At Washington’s behest, Kenyan President Ruto moves ahead with police deployment to Haiti

Kipchumba Ochieng

On Thursday, Kenya announced that it is moving ahead with the US backed and developed plan for it to lead a Multinational Security Support (MSS) intervention in Haiti to bloodily restore bourgeois “law and order” in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. The Caribbean island-nation has been overrun by criminal gangs, most of which have close ties to rival factions of Haiti’s ruling elite.

While cast as a response to the desperate plight of the Haitian people, the true purpose of the MSS is to uphold US, Canadian and French imperialist interests and domination over the Caribbean.

A National Police officer patrols an intersection in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph]

The mission will see more than 1,000 Kenyan police, drawn from a force notorious for its brutality and criminality, working with the thoroughly corrupt Haitian National Police and security forces from Caribbean Community member-states Jamaica, Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda. Last week, Benin pledged to send 2,000 troops. Burundi, Chad and Senegal have also pledged troops. All of them have a track record of mass violence against their respective populations.

The mission is not only deeply opposed by the vast majority of Haiti’s impoverished workers and toilers, but also by the Kenyan masses. On Thursday, Kenyan government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura criticized Kenyans for not supporting a “mission to foster peace.” “Why are we complaining on matters of security when we have been given such help before? Let us be patriotic and support the government” he declared.

In the days before Mwaura’s remarks, the thuggish nature of the whole mission had, in fact, been on full display.

On March 1, Kenyan President William Ruto signed a deal in Nairobi with Haiti’s unelected, US-installed prime minister, Ariel Henry, to launch the latest imperialist military-security intervention in Haiti. This step became necessary after Kenya’s High Court had ruled the deployment of Kenyan forces to Haiti was unconstitutional, in part due to the lack of any reciprocal agreements between the two countries.

Just four days later, Henry—a right-wing figure who the US had hitherto staunchly supported—was effectively kidnapped by Washington. On his way back to Haiti, Henry’s plane was forced to land in the US territory of Puerto Rico, after he was confronted while in mid-air with a US State Department demand that he agree to “a new transitional government—and resign.” When Henry’s plane landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, he was “immediately met by US Secret Service agents” and refused permission to deplane for hours, a Miami Herald exclusive on last Tuesday’s events further reported.

The US is pressing Henry to reach agreement with opposition leaders on an interim government led by a three-member “presidential council,” then step aside. Washington has long backed Henry in refusing opposition demands he “broaden” his government prior to any election. (The mandates of all the country’s elected officials long ago expired, and Henry was himself imposed as prime minster at the demand of the US, French and Canadian-led “Core Group” of nations, following the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.) However, such is the state of the crisis now convulsing Haiti and the popular hatred for Henry, Washington has concluded his rule is no longer viable and wants to put into place a new political instrument to provide a “legal,” “Haitian” fig leaf for the MSS deployment, which it is simultaneously working to expedite.    

Speaking of the Kenyan police deployment on Wednesday, the US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Washington hoped “that action will take place quickly.”

Kenya’s role as an imperialist satrap

Kenya’s potential role in leading a US-Canadian financed and logistically supported MSS has been discussed for over eight months. Last July, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Minister Alfred Mutua suddenly announced the mission, justifying it on racialist and “pan-Africanist” lines.

Mutua cynically stated, “At the request of Friends of Haiti Group of Nations, Kenya has accepted to positively consider leading a Multi-National Force to Haiti. … Kenya stands with persons of African descent across the world, including those in the Caribbean, and aligns with the African Union’s diaspora policy and our own commitment to Pan Africanism, and in this case to ‘reclaiming of the Atlantic crossing’”

The truth is that Kenya’s police forces are being sent to Haiti as de facto mercenaries, acting in the role of jailers for a country which has become an open-air prison. The mission seeks to terrorise the Haitian population into submission to ensure the gang crisis does not precipitate a mass outflow of refugees to the US and Canada or serve to destabilise the Caribbean region.

Not coincidentally, Nairobi has already received advances for its services. Weeks after announcing it was “volunteering” to lead a mission to Haiti, the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) granted Kenya a new loan of more than $941 million, as the country continues to grapple with a host of economic challenges including vast debt, the deterioration in living standards and a tumbling currency.

Kenyan President William Ruto, center left, inspects a guard of honor parade, during the 60th Jamhuri Day Celebrations (Independence Day) at Uhuru gardens Stadium in Nairobi, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]

Washington and Ottawa have selected Kenya under conditions where they are waging war against Russia in Ukraine, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and actively preparing for war with China, and amid mass opposition among the Haitian masses to an intervention led by either the US or Canada. Both have a long history of neo-colonial occupation and military intervention in Haiti, including as recently as 2004, when they deployed troops to oust its elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Tasking ruthless African and Caribbean police with pacifying the gangs and suppressing the Haitian population is, they calculate, a less costly option—in terms of both money and the lives of imperialist soldiers—than sending in US and Canadian troops.

Kenya has a long track record of acting as a satrap for US and European imperialism in maintaining their strategic grip over Eastern and Central Africa. In Somalia, where US drone strikes have killed over 1,000 Somalis in the past three years alone, Kenya has been intervening with thousands of troops since 2011 as the US proxy against the Al-Shabaab insurgency.

The US seeks to maintain control of the geostrategic Red Sea, where Washington and its allies are currently launching attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen that have attempted to disrupt supplies to the Israeli military, in solidarity with the Palestinians. Kenya is the only Horn of Africa country to publicly endorse airstrikes on the impoverished nation.

