No More Deaths volunteers prosecuted for providing humanitarian aid to migrants

Anthony del Olmo 

On January 18, a federal judge rendered a guilty verdict against four volunteers from the humanitarian organization No More Deaths (NMD) for their actions in the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona along the US-Mexico border a year and a half ago. Judge Bernardo Velasco’s ruling marks the first conviction of humanitarian aid volunteers in the US in a decade.

The volunteers—Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick—were found guilty of misdemeanors related to entering a wildlife refuge without a permit and leaving behind “personal property.” The latter was a reference to basic lifesaving necessities such as food, water and other small items left behind by the volunteers in order to ensure migrants survive the dangerous desert crossing.

The four volunteers each face a sentence of up to six months in prison, along with a possible $500 fine. Another four NMD volunteers are set to go to trial later this month on similar charges. A ninth volunteer, Scott Warren, will face trial in May on more serious charges including felony harboring and concealment for allegedly providing food, water, clean clothes and beds to two undocumented immigrants last year. If convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms, Warren could face up to 20 years in prison.

NMD has launched a campaign demanding that the Justice Department release the defendants on humanitarian grounds.

While NMD volunteers are not speaking to media while the trials are underway, WSWS reporters were able to speak to Enrique Morones, director of Border Angels, a sister organization of the group. Border Angels has been providing humanitarian aid to migrants in the US-Mexico border region of San Diego, California, since 1986.

“Border Patrol was very upset when NMD came out with a video of their agents destroying water bottles,” Morones stated.

“This [lawsuit], I think, is in direct response to two things—the hate rhetoric of the Trump administration, and the video that exposed these Border Patrol agents. We have been supporting NMD and demand that those charged should be released.”

“What they’re trying to do is intimidate us. Border Patrol has approached us before—asking what we’re doing, if we have a permit, etc.—and we tell them that we’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and that we’re going to continue doing it. We’re outraged and paying attention.”

In June 2017, an NMD humanitarian aid camp on the outskirts of Arivaca, Arizona, was raided by Border Patrol and four patients receiving care were arrested. A second Border Patrol raid was carried out in January 2018, at the NMD humanitarian aid base in Ajo, Arizona, where two individuals receiving humanitarian aid were arrested along with Scott Warren.

In a statement published earlier this month, Parker Deighan, one of the so-called #Cabeza9 defendants, detailed that the “remote terrain was being weaponized against people crossing the border, many of whom were fleeing poverty and violence. More specifically, since the mid-1990s, US border enforcement strategy has been to heavily concentrate enforcement in urban areas where people traditionally have crossed, thereby intentionally funneling migrants into remote and dangerous terrain, like Cabeza Prieta.”

The increased use of these more dangerous crossings, particularly along the Southwestern border, is the product of a deliberate strategy adopted by the Border Patrol under both Democratic and Republican administrations to use the harsh terrain as a means of killing larger numbers of migrants who perish in the scorching desert and discourage others from crossing.

Rather than accepting and processing asylum seekers in accordance with international law, the US government’s focus on militarizing the border has worked to reroute migrants, driving them further into uninhabitable terrain and territory controlled by organized crime syndicates and right-wing militias. This has only worsened with the Trump administration’s efforts to build up the border wall, while ramping up the militarization of border areas in general.

Late last month, Pentagon officials confirmed the deployment of an additional 3,750 troops to the US-Mexico border, continuing the build-up of repressive forces directed against defenseless immigrants and refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

Under the fraudulent contexts of terrorist threat and an influx of drugs entering the United States, the Democrats have downplayed the mobilization of the military on US soil as a political stunt, refusing to acknowledge that the move is in violation of the Posse Comitatus law barring the military form performing domestic police functions.

Yesterday’s declaration by President Trump of a national emergency at the US-Mexico border will mean billions more in funding for the mobilization US troops to build and construction of many miles of border wall.

