on the glorious victories of the Ukrainian army.  Facebook responded by promising to ramp up its censorship, including relying on “a third-party fact-checking service to determine if posts contain false claims.”  Some “third-party fact checking services” have been government fronts.  As journalist Aaron Maté scoffed, “We are fueling a proxy war in Ukraine in order to defend freedom, such as the freedom to censor dissenting views on our proxy war in Ukraine.”

Is the “will of the people” so fragile that it can no longer survive exposure to any thoughts that officialdom disapproves?  Does winning an election automatically convert tinhorn politicians into minor deities entitled to control the thoughts of any voter? Nullifying freedom of speech converts citizens into vassals that politicians can use and abuse as they please.

Throughout the Summit proceedings, piety was thicker than hog slop at an Iowa slaughterhouse. Secretary Blinken declared on March 28, “No woman or girl should face harassment and abuse in-person or online.” The State Department’s effort on this score was propelled by its  Global Engagement Center, which previously pressured Twitter to cancel hundreds of thousands of accounts, including vast numbers of hapless Americans. That Center is leading the fight against “gendered disinformation” and whooped up a report on “the need for more research to tackle this scourge.” According to the United Nations, a prime example of this “scourge” is “Zoom Bombing.”  That atrocity occurs when uninvited people crash a Zoom meeting and make rude comments.  Is it an international human rights crisis because boneheaded Zoom organizers fail to require pass codes to attend a meeting?

As part of its Summit festivities, the Biden administration announced new crackdowns to make it “more difficult for corrupt actors to conceal their identities, assets, and criminal activities.”  Despite reform promises at the first Summit, there has been no worldwide progress.  The U.S. ranks #24 on the international corruption index – even worse than France, according to Transparency International.  And that score was calculated before the latest revelations of the Biden family pocketing vast sums from smarmy foreign companies.

  Biden boasted that his administration plans to spend more than $9 billion to support democracy worldwide by the end of next year.  But U.S. foreign aid programs obliterate the anti-corruption initiatives of the U.S. government. An American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption,” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.”  As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, “The history of U.S. assistance is littered with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects.” Torrents of U.S. helped make Afghanistan one of the most corrupt places on Earth. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, “We need to understand how US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.” The U.S. has been “fighting corruption” in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War in the decades when Ukraine became one of the most corrupt nations in Europe.  Biden administration officials helped defeat a congressional proposal to create an Inspector General to audit and oversee the $100 billion the U.S. government has pledged to the government of Ukraine.

But another handout will fix that problem. The Biden administration is bankrolling foreign journalists to fight “kleptocracy” – government of thieves.  There is even an aid program entitled “Empowering the Truth Tellers.” (Julian Assange need not apply.)  The Biden administration claims to support “independent media” by effectively putting foreign journalists on the U.S. payroll.  Those journalists are “independent” because the U.S. government says so, and anyone who disagrees will be labeled an enemy of democracy. Besides, the U.S. is no role model: it ranks a pathetic #42 in the World Press Freedom Index, worse than Moldova and Guyana, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Biden is “saving” democracy” with buckets of goofy new acronyms: SHE PERSISTS   – one of the rallying cries for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, now standing for Supporting Her Empowerment: Political Engagement, Rights, Safety, and Inclusion Strategies to Succeed Investing. And then there was SHE WINS (Support Her Empowerment: Women’s Inclusion for New Security).  The Agency for International Development is whooping up PxP – Powered by the People. Did the White House believe acronyms should look like drug prescriptions? ADD stands for Advancing Digital Democracy but policymakers should have worked in an ‘H’ to reflect their cluelessness. ACRF stands for the Anti-Corruption Response Fund. They should have tweaked that one to make it ARF-ARF, to symbolize officialdom’s cravenness to the Powers That Be.

Comic relief failed to redeem the summit. The State Department wanted Americans to make short videos with the hashtag #SummitForDemocracy whooping up “What has democracy made possible in your own life?” Such as falling living standards, soaring inflation,   sporadic financial panic, and a befuddled commander-in-chief who doesn’t know if he is in Canada or China?  A search on Twitter indicates that almost all the videos made with #SummitforDemocracy hashtags were done by governments or by government-funded entities.  Biden’s democracy spiel can’t compete with cat videos.

Revealing all the levels of hypocrisy at the summit would be on par with peeling an onion. Mexico President López Obrador declared at the Summit: “Many of the great crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of God, or in the name of democracy.”  Many of the nations showcased at the Summit are dutiful U.S. allies, meaning that Washington ignores their abuses.

In his speech last Wednesday, Biden declared that “the power of these summits” is “not just to speak high-minded words.”   But even U.S. government officials feared the summit would be “inconsequential talk shop,” according to the Washington Post. Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass scoffed, “The summit for democracy is a bad idea that won’t go away…. American democracy is hardly a model for others.”

Unfortunately, the Pentagon missed the memo on democracy. Since 2008, foreign soldiers who received training from the U.S. military “attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries,” as journalist Nick Turse reported.  The Pentagon denies responsibility for the debacles. But, as Antiwar.com reported, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) declared at a recent congressional hearing, “I think we should at least know how many countries we train the coup plotters.”

Biden concluded his spiel to the Summit: “The great strength of democracy is that it gives us all the tools we need for self-government and self-improvement.” But the tools are controlled by politicians who equate ever great submission with the triumph of the “will of the people.”
With politicians openly championing censorship, Leviathan Democracy is dropping its mask and no longer pretending to give a damn about freedom.