This follows from Ruto’s support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. After the October 7 Palestinian uprising, Ruto rapidly condemned Hamas and supported actions against “perpetrators, organizers, financiers, sponsors, supporters and enablers” of terrorism. Soon after, Kenya refused to endorse South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and announced a plan to send 1,500 Kenyan casual workers to Israel to help make up for the acute labor shortage that has resulted from the exclusion of tens of thousands of day-labourers from the Occupied Territories and the departure of migrant workers from southeast Asia.

Kenya also signed onto a Western-backed East Africa “peacekeeping” force to the DR Congo’s mineral-rich east, to stabilise the war-torn region so Western corporations can plunder the minerals in the region. The mission has ended in fiasco as various neighbouring countries back rival militia groups within the country.

Over the past year, top US security chiefs have been trooping to Nairobi. The latest was General Michael Langley, the head of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), in January. His visit came two weeks after CIA Director William Burns met Ruto at State House, as Washington was planning its attacks on Yemen. It followed the visit of US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in September 2023 to sign a new five-year Defense Cooperation Agreement between the two countries, with the stated purpose of supporting Kenya’s capabilities for operational deployments.

Ruto regards Kenya’s proxy services as a necessary demonstration of his government’s commitment to the US and its global geostrategic aims. It underlines the Kenyan government’s support for the US-led attempts to counter China’s economic preeminence on the African continent. By serving as a proxy force for Washington, the Kenyan ruling class hopes to secure economic support. But its principal goal is securing imperialist political and military-security support, so as to steel itself in the face of mounting worker and farmer opposition to its imposition of class-war IMF austerity measures, including savage tax hikes, subsidy cuts on staple food and privatisations.

The bloody, repressive role of the Kenyan police

The plans to deploy Kenyan police to Haiti are themselves a devastating exposure of the claims of the imperialist powers to be concerned about the Haitian people. Despised by the masses, the Kenyan police act as a state sanctioned criminal gang, with the freedom to demand bribes, falsely accuse and imprison, and are regularly involved in extortion and extrajudicial killings. On a daily basis, the population is cash-milked dry by cops who demand “chai” (tea), a code-word for a bribe.

The Kenyan police has a long history of violence. After Kenya’s independence from Britain in 1963, the new ruling class “Africanised” the police, but ensured it retained its repressive colonial character to suppress the masses. During the rule of Western-backed dictator President Daniel Arap Moi (1978-2002), Ruto’s mentor, the police violently repressed workers and peasant strikes, murdered and tortured left-wing opponents, detained opposition figures without a trial, and enforced disappearances.

After Moi, police violence continued. Between 2002 and 2007, the Mungiki gang that operated protection rackets in slum areas, was violently suppressed by police forces. An estimated 8,000 mostly young people were killed in extrajudicial police murders. The brutality was such that decomposing bodies of as many as 500 victims were found in the outskirts of Nairobi. Then minister in charge of security, John Michuki, thuggishly stated that “if you don’t toe the line, [Nairobi principal police officer] King’ori will give you a bullet.”

In the 2007-2008 post-election violence, police were found to be complicit in mass killings, which claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people and displaced 600,000 from their homes, as police terrorised the population to enforce the election theft of then president candidate Mwai Kibaki. The majority of the killings happened in opposition strongholds where police shot dead hundreds of demonstrators.

Last year, Ruto sent the police to violently crack down on anti-austerity protests called by the opposition. Over 60 people were killed. To date, no police officer has been held accountable.

This is the track record of the police that the imperialist powers are sending to supposedly aid the Haitian people.

Amid mounting opposition within the Kenyan working class to sending police thugs to suppress their brothers and sisters in Haiti, the main opposition party, Azimio, is attempting to posture as an opponent of the Haiti intervention.

On Monday, Azimio spokesperson, Kalonzo Musyoka, said, “We will hold this government responsible in case our sons die in Haiti under the illegal deployment. We still oppose the move that was declared illegal by our courts.”

Kalonzo’s concerns for police deaths is not surprising given his track record working for Moi’s police state. Under Moi’s rule, he was the Foreign Affairs Minister (1993-1998), Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly (1988-1992) and National Organising Secretary of KANU, the only legal party under Moi, as workers, students and left-wing opponents of the regime were killed and tortured.

As for Azimio’s multi-millionaire leader, Raila Odinga, he is a darling of Washington and London, having maintained close relations with the US and other imperialist powers for decades. In 2011, as Kenya’s prime minister, he supported Kenya’s illegal invasion of Somalia. In the same year, he personally intervened to support France’s soldiers in Ivory Coast to install Alassane Ouattara as president, after disputed November 2010 presidential elections.

Raila is an open defender of using Kenya to serve imperialist interests. In his autobiography, The Flame of Freedom (2013), he accuses the Kibaki government (2002-2013) of not seeing it necessary “to deploy our military forces to secure our borders against foreign incursion, nor to engage in regional, bilateral or international intervention and co-operation to help solve some of the problems bedeviling eastern Africa.”

Similarly, the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK), whose leaders deserted the party and backed Ruto in 2022, are making empty appeals to the Kenyan regime. After the High Court declared the deployment of the police to Haiti as unconstitutional, the CPK posted a statement stating, “In light of this ruling, the CPK Majority urges the Kenyan government to respect the court’s decision, abandon any plans for the unconstitutional deployment of police officers, and redirect efforts toward addressing domestic challenges faced by our citizens.”

Australian workers hit by biggest cut to living standards in 50 years

Mike Head

Recent data has confirmed that working-class households in Australia are experiencing the largest fall in living standards in half a century, and have been for two years, mostly under the current Labor government.

Striking nurse at Sydney rally on March 31, 2022.

This is the combined result of higher global energy and food prices caused by the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the central bank’s government-backed ratcheting up of home mortgage interest rates and the role of the trade union apparatuses in keeping wage rises well below the soaring cost of living.