These measures will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis of migrant deaths in the deserts along the border. Between 2000 and 2016, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) discovered the remains of 6,023 people who died crossing from Mexico into the United States. One Texas sheriff reported in May 2017 to the New York Times that, “I would say for every one [body] we find, we’re probably missing five,” putting the total dead in the tens of thousands.

The declaration of a state of emergency and mobilization of active duty troops coincides with the abusive treatment of tens of thousands of immigrants held in ICE and CBP facilities across the US, with billion-dollar companies making vast profits operating modern-day concentration camps.

In this context, the prosecution of the NMD volunteers demonstrates another step in the destruction of democratic rights in the systematic criminalization of individuals and groups who attempt to provide life saving aid to the most vulnerable sections of society.

The Trump administration is seeking to make an example out of Scott Warren for charges that he harbored immigrants crossing the border. Such an attack finds historic parallels in the persecution of sympathizers for harboring of Jews during the Holocaust.

The crackdown is part of the administration’s efforts to whip up national chauvinism and prevent a unification of the working class internationally. The brave strike by maquiladora factory workers in Matamoros, Mexico, and the unity of workers across North America and all borders is the primary target of such measures.

German defence minister advocates German-European war policy

Johannes Stern

In her opening address to the Munich Security Conference yesterday, German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen declared that “the most prominent characteristic of the new security landscape” is “the return of competition between the major powers.” She followed this up by adding, “Our American friends recognised this early on. We also recognise and see, whether we like it or not, that Germany and Europe are part of this competitive struggle. We are not neutral.”

Von der Leyen’s entire speech made very clear what this means. Almost 75 years after the end of World War II, the imperialist powers are openly preparing for a new round of military conflicts. In front of over 600 politicians, military personnel and intelligence service operatives, including 35 heads of government and 80 defence and foreign ministers, von der Leyen appealed for an independent German and European defence policy to enable Berlin and Brussels to play an independent role in the coming struggle.

“We Europeans have to step it up a gear,” stated von der Leyen, who also vowed to increase military spending. There is a clear plan: “The white paper and capability plan shows how we will modernise our army by 2025. But we are also realistic,” she added. “We know we have to do more. Especially we Germans. We are firmly committed to the 2 percent goal. Just like how the federal government recently reassured NATO, and how it is included in our coalition agreement.”

NATO’s 2 percent goal, which the federal government together with other governments agreed at the NATO Wales summit in 2014, amounts to at least a €35 billion increase in the German defence budget over the course of a few years. The cost for this madness, which recalls rearmament under Hitler during the 1930s, will be borne by workers and young people, who will be used as cannon fodder in new wars and suffer the consequences of social spending cuts to pay for military rearmament.

“We have set out towards a European defence union,” boasted von der Leyen. “We have finally found ways and means to overcome our fragmentation. We are harmonising our planning, purchasing of equipment, and readiness to deploy. This is resulting in the emergence of new, European capacities. It enables we Europeans to act in a crisis. And this is also transatlantic burden-sharing. To step things up a gear, however, we have to clear up a few contradictions.”

The defence minister left no doubt about what the German ruling class wants to “clear up.” After its horrific crimes during two world wars, it now intends to use armed force to uphold the interests of German imperialism. “We Germans shouldn’t claim to be more moral than France, or more far-sighted on human rights policy than Britain,” added von der Leyen. “We have to summon up the political force for a reliable common line that connects our security interests with our humanitarian principles.”

When European politicians bluster about “humanitarian principles,” “responsibility,” or “peace,” they mean brutal military interventions, which rely on the forcible suppression and plundering of the targeted country. Von der Leyen boasted that the German government also agreed this week to extend its mission in Afghanistan for another year. “With that, we are making very clear that we stand by our responsibilities.”

The military interventions in Syria and Iraq, which have laid waste to both countries and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, must be continued, added the defence minister. “Our mission continues,” von der Leyen told her audience. Islamic State is not yet fully defeated and has been transformed into an underground network. The central focus therefore moves “from the military component to stabilisation.” In Iraq, it is necessary to support the newly-formed government and “integrate those into reconstruction who fought bravely on our side.”