In addition, the Australian economy has been in a per-capita recession since the massive bailouts of big business during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has so far avoided an outright recession, unlike Japan and the UK, mainly because immigration boosted economic output.

Analysis of the data shows that workers and their families are already paying a heavy price for the plunge into war globally, accompanied by rising military spending and cuts to jobs and public health, education, housing and other essential social services.

Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) spreadsheets going back to the 1970s, Peter Martin, economics editor of the Conversation and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, calculated that the two-year drop in real household disposable income per capita since the start of 2022 was the biggest in 50 years.

Martin’s calculations are in line with an earlier estimate by the Australian Financial Review. It said that in the 12 months to September 2023, Australian household incomes slumped 6.1 percent, adjusted for inflation and population growth. That was the sharpest fall recorded across comparable OECD economies.

These statistics are regarded by economists as a measure of falling living standards. Yet such figures seriously underestimate the impact on the working class because they are averages covering the entire population. In reality, the burden is falling by far the heaviest on workers, not the wealthiest layers of society who are benefitting from soaring corporate profits, share prices, housing values and the rents they charge tenants.

For working people, even worse is to come as the 13 rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia since May 2022 have the intended effect of driving up unemployment. RBC Capital Markets and Deloitte Access Economics this week forecast the official unemployment rate to peak at 4.6 percent. That means at least a further 129,600 workers would have to be thrown out of work, taking the total to 700,000. According to the ABS December labour force data, 570,400 people are unemployed, but that does not count those working part-time or who have given up actively looking for work.

Higher mortgage repayments—up 62 percent since May 2022—have produced weak retail sales, rising insolvencies and surging living costs that have outpaced wage increases for almost two years.

The Albanese government’s recent desperate rejigging of “Stage 3” income tax cuts will do little to nothing to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. Most workers will receive only about $2 a day in reduced tax, starting from July 1, while high-income recipients will receive about six times that much.

The Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine, deliberately provoked by the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, has exacerbated the growth of social inequality. It has delivered windfall gains to the Labor government, which has collected record amounts of tax from the nation’s energy exporters, who in turn have profited from soaring coal and gas prices.

Without that bonanza, the economy would have contracted. According to the latest ABS report on Wednesday, real gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by just 0.2 percent in the final quarter of 2023.

That was largely because households were forced to cut back on “discretionary” spending, like buying new clothes, while paying ever-higher prices for food, utilities, and other essentials.

The annual rate of growth slowed to 1.5 percent from the previous quarter’s 2.1 percent. Outside the initial peak of the pandemic, this was the lowest rate of growth since 2000, when the worldwide dotcom crash caused a sharp slowdown in economic activity.

Without population growth, the economy would have gone backward by about 1 percent over the past 12 months.

Despite an intensifying affordable housing shortage, residential home building fell in the last three months of 2023, as did employers’ spending on machinery and equipment. A sharp fall in imports of goods like cars and appliances, as well as industrial equipment, prevented a bigger drop in GDP, which measures imports as a negative.

Non-dwelling building construction of data centres and warehouses raised business investment by 0.7 percent during the quarter, suggesting firms are preparing for further automation and use of artificial intelligence, at the cost of jobs.

Ironically, an official recession was also partly avoided by a 0.6 percent rise in government spending during the final quarter of 2023, largely due to the extra expenses and employment of staff for the Albanese government’s overwhelmingly defeated indigenous Voice referendum last October 14.

That defeat laid bare the growing disaffection in the working class with the Labor government’s false promises of a “better future” after it scraped into office at the May 2022 federal election, and disbelief that the entrenchment of an indigenous assembly in the Constitution would improve conditions for working-class indigenous people. The defeat also reflected the hostility to the government’s backing for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which began that week.

Responding to the GDP figures, Treasurer Jim Chalmers flatly defended the government’s record. He said the results showed that real gross disposable household income rose 0.3 percent during 2023. That claim not only covered up the ongoing decline in household income per person but also the unequal impact on the working class.

Chalmers argued that GDP growing at all was a major achievement. “Around a quarter of G20 nations have recorded a technical recession or narrowly avoided one, and yesterday Chinese authorities announced that they expect a period of softer growth to continue there,” he stated.

This actually points to a global recessionary trend that will inevitably strike Australian capitalism, which depends heavily on iron ore, gas and coal exports, with China its largest market.

As another warning of what is to come, the Murdoch-owned Australian seized upon the GDP results to demand that the Labor government impose harsher cuts to social spending. A March 7 editorial declared: “Difficult questions need to be faced about how affordable growing spending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, childcare and other programs will be in more stringent times.”

No such call was made, of course, for any reduction in the mounting billions being allocated by the Labor government to military spending to prepare for frontline involvement in a US-led war against China. That vast expenditure, headlined by at least $368 billion for AUKUS nuclear-powered attack submarines, will mean even more severe cuts to essential social programs and working-class living conditions.

Cuba slashes fuel subsidies and appeals for UN aid as economic and political crises deepens

Alexander Fangmann

As Cuba’s economic crisis worsens, the Cuban government has begun the implementation of a massive austerity program, what it calls a “macroeconomic stabilization program,” by first slashing subsidies on gasoline. The austerity program, which would substantially reverse what little remains of the reforms associated with the Cuban Revolution, is deeply unpopular among Cubans, and threatens to ignite a powder keg of built-up social discontent.

Gasoline station in San Antonio de las Vueltas, Camajuaní, Cuba [Photo by CubanoBoi / CC BY 1.0]

Starting on March 1, gas station prices were raised five-fold, with the most common fuel grade, 94 octane, rising from 30 Cuban pesos per liter to 156 pesos per liter. This brings the cost of a 40-liter tank of gas to 6,240 pesos (around $23 at black market exchange rates), or about 1.5 times the monthly state salary of 4,209 pesos. 

The cut to gasoline subsidies, one in a package of severe austerity measures, was first announced in December by Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero during a session of the National Assembly. Initially scheduled to take effect on February 1, it was delayed for a month, with vice minister of the economy and planning Mildrey Granadillo de la Torre claiming this was due to a “cybersecurity” incident. 

However, a released summary of a January 29 meeting of the Council of Ministers indicated concern that more needed to be done to politically prepare the austerity measures and avoid a social explosion, given already existing shortages of food and other basic goods, regular electricity blackouts and the collapse of water infrastructure.  

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel was quoted as saying, “We may find ourselves ... with workers’ groups, with the party core, who will not understand and we need to explain it to them well.” An article in Granma quoted Díaz-Canel admitting “I know that in the opinion of the public there is a lot of concern with the measures,” though he blamed the opposition on a “smear campaign against the measures on the part of the enemy to create confusion and discouragement, especially on social media.” 

A sign of the backlash against the government was the announcement on January 15 that the Cuban Communist Party’s Second National Conference, planned for the first quarter of 2024, would be postponed in order to concentrate on the “urgencies and priorities of the country.”

Díaz-Canel insisted the measures were “not a neoliberal package (pacquetazo),” the word used to describe the “Omnibus Law” of reactionary Argentine president Javier Milei, arguing that the plans could not be compared due to the Cuban government’s proposal to increase salaries for health and education workers. In actuality, the salary increases introduce a system of individual incentives entirely in line with “neoliberal” models, with healthcare workers being offered increased pay for night shifts, years of service, exposure and complexity, and “maximum effort.” Education workers will be offered pay incentives for seniority and teaching loads. 

In a bid to put a new face on the unpopular measures, Díaz-Canel sacked economy minister Alejandro Gil on February 2, replacing him with Joaquín Alonso, the president of the central bank. Also replaced were Elba Rosa Pérez the science, technology and environment minister and food industry minister Manuel Santiago Sobrino. Gil had held the position since 2018 and played a leading role in carrying out a shock therapy plan in 2021 that devalued the peso and raised prices, leading to inflation that was officially over 70 percent that year.

In 2023, the official rate of inflation was 30 percent. Additionally, the government estimates that the economy contracted by 1 to 2 percent in 2023, when it had originally forecast 3 percent growth. The budget deficit grew to 15 percent of GDP, with the government admitting it overspent its budget by 44 percent. 

The collapse of Cuba’s sugar industry has reduced its export earnings, with the recent harvest close to the previous year’s output of 350,000 metric tons, down from 1.5 million in 2019, a mere fraction of the 8 million produced in 1989.

Cuba’s reliance on sharply reduced tourism revenues for the bulk of its foreign exchange has led to widespread shortages and long lines for basic goods, as it imports around 80 percent of what it consumes.

Tourism to the island has fallen drastically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with not even 2 million visitors recorded in 2023, far below the 3.5 million expected by the government, and lower than the 4 million to 5 million per year who visited the island before 2020. The current forecast by the government is for 3 million in 2024. 

It is quite likely that the dire economic conditions themselves are depressing the level of tourism activity as potential visitors reconsider travel to an island where shortages are rampant. Aside from frequent hours-long blackouts, there have been ongoing shortages of bread in several provinces, and for the first time in its history Cuba sent a formal request to the United Nations’ World Food Program for assistance, requesting powdered milk for children. Nearly three-fourths of public lighting is being turned off during peak hours to save energy. 

Cuba’s economic collapse has been exemplified by the more than half a million Cubans who have fled to the United States since 2021, around 5 percent of the country’s population and the largest emigration of people from the island since 1959.

According to Marrero, a further currency devaluation is planned. Currently, the official exchange rate for individuals is 120 pesos per US dollar, though unofficial rates are currently over 314 pesos to the dollar. 

Other measures proposed by the prime minister as part of the package include a 25 percent increase in the cost of electricity for the top 6 percent of residential users. Unmetered water service prices will triple and gas cylinders, which many residences use for cooking, will see price increases of 25 percent. Wholesale fuel prices are set to double and freight transportation will increase 40 to 60 percent, while the cost of public transportation will also rise. There will also likely be layoffs at state companies as authorities “review the state structures and payrolls.” New private businesses are also being stripped of their one-year tax exemption. 

One of the more significant of the announced measures is the end of universally subsidized basic goods. The government now plans to replace this with a system of means-testing, which Marrero described as “subsidizing people and not products” and a “a more fair and efficient scheme.” The ministry of labor and social security will be carrying out a mass classification of individuals according to their degree of “vulnerability.” 

Items available through Cuba’s libreta food-rationing system have become increasingly paltry over the years, with more and more goods made available only at market rates or even at stores where only US dollars are accepted. Nonetheless, all Cubans were nominally able to acquire some basics through the libreta, which fostered a certain social cohesion and functioned as a symbol of the supposed equality won through the Cuban Revolution. The elimination of the universal subsidies will no doubt contribute to further growth of inequality and more open class struggle. 

The collapse of the Cuban economy and the government’s implementation of austerity measures are completely in line with the actions taken by of other bourgeois governments throughout Latin America around the world.

The mad race to war: Sending Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, deploying NATO ground forces, using the atomic bomb

Peter Schwarz

In 2014, the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, the old debate broke out again as to whether the major powers had “tobogganed” or “sleepwalked” into the war, or whether they had deliberately started it. With NATO’s deployment against Russia, this question is superfluous. The European powers are not tobogganing into war, they are plunging headlong into it.

In recent days, leading European statesmen, military leaders, and opinion-makers have accused each other of not going far enough in the war against Russia. Like adolescent boys engaged in a test of courage, they have called each other cowards, sissies and useful idiots of Putin.