Von der Leyen noted that a joint European force and military policy would be a benefit to NATO, but the first day of the conference underscored how sharp the tensions between the European powers and the United States have already become. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas used his remarks to launch a frontal attack on Donald Trump’s trade policy. Tariffs and protectionism don’t lead in the right direction, he stated, before describing American tariffs on steel and aluminium imports as “a classic case of lose - lose.”

Maas also declared his desire, along with France, Britain and the rest of the EU, to retain the Iran nuclear accord. At a Middle East conference in Warsaw on Thursday, US Vice President Mike Pence, who will speak in Munich today, demanded that the Europeans “stand with us” by abrogating the nuclear accord and supporting Washington’s war drive against Iran.

The conflicts within the EU are also more intense than at any time since the end of the Second World War. After a months-long conflict, France withdrew its ambassador from Italy last week. And tensions between Berlin and Paris are rising, in spite of their agreement on rearmament.

Additionally, French President Emmanuel Macron cancelled a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Munich at short notice. Instead, von der Leyen appeared alongside British Defence Minister Gavin Williamson and stressed the need to deepen the countries’ defence cooperation, particularly in the context of Brexit.

Williamson focused in his speech in Munich on threats against Russia. He “welcomed Ursula’s personal efforts to push ahead with investments in German defence,” and declared that a common European military policy must above all be directed against Russia. “Let’s respond to the Russian violation of the INF treaty [The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] and the threat posed by new Russian missiles. Let’s be prepared to deal with these provocations. Russia’s adventurism must come with a price.”

Although the imperialist powers are preparing for new horrific wars, which will call into question the very existence of humanity, no opposition to this within the establishment parties exists. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, Alexander Neu, the Left Party’s representative on the parliamentary defence committee, made clear that his party supports the German-European great power plans in all essentials. The German government cannot “hide behind the US any more, or behind NATO,” he declared. “European security must be framed and realised by the Europeans themselves, not by the United States.”

The only party to call the war danger by its real name and oppose it on the basis of a socialist programme is the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP). Against the capitalist warmongers around the world, we counterpose the international unity of the working class. Under conditions where all of the fundamental problems of the 20th century are erupting with full force once again, this perspective assumes tremendous urgency.

No agreement on US-China trade with talks to continue

Nick Beams

The week-long trade talks in Beijing between top-level representatives of China and the US ended on Friday without any agreement. Negotiations are to continue in Washington next week.

The next round will be virtually the last chance to reach a formal agreement before a March 1 deadline after which the US will increase tariffs—from 10 to 25 percent—on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods.

Even if a deal is reached it will not take the form of a detailed document. According to a statement issued by the White House, “United States and Chinese officials have agreed that any commitments will be stated in a Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) between the two countries.”

The statement said detailed and intense discussions had led to “progress” but “much work remains.”

If an MOU is reached, along the lines of those established between the US and the European Union and the US and Japan, the drawing up of a final agreement would take place with existing US tariffs remaining in place. Thus the threat will remain that further measures would be imposed if the detailed discussions broke down.

Commenting on the outcome of the latest round of talks, US President Trump said they were going “extremely well” but then added: “Who knows what that means because it only matters when we get it done.”

Following his meeting with the US delegation, China’s President Xi Jinping offered no details saying only that China and the US are “inseparable” and “co-operation is the best choice.”

China’s official Xinhua News Agency said the discussions had made “important, interim progress.”

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the US felt “we have made headway on very, very important and difficult issues” without providing any details.

The comments by Trump and Lighthizer, together with a tweet by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that “productive meetings” had been conducted, were enough to give a boost to the US stock market. The Dow finished up by more than 440 points or 1.7 percent for the day.