In this photo provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, a Taurus missile flies during a drill off the country's western coast in South Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2017 [AP Photo/South Korea Defense Ministry]

French President Emmanuel Macron called on his European allies “not to be cowards” after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) publicly contradicted his proposal to send Western troops to Ukraine.

Ben Wallace, British defence secretary until last summer, berated Scholz as the “wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time” for refusing to deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.

Following the publication of an intercepted conversation between German military officers by Russian media, Britain’s Telegraph, the house organ of the Conservatives, wrote, citing a “diplomatic source,” that Russia had “identified Germany as the weakest link in the alliance and Scholz as a useful idiot to take Germany out of the equation.”

Scholz, for his part, boasts that no other country apart from the US has poured as much money and weapons into the Ukraine war as Germany. According to the Ukraine Support Tracker published by the Kiel Institute for Economic Research, German aid commitments in the first two years of the war totaled €22 billion, of which €17.7 billion was for military purposes alone. The UK is in third place with a total of €15.7 billion, and France is in 14th place with €1.8 billion.

Scholz opposes the delivery of Taurus missiles only because he considers the timing to be premature, just as he once opposed the delivery of Leopard tanks before the Americans joined in. He does not want to expose Germany prematurely. On the other hand, he is expressly keeping open the option of later delivery.

The competition regarding “who is the most reckless warmonger” is also being played out within Germany itself. The state-owned and private media are campaigning around the clock for an escalation of the war against Russia.

On the ZDF evening news, Green MP Anton Hofreiter angrily accused the chancellor of his own governing coalition of a lack of leadership and weakness towards Putin for refusing to supply Taurus missiles. Defence lobbyist and self-proclaimed war expert Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (Free Democratic Party, FDP) even voted against her own government in the Bundestag (parliament), supporting an opposition motion calling for the immediate delivery of Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

The risks that Macron, Scholz, Biden, Sunak and all the other warmongers are taking are breathtaking. They are playing Russian roulette with the nuclear bomb.

There is an obvious contradiction in their propaganda. On the one hand, they demonise Putin as the embodiment of evil, the reincarnation of Hitler, who is planning to conquer all of Europe and is capable of any crime. On the other hand, they dismiss his repeated warnings of the possible use of nuclear weapons if Russia’s existence is threatened, calling them a “bluff” that should not be taken seriously.

Just as before the war began, they threw to the wind all warnings that Russia would react militarily if NATO continued its expansion to the east and continued to arm Ukraine, they are now doing the same in the face of warnings of nuclear escalation.

There is only one explanation for this behaviour: The US government, NATO headquarters in Brussels and the European governments are planning to use nuclear bombs themselves. They are seriously considering the use of weapons that have long been downplayed as a mere means of deterrence.

In 2014, they helped a right-wing, pro-Western regime come to power in Kiev and then systematically reorganised and rearmed the Ukrainian army. In this way, they deliberately provoked a military attack by Russia. They hoped to bleed Russia dry economically and militarily and bring the huge country with its vast natural resources under their control.

Now that the Ukrainian army is heading for defeat after hundreds of thousands of casualties, they are planning a further escalation of the war. The deployment of NATO ground troops, which is already underway on a small scale, the delivery of high-precision Taurus cruise missiles that can reach Moscow, the huge NATO manoeuvres on the Russian border, and the transformation of the Baltic and Black Seas into NATO waters are intended to provoke Moscow into a further military response. If the military and intelligence officials who have influence over Putin conclude that outright war with NATO is inevitable, they could decide that attack is the best defence and give NATO the pretext for a huge escalation.

That is madness. But the Schlieffen Plan, by which Germany prepared to conduct a two-front war in the First World War, and Hitler’s even more reckless plans for world conquest, were also madness. Nevertheless, they were implemented and supported by the generals and the ruling class to the bitter end.

The foreign policy of the capitalist powers, especially in times of war, is not determined by Kantian logic, but by the class logic of imperialism. After decades of increasing social inequality and the accumulation of mountains of speculative capital, the crisis of world capitalism has once again reached a point where there is only one way out on a capitalist basis: The violent redivision of the world among the imperialist powers and the brutal subjugation of the working class.

That is the reason for the support for war against Russia and genocide against the Palestinians by all parties defending capitalism. The pro-war policy is supported not only by the representatives of the corporations and banks, but also by the mouthpieces of the wealthy upper-middle classes that have profited from the stock market and property boom of recent decades. The trade unions, which have been transformed into corporatist apparatuses for disciplining workers, are just as much behind the escalating world war as the Greens, the SPD and the Left Party.

The Greens, in particular, are inebriated by widening war. In their early days they blockaded nuclear weapons depots. Today, they call the loudest for the atomic bomb.

In contrast, the working class and broad sections of the population reject the pro-war policy. According to an ARD Deutschland trend survey, despite the constant propaganda, 61 percent of respondents oppose the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to the Ukraine. Only 29 percent are in favour. Only the Greens and the FDP show a majority of their supporters favouring the delivery of Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

170 killed in Burkina Faso massacre as French-Russian rivalry grows in Sahel

Athiyan Silva

In a series of massacres over the past two weeks, more than 170 people were killed in Burkina Faso, a former French colony plunged into bloodshed by France’s 2013-2022 war in neighboring Mali.

Victims of the recent massacres in Burkina Faso, March 2024.

On February 25, 170 people were killed in the towns of Komsilka, Nodin and Soro in Yatenga, in northern Burkina Faso. On March 4, RFI (Radio France Internationale) reported, new massacres occurred in the villages of Bigbou and Soualimou in eastern Burkina Faso’s Komondjari province, near the border with Niger.