The White House statement said the key US concerns were so-called “structural issues, including forced technology transfer, intellectual property rights, cyber theft, agriculture, services, non-tariff barriers, and currency.” The two sides were also discussing increased Chinese purchase of US goods to reduce the trade deficit.

China has denied that it engages in forced technology transfers, insisting that any such transfers are part of agreements reached by US companies to gain greater access to Chinese markets. It has also committed to tightening laws on intellectual property. However, these measures are regarded as insufficient by the US.

Another key point, not specifically mentioned in the White House statement, has been China’s state subsidies to its leading corporations, which the US claims are “market distorting.” China regards the US demands for such subsidies to be wound back as a means of intervening in the running of its economy and therefore not negotiable.

According to a Financial Times report, during the negotiations China promised to provide a list of all central and local government subsidies in accordance with World Trade Organisation requirements to ensure that they complied with WTO rules.

However, this was treated with scepticism by the US negotiators. “China’s system is so opaque that you would have to take their word that the WTO notification is complete,” one of Lighthizer’s staff told the newspaper.

This dismissive approach highlights the more general issue of whether the US will accept any agreements from the Chinese side without establishing its own mechanisms for determining whether they are being carried out. As Lighthizer has emphasised on numerous occasions, “enforcement” is a key question.

For Beijing any mechanism that allows the US to directly intervene in monitoring, enforcing or determining the level of state subsidies would be an intolerable infringement on its national sovereignty.

In addition, according to a source “familiar with the Chinese position,” cited by the South China Morning Post, Beijing is concerned that the “US would use the verification mechanism to make additional demands on the technology front.”

Chinese officials have emphasised that they are prepared to reach an agreement to reduce the trade deficit and have made commitments to increase purchases of US goods. But they are well aware that the fundamental US objective is to try to block China’s industrial and technological development.

The US regards Beijing’s Made in China 2025 program as a direct threat to its economic and ultimately military supremacy.

During the course of negotiations, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that China’s top planning agency was proposing to increase US semi-conductor sales to China to a total of over $200 billion over the next six years, or five times the current level in order to address the trade deficit.

However, in comments to the WSJ, John Neuffer, chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association, dismissed the proposal as a “distraction” and “too clever by half.” He described it as an “accounting gimmick designed to help China achieve its Made-in-China 2025 goals.”

The underlying US objectives are revealed not only in its positions during the trade talks but in its actions. The US Justice Department has charged Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, with breaches of US sanctions against Iran and theft of intellectual property from the US firm T-Mobile.

While the trade negotiations were taking place this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was lobbying Eastern European countries to exclude Huawei from participation in the establishment of 5G mobile phone networks.

The US has already secured the exclusion of Huawei from countries in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence group—the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand—and wants the ban extended to all its allies.

In addition, the Trump administration reportedly has under consideration an executive order that would ban Chinese telecom companies from operating in the US on “national security” grounds. It would give greater authority to the Commerce Department to review purchases of products by companies connected to what are deemed “adversarial” countries.

Nationwide public sector strike hits Portugal

Will Morrow

Tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, garbage collection workers and other public sector employees took part in a nationwide strike in Portugal yesterday. They are fighting against wage cuts and austerity demanded by the European Union and imposed by the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Antonio Costa.

The 24-hour strike was called by the major public sector trade unions, which support the Socialist Party government and its austerity policies, but are maneuvering to maintain control of a growing movement among nurses and other sections of workers that is increasingly developing outside of their control.

The strike in Portugal follows a 24-hour public-sector strike in Belgium on Wednesday, a strike of 70,000 teachers and public sector workers in Berlin the same day and mass protests of Italian workers opposing austerity and unemployment in Rome over the weekend. It takes place as tens of thousands of workers in France are due to take part today in the fourteenth weekly Yellow Vest protest against social inequality.

According to the National Teachers Federation, 90 percent of teachers and other school employees took part in the strike in Portugal, closing schools across the country. Roughly the same proportion of garbage collection workers struck.