RFI stated, “Several videos collected by our editorial staff show dozens of corpses: men, women, children, lying on the ground. In these same images, we see a few men in armed civilian clothes, on motorcycles, who collect and give water to children, obviously survivors of the massacre.”

A mosque in Natiaboani was also attacked. “Armed individuals attacked a mosque in Natiaboani on Sunday around 5:00 a.m. (local time and GMT), leaving several dozen dead. The victims are all Muslims, mainly men who had gathered at the mosque,” a witness told AFP (Agence France-Presse). A series of other attacks also on February 25 targeted the military detachment of Tankoualou (east), Kongoussi and the Ouahigouya area in the north.

The horrific February 25 massacre was reported internationally after Ouahigouya regional prosecutor Aly Benjamin Coulibaly released his findings last Sunday. Survivors said dozens of women and young children were among the victims as well.

On the same day, an attack on a church in the village of Essakane in northern Burkina Faso left 12 dead and three wounded. Attackers killed at least 15 worshipers and wounded two others, Abbot Jean-Pierre Sawatago said in a statement. Sawatago blamed the massacres on “jihadist” groups.

Burkina Faso’s military junta blamed the attack on Ansaroul Islam, a local armed group linked to Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of the Sahel (EIS).

Residents who took refuge in Fada N’gourma, the capital of neighboring Gourma province, told the press that the new Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) was involved in the massacres in Komondjari province. The BIR, created last October by junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré, is stationed in the area of Gayeri in which the massacres took place, the Burkina Faso Information agency reported two weeks ago.

Since the French intervention in Mali began in 2013, fighting has mounted across the entire Sahel region. In Burkina Faso, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million internally displaced since clashes between jihadist groups and government forces began in 2015. According to Acled, a US-based non-governmental organization that tracks deaths in armed conflicts worldwide, 439 people were killed in the violence in Burkina Faso this January alone.

Many provinces of Burkina Faso have established a state of emergency, and large portions of the country are not under government control. A November 2 Amnesty International report, titled “Death Awaits Us,” found that 46 localities with a total population of over 1 million—of the country’s 22 million—are besieged by jihadist groups. UN figures at the end of 2022 showed that over 2.6 million civilians faced severe food insecurity in Burkina Faso. One in five Burkinabès, or 4.7 million people, needed humanitarian assistance.

The French war in Mali not only led to massively bloody massacres by French forces, like the infamous 2021 bombing of a wedding in the Malian town of Bounty that killed 22 people. It also led to bloody fighting between militias and state authorities elsewhere in Africa.

In August 2023, the Washington D.C.-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies reported: “Africa has experienced a near three-fold increase in reported violent events linked to militant Islamist groups over the past decade (from 1,812 events in 2014 to 6,756 events in 2023). Almost half of that growth happened in the last 3 years.”

Broad layers of working people as well as top state officials in the Sahel accuse Paris of using jihadist forces to foment civil war and prepare new invasions in the region. It is a matter of public record that Paris and its NATO imperialist allies supported Al Qaeda-linked militias funded by the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms in the wars for regime change that they launched in 2011 against Libya and Syria.

Two years later, France intervened in Mali on the pretext that they had to save Mali from Islamist forces like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Boko Haram. France, America, Germany and other major NATO powers on this basis continued to plunder Africa’s rich resources. Between 2013 and 2022, thousands of French troops deployed to Mali and nearby Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad on military operations Serval (2013-2014) and Barkhane (2014-2022).

As popular anger mounted at Operation Barkhane, coups toppled governments that supported the French military presence, in Mali in 2021, then last year in Burkina Faso and Niger. In October 2021, Malian Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga accused the French government of secretly arming Islamist terrorists to maintain conflict in Mali and justify French military occupation. Nigerien officials leveled similar charges at Paris last year.

In Burkina Faso, which has seen eight coups since formal independence from France in 1960, a junta of officers led by Ibrahim Traoré seized power in September 2022. Anti-French sentiment was fueled by rumors on social media that Sandaogo Damiba, who received military training in France and backed Operation Barkhane, was hiding at a French base in Kampoincin near the capital Ouagadougou. French troops withdrew from Burkina Faso in February 2023 amid growing protests by workers and youth against war and social hardship.

These wars in Africa became inextricably linked to global war waged by NATO on Russia in Ukraine as the newly formed juntas in the Sahel, breaking with Paris, sought military aid from Moscow. The Russian state-linked Wagner Group militia has deployed forces to Mali and held talks with Nigerien and Burkinabè officials.

In the last two years, as Paris took an ever more aggressive stance against Russia in the Ukraine conflict, it also moved aggressively to recoup its lost military positions in the Sahel. It pressed the major regional powers in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to impose sanctions on and prepare to invade Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. There is little doubt that top French officials are well aware of, and seek to exploit, Islamist militia operations in the region.

The growing movement of the African workers, youth and rural masses places direct struggle against French and world imperialism in Africa on the order of the day. Nevertheless, bitter historical experience shows African workers cannot rely on military alliances with Moscow in such a struggle. Not only does Russia’s corrupt post-Soviet capitalist oligarchy seek to cut a deal with the imperialist powers it calls its “Western partners,” but a struggle against imperialism faces deep-rooted opposition in the African ruling classes.

This is the critical lesson from the 1987 French-backed assassination of Burkinabè President Thomas Sankara by Blaise Compaoré. Hostile to Sankara’s political overtures to the Soviet bureaucracy, Compaoré saw in Sankara’s removal a way to develop a base of support in ruling circles and especially in Paris for a military regime he would lead. Compaoré was only toppled 27 years later, in 2014, by mass protests of youth and workers.

Disability rights of Long COVID patients are routinely trampled upon

Michael Anders & Esther Galen

Despite the lies of the Biden administration and every world government, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to exact a heavy toll globally, in particular through the “mass disabling event” of Long COVID. As a result of governmental negligence, millions of people across the United States are fighting for long-term disability benefits to which they have wrongfully been denied access.

The symptoms of Long COVID, including extreme fatigue, as well as cognitive and memory problems, are often debilitating. Among the most disabling features of Long COVID is post-exertional malaise, which occurs when even minor physical or mental activity substantially worsen a person’s symptoms.

The most recently available statistics from US Census data, from April and May 2023, show that 11.9 million people were then suffering at least some limitations from Long COVID, with 3.6 million suffering extreme limitations. A 2022 analysis by the Brookings Institute estimated that Long COVID was resulting in between $170 and $230 billion in lost wages each year in the US alone.

Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID

This mass disabling event is not a “natural disaster.” The ruling class has inflicted it on the population by prioritizing private profit over public health. Despite Biden’s campaign promise to “follow the science,” his administration has overseen the scrapping of the most limited mitigation measures used at the beginning of the pandemic. As far as the ruling class is concerned, the pandemic is “over,” in the sense that it will not allow COVID-19 to impinge on corporate profits.

An article by Dr. Karen Bonuck with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine entitled “Long COVID is a Mass Disabling Condition―Treat it Like One,” shows the complexity of treating Long COVID. She tells how her daughter was seeing specialists in “cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, immunology, nutrition, otolaryngology, psychiatry, and sleep medicine” simply to manage her Long COVID. She poignantly describes the recovery process as proceeding in “‘inch-stones,’ not milestones.”

Long COVID is a debilitating illness even for those with access to high-quality medical care and insurance. For the working class, Long COVID can only be more disastrous. Workers who have been forced to stay on the job since the beginning of the pandemic are at great risk for developing Long COVID, which becomes more likely after each reinfection.

Despite these facts, the Social Security Administration and private insurers regularly deny benefits, often forcing people to wait months or even years for a final decision after appeal.

From a legal standpoint, Americans with Long COVID can seek accommodations from employers under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) states that Long COVID qualifies as a disability under the ADA “if it substantially limits one or more major life activities.” However, they note, the ADA does not guarantee that people will qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or private benefits, in the case that one cannot work even with reasonable accommodations.

Those for whom Long COVID leaves completely unable to work must either have long-term disability insurance from their employer, though not every employer health plan will offer it, or a private plan, or apply for SSDI from the federal government. This leaves people with a debilitating illness that can affect cognitive ability to slog through a labyrinth of bureaucracy to receive whatever they can. SSDI benefits generally amount to $800 per month for individuals and $1,300 for families, while rates by private insurers vary.

The complexity of the process usually requires that a person hire an attorney to help fill out and file paperwork. Disability attorney Nancy Cavey told CNN Business, “I tell my clients, ‘Fully expect you’re going to be denied.’ That’s, unfortunately, just the process.” After applicants are denied the first time, the government and most private insurers will leave only a limited time to file an appeal, which can be challenging for someone with Long COVID. In the case of SSDI, the applicant has only 60 days to file their appeal.

People protest during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing to examine addressing long COVID, focusing on advancing research and improving patient care, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

In Michigan, Kelsey Warshefski, a mother and former manager of a Trinity Health nursing home, is suing her insurer, the Hartford Life and Accident Insurance Company, who denied her application for long-term disability benefits. According to the lawsuit, before contracting COVID-19, Warshefski was “a runner, cyclist, athlete, and an energetic human being.”

Due to Long COVID, she now suffers “epileptic seizures, mini-strokes, skin rashes and breakouts, chronic pain throughout her upper and lower extremities, life-altering fatigue, digestive difficulties, and cognitive impairment.” 

Despite the clearly disabling nature of these symptoms, Hartford denied her benefits. The lawsuit quotes at length the requirements under Hartford’s rules for Warshefski to receive benefits, all of which she meets. The lawsuit also notes the dirty tricks used by private insurers to deny benefits. Hartford based its denial of benefits on error-filled reports from Medical Evaluation Specialists, Inc., which Warshefski’s attorneys describe as “a disreputable insurance industry review organization.”

Her lawyers found, most notably, that the two MES employers who reviewed Warshefski’s case got her name and certain dates wrong. When the reviewers were made aware of these fundamental errors, one stated that his opinion did not change. The lawsuit correctly states that Hartford’s denial “was preordained because, upon information and belief, it does not want to recognize a new potential cause of disability, namely PostCOVID-19 Syndrome.”

Chris Pham, a former head of sales in San Francisco forced to live with his parents in Arizona due to Long COVID, told NPR about his own experience with private insurance. “The disability company would often come back and say it needs review. And this happened every single month. So they would only approve the benefit one month at a time. So I had no certainty on how to plan. You know, I was basically just chasing down my benefits the whole time.”

Pham concluded, “You know, if I didn’t have the support of my family, I’d be out on the streets, and they don’t care.”

Dr. David Putrino of Mount Sinai in New York, a prominent physician who treats Long COVID, told NPR, “These individuals need to be held accountable for withdrawing support from people who deserve benefits and deserve adequate levels of care. Please let us stop asking sick people to prove to us that they’re sick.”

The process is equally difficult for people applying for SSDI. Michaelene Carlton, who has suffered with Long COVID since 2020, explained her own situation to CNN Business in March 2023. Her case had been assigned to a new case manager and she spent nearly four months calling every other week just to try to get information on her status. During that time, she was unable to get in touch with anyone.

The Social Security Administration told CNN that the issue is widespread due to years of underfunding and a mass exodus of employees. What workers the SSA has are all new and inexperienced. The issue has reached the point where, according to the think tank USAFacts, the decision times in disability cases can take months or even years.