The Common Front public sector union federation reported that more than two dozen hospitals had recorded a strike participation rate of between 75 and 100 percent in their Friday night shift, including at the Sao Jose and Santa Maria hospitals in Lisbon, and at the Sao Francisco Xavier, Santo Antonio and Pedro Hispano hospitals in Oporto.

Public sector workers have not received a wage increase for ten years. Their wages have been frozen every year by successive governments, and the Costa government announced last month that the freeze would be continued for another year. Only one group of public employees will receive a wage increase—those whose current wage of 580 euros per month is below the legal minimum wage of 600 euros.

A decade of austerity has led to a breakdown of schools and hospitals. Many teachers are hired to work for 3.5 hours per day but are expected to work the entire day, and are laid off at the conclusion of the school year for three months.

In contrast to the determination of workers to wage a struggle, the main union federations are motivated by entirely different concerns. Yesterday morning, Ana Avoila of the Common Front union declared that they “will not give up fighting until the elections,” which are due to be held in October. This points to the unions’ role in demobilizing opposition and channeling workers behind the re-election of a Socialist Party government.

The main UGT and CGTP union federations have called repeated one-day general strikes over the past five years, most recently last October, as a means of letting off steam among workers, as the unions have continued to negotiate further austerity. The latest strike is aimed at maintaining their control over and suppressing a movement among nurses in particular.

Beginning last November, tens of thousands of nurses supported calls for a strike that developed outside of the unions’ control on social media, particularly on WhatsApp groups. A statement published by a group of nurses called for a “surgical strike,” which would involve strikes of only a minority of workers at any one time, but enough to enforce the postponement of operations. The call was supported by Sindepor, the nurses’ union which is allied to the main Socialist Party UGT union federation, in order to prevent the strike from developing independently of the unions.

More than 14,000 workers, most of them nurses, donated money online via a crowd-funding page to provide a 42 euro daily wage to workers who strike. In the space of two months, the fund has raised over 600,000 euros. The strikes were first carried out between November 22 and December 31, forcing the postponement of 7,500 operations, and resumed on January 31 to continue until the end of February. According to government figures, it had caused the postponement of 2,657 operations in the week to February 8.

On February 7, the Costa government announced a legal injunction to shut down the nurses’ strike on the grounds that nurses—and not successive governments that have starved hospitals of funds in order to hand over billions of euros to billionaire hedge fund holders of Portuguese government bonds—are responsible for a reduction of services below a minimum required level. The Sindepor union has challenged the decision in the Supreme Court.

As part of an increasingly repressive crackdown against workers, the government has ordered that PPL, the private crowd-funding website, hand over the personal information, including IP addresses, of every worker who donated to the fund.

The trade unions have made clear that their real opponent in this situation is not the government, but workers themselves.

The president of the Portuguese Trade Union of Nurses, Lucia Leite, reacted to the president’s injunction announcement by warning of “more uncontrollable” forms of struggle by workers not supported by the unions themselves. “But I have a clear conscience,” she told Lula, because “I warned the Minister of Health about this risk.”

In an interview with RTP on January 30, UGT Secretary General Carlos Silva warned that any legal injunction against the nurses’ strike could trigger explosive opposition that the union could not control. “It’s not the attitude we expect from a leftist government,” he said. He asked if the government wanted to “maintain the climate of social conflict and wear out the unions”, and added: “And then negotiate with whom? The yellow vests, the social media networks, the inorganic movements? The government has to decide what it wants to do.”

Meanwhile, Publico magazine published a report yesterday, under the heading, “Hot Winter,” warning that the number of union strike warnings had reached 112 in the first month and a half of the year, compared to 260 in the whole of 2018, a roughly three-fold increase from the three previous years. The publication warned of signs of “contagion” of the nurses’ struggle among teachers.

Silva’s warning of Yellow Vest protests and “inorganic movements” expresses the real fears of the unions in Portugal and internationally—that workers, who are angered by the collaboration of the unions with continuous austerity, will take the struggle into their own hands and break out of the control of these pro-business apparatuses.

But that is exactly what is required. To take forward their struggle, nurses and other public sector workers should form their own independent organizations, networks of rank-and-file workplace committees—democratically controlled by workers themselves—in every hospital, school and workplace. Such committees would provide a means for workers to reach out and organize a joint struggle with their counterparts across national borders and overcome the continuous sabotage by the union apparatuses.

Such a fight must be coupled with a new political perspective. The anti-working class and pro-business policies of the Socialist Party government demonstrate the bankruptcy of all those forces who have worked to promote it, including not only the unions, but the pseudo-left Left Bloc party.

The answer to the program of capitalist austerity defended by all these parties is the taking of political power by the working class in Portugal and across Europe, and the reorganization of economic life on a socialist basis, according to social need, rather than private profit. Billions of dollars must be poured into healthcare, education and providing decent jobs for all workers, through the transformation of the banks and major corporations into public utilities under workers’ control.

Spanish government falls amid Catalan crisis

Alejandro López

On Friday, two days after his budget was voted down in the Congress, Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap general election for April 28. Sanchez’s government, the shortest-lived since the Transition from fascist to parliamentary democratic rule in 1978, fell over the state prosecution of Catalan political prisoners who organized or supported the October 1, 2017, independence referendum. They face up to 25 years in prison on false charges of having instigated violence during the referendum.

Sánchez criticized Catalan nationalist parliamentarians who voted down his budget in retaliation for his trying of the Catalan nationalist prisoners. “When some parties block the taking of decisions, it is necessary to call new elections,” he said. “There are parliamentary defeats that are social victories,” he added, claiming that supposedly progressive measures inscribed in the budget that the PSOE is abandoning meant that “citizens have seen what we wanted for the country.”

Other PSOE officials said they were happy to abandon the budget to focus instead on attacking the Catalan nationalists. “It’s too bad the budget was not approved, but paradoxically thanks to that we now have a line. The right cannot throw in our face the accusation of having any agreement with the separatists. It was something that hurt us and that provoked uncertainty in parts of our electorate,” a leading PSOE mayor told El Pais .

The PSOE is opening the door to the most right-wing campaign since 1978, in which the imposition of austerity and police-state rule is to proceed under cover of opposition to Catalan separatism. Elections in 2015 and 2016 produced hung parliaments, as votes split between the PSOE, the right wing Popular Party (PP), Citizens (Cs), and Podemos. Now, while the PSOE denounces the Catalan nationalists, the PP aims to assemble a narrow right wing majority on the basis of an anti-Catalan coalition with Cs and the new, pro-fascist VOX party.

VOX leader Santiago Abascal declared that “the Living Spain,” as he calls his supporters, “has finally defeated an infamous legislature.” He also denounced as “incapable and cowardly” the previous PP government of Mariano Rajoy, for having failed to crack down violently enough on the Catalan independence referendum.

This comment by Abascal, who has defended the genocidal record of Francisco Franco’s fascist army during the Spanish Civil War, underscores that VOX speaks for factions of the bourgeoisie planning military repression of the population.

Under Rajoy, Madrid sent 16,000 police to violently assault voters in the Catalan independence referendum, including the elderly, injuring over 1,000. It then jailed Catalan nationalist politicians in pre-trial detention and dissolved the elected Catalan government, using Article 155 of the 1978 Constitution to replace it with a government named by Madrid. At the height of the crisis, the PP threatened direct military intervention in Catalonia. Nonetheless, Abascal is attacking this record as insufficient.

PP leader Pablo Casado, while calling his party a “calm, moderate force,” stressed that he would work with Citizens and VOX to win a majority. Citing the “Andalusian pact” where the three parties are in a regional governmental alliance in Andalusia, he stressed the PP would build no “sanitary cordon” walling it off from the explicitly pro-Franco position of VOX. “Sanitary cordons always harm those that build them,” Casado commented, adding that he was fighting the “Popular Front,” that is, the government brought down by Franco’s coup and civil war.

In recent weeks, Casado has also unleashed a torrent of hysterical insults against Sánchez, calling him a “felon,” a “compulsive liar,” “illegitimate,” a “squatter” and guilty of “high treason.”

Similarly, Citizens leader Albert Rivera demanded that “all candidates position themselves” on the Catalan issue. He added that, if elected, he would “promise not to pardon the coup plotters,” that is, the prosecuted Catalan leaders. He warned that there could be a new “Frankenstein government,” with Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias “as deputy prime minister in charge of Spain’s economy and the separatists deciding how my country should be ruled.”

The principal danger in this situation is that the working class is not fully aware of the threat of police and military rule. There is no opposition from the European Union (EU) to the drive to legitimize Francoism, and what passes as opposition within the Spanish political establishment are split between open supporters of the policies of the right, and political indifference.

On Wednesday, Sánchez accused Citizens and the PP of failing to show the same “loyalty” to the government he had shown to the previous conservative government: “The PP government had the institutional loyalty of the Socialists. But they were not loyal, not only to us, but to Spain.” He added that “we’ve been willing to compromise with those who think differently. We’re pro-Europe, progressive, left-leaning, and not a single OECD country has had more female ministers than us.”

In government, the PSOE was virtually indistinguishable from the PP. Its fundamental agenda was further austerity for the working class, stepped-up militarism in the service of Spain’s geo-strategic ambitions and re-stabilizing the state after the Catalan independence crisis.

On democratic rights, it continued the PP’s clampdown. They have endorsed so-called “hot returns” of undocumented migrants—quick deportations that bypass immigration laws—at the southern borders of Ceuta and Melilla, and defended the anti-democratic Public Safety Law, better known by its nickname of the “gag law.” On the Catalan court case, the Sánchez government told state attorneys to charge the jailed nationalists under sedition, which carries a 15-year sentence.

Podemos has made clear it will mount no serious opposition to the right-wing campaign. Rather, it is fraudulently claiming that the Podemos-backed PSOE government was a success. Podemos parliamentary spokesperson Irene Montero cited “the most socially progressive budgets in history” as the main accomplishment of that government. But plans for an increased minimum wage, an end to the “gag law” outlawing the filming of police repression of protests, and subsidies for the elderly unemployed—many of which were included in the failed budget—will not pass after this week’s budget vote.

She said that Podemos and the PSOE had “In the eight months … worked to do things pushed by millions of people who have not given up.” In fact, the vote for the PSOE and Podemos collapsed in the last elections held in the most populous region in Spain, Andalusia, as hundreds of thousands refused to support these parties and instead preferred to abstain.

According to Montero, however, Sánchez’s gravest mistake was to not have integrated Podemos in his government. This would have produced a “stable and solid government with which to present itself in Europe.” She also attacked the Catalan nationalists for not having supported the PSOE government, cynically claiming Sánchez was “the best guarantee of an honest and sensible dialogue with Catalonia.”

Asked about possible post-electoral agreements, Montero said that Podemos would “speak with all the legitimate representatives of the citizens,” opening the door to alliances with all parties.

Nothing exposes more clearly the complacent and indifferent attitude of Podemos to the dangers facing the working class more than Montero’s announcement that Iglesias, her partner, would continue on paternity leave during the campaign, in which he is Podemos’ lead candidate. She claimed this is a way of showing what “type of Spain we want,” one in which men and women share household duties. In fact, it underscores that Podemos is largely unconcerned by the drive towards police-state rule in Spain, which it does not intend to fight seriously.

Indian government seizes on Kashmir attack to ratchet up tensions with Pakistan

Deepal Jayasekera

India has responded to a suicide-bombing Thursday in Indian-held Kashmir, which killed 40 Indian security personnel, with denunciations and blood-curdling threats—all but announcing an impending military strike on Pakistan.

Speaking yesterday, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister and the head of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP), held Pakistan responsible for the attack. He then vowed that India will make “the terror outfits and those aiding and abetting them …. pay a heavy price.”

“Let me assure the nation,” Modi continued, “those behind this attack, the perpetrators of this attack will be punished.” He said his government has given India’s security forces “complete freedom of action.”

Modi has repeatedly boasted that the cross-border military strikes he ordered on Pakistan in September 2016 in retaliation for a terror attack on an Indian army camp in Jammu and Kashmir, had freed India from the shackles of “strategic restraint.”

Seeking to whip up war-fever, Modi declared: “The blood of the people is boiling... Our neighbouring country, which has been isolated internationally, is in a state of illusion, [and] thinks such terror attacks can destabilise us, but their plans will not materialise.”

At least 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) para-militaries were killed and several more injured on Thursday afternoon when a suicide-bomber rammed an SUV packed with explosives into a CRPF bus traveling on the Srinagar-Jammu highway in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir. The bus was part of a convoy of 78 vehicles that was returning more than 2,500 soldiers, most of whom had been on holiday, to active duty in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir’s largest city.

Indian authorities blamed the success of the attack—the single biggest loss of Indian security forces in three decades—on intelligence and security lapses.

Citing a claim of responsibility for the attack from the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), an Islamist pro-Kashmir separatist group, New Delhi immediately declared Pakistan was to blame.

Yesterday, New Delhi delivered Pakistan what was termed a sternly-worded diplomatic demarche, recalled its ambassador from Islamabad, and announced it was canceling Pakistan’s most-favoured nation trade status .

Everything suggests that Modi and his BJP intend to exploit Thursday’s attack to the hilt to whip up bellicose nationalism with a view to deflecting mounting social anger, and mobilising its reactionary Hindu communalist base. All opposition will be branded as a threat to the “national unity” needed to confront arch-rival Pakistan.

In recent months, the Modi government has been shaken by growing worker and farmer protests—including a two-day nationwide general strike in January in which tens of millions participated.

Moreover, the BJP has suffered electoral defeats in December in three Hindi-heartland states that hitherto were among its strongest bastions. This has placed a large question mark over whether the BJP will prevail in the national elections to be held in multiple phases this April and May.

The BJP and its Hindu extremist allies have organised protests in several cities, including New Delhi, at which demands for military action against Pakistan were raised.

A crucial factor in the BJP’s ability to exploit the Kashmir events to stoke reactionary communalism is the role of the so-called opposition parties. Whatever their tactical differences and criticisms of the ruling BJP, they all support aggressively pursuing New Delhi’s geo-political interests in the region against Pakistan.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi, the dynastic head of the party, denounced the incident as “an attack on India’s soul” and assured the BJP government that his party, as well as the entire opposition, was fully supportive of the government and the military. “I want to make it very clear that the aim of terrorism is to divide this country and we are not going to be divided for even one second, no matter how hard people try,” he said.

All the opposition parties led by Congress supported Modi’s “surgical strikes” in September 2016 and hailed the Indian army for carrying them out. On behalf of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, chief minister of southern Indian state of Kerala, Pianrayi Vijayan, then passed a resolution in the state assembly praising “surgical strikes.”

The Stalinists have issued only tepid criticisms of the BJP government’s brutal crackdown on opposition in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, and its refusal to enter into high-level discussions with Pakistan, until it demonstrates it has ended all logistical support for insurgent groups in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The CPM Polit Bureau has immediately issued a statement that “strongly condemns the terrorist attack mounted on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama in Jammu & Kashmir.” It reiterated its support for the Indian military, declaring: “The Polit Bureau of the CPI (M) conveys its heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families of the personnel who laid down their lives in the line of duty.”

Thursday’s suicide bombing was reportedly carried out by 20-year-old Adil Ahmed