“It’s my family’s future,” Carlton told CNN, “I can’t do much physically. I can’t work. This way, I could at least contribute something. It would allow me to feed my family. But the system is broken.”

Empire Decline and Costly Delusions

Richard Wolff

Пераправа цераз раку Бярэзіну (Biarezina)

When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR defended with far greater effect against two invasions than the invaders had calculated. That history ought to have cautioned U.S. and European leaders to minimize the risks of confronting Russia, especially when Russia felt threatened and determined to defend itself.

Instead of caution, delusions prompted ill-advised judgments by the collective West (roughly the G7 nations: the U.S. and its major allies). Those delusions emerged partly from the collective West’s widespread denial of its relative economic decline in the 21st century. That denial also enabled a remarkable blindness to the limits that decline imposed on the collective West’s global actions. Delusions also flowed from a basic undervaluation of Russia’s defensiveness and its resulting commitments. The Ukraine war starkly illustrates both the decline and the costly delusions it fosters.

The United States and Europe seriously underestimated what Russia could and would do to prevail militarily in Ukraine. Russia’s victory—at least so far after two years of war—has proven decisive. Their underestimation stemmed from a shared inability to grasp or absorb the changing world economy and its implications. By mostly minimizing, marginalizing, or simply denying the decline of the U.S. empire relative to the rise of China and its BRICS allies, the United States and Europe missed that decline’s unfolding implications. Russia’s allies’ support combined with its national determination to defend itself have so far defeated a Ukraine heavily funded and armed by the collective West. Historically, declining empires often provoke denials and delusions that teach their people “hard lessons” and impose on them “hard choices”. That is where we are now.

The economics of the U.S. empire decline constitutes the continuing global context. The BRICS countries’ collective GDP, wealth, income, share of world trade, and presence at the highest levels of new technology increasingly exceed those of the G7. That relentless economic development frames the decline of the G7’s political and cultural influences as well. The massive U.S. and European sanctions program against Russia after February 2022 has failed. Russia turned especially to its BRICS allies to quickly as well as comprehensively escape most of those sanctions’ intended effects.

UN votes on the ceasefire issue in Gaza reflect and reinforce the mounting difficulties facing the U.S. position in the Middle East and globally. So does the Houthis’ intervention in Red Sea shipping and so too will other future Arab and Islamic initiatives supporting Palestine against Israel. Among the consequences flowing from the changing world economy, many work to undermine and weaken the U.S. empire.

Trump’s disrespect for NATO is partly an expression of disappointment with an institution he can blame for failing to stop empire’s decline. Trump and his supporters broadly downgrade many institutions once thought crucially central to running the U.S., empire globally. Both the Trump and Biden regimes attacked China’s Huawei corporation, shared commitments to trade and tariff wars, and heavily subsidized competitively challenged U.S. corporations. Nothing less than a historic shift away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism is underway. An American empire that once targeted the whole world is shrinking into a merely regional bloc confronting one or more emerging regional blocs. Much of the rest of the world’s nations—a possible “world majority” of the planet’s people—are pulling away from the U.S. empire.

U.S. leaders’ aggressive economic nationalist policies distract attention from the empire’s decline and thereby facilitate its denial. Yet they also cause new problems. Allies fear that economic nationalism in the United States already has or will soon adversely affect their economic relations with the United States; “America first” targets not only the Chinese. Many countries are rethinking and reconstructing their economic relations with the United States and their expectations about those relations’ futures. Likewise, major groups of U.S. employers are reconsidering their investment strategies. Those who invested heavily overseas as part of the neoliberal globalization frenzies of the last half century are especially fearful. They anticipate costs and losses from policy shifts toward economic nationalism. Their pushback slows those shifts. As capitalists everywhere adjust practically to the changing world economy, they also quarrel and dispute the direction and pace of change. That injects more uncertainty and volatility into a thereby further destabilized world economy. As the U.S. empire unravels, the world economic order it once dominated and enforced likewise changes.

“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogans have politically weaponized U.S. empire’s decline, always in carefully vague and general terms. They simplify and misunderstand it within another set of delusions. Trump will, he promises repeatedly, undo that decline and reverse it. He will punish those he blames for it: China, but also Democrats, liberals, globalists, socialists, and Marxists whom he lumps together in a bloc-building strategy. There is rarely any serious attention to the economics of the G7’s decline since to do so would critically implicate capitalists’ profit-driven decisions as key causes of the decline. Neither Republicans nor Democrats dare do that. Biden speaks and acts as if the U.S. wealth and power positions within the world economy were undiminished from what they were across the second half of the 20th century (most of Biden’s political lifetime).

Continuing to fund and arm Ukraine in the war with Russia, like endorsing and supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are policies premised on denials of a changed world. So too are successive waves of economic sanctions despite each wave failing to achieve its goals. Using tariffs to keep better, cheaper Chinese electric vehicles off the U.S. market will only disadvantage U.S. individuals (via such Chinese electric vehicles’ higher prices) and businesses (via global competition from businesses buying the cheaper Chinese cars and trucks).

Perhaps the greatest, costliest delusions that follow from a denial of years of decline dog the upcoming presidential election. The two major parties and their candidates offer no serious plan for how to deal with the declining empire they seek to lead. Both parties took turns presiding over the decline, yet denial and blaming the other is all either party offers in 2024. Biden offers voters a partnership in denial that the empire is declining. Trump promises vaguely to undo the decline caused by bad Democratic leadership that his election will remove. Nothing either major party does entails sober admissions and assessments of a changed world economy and how each plans to cope with that.

The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.

Meanwhile, the economic, political, and cultural costs mount. And on some level, as per Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Everybody Knows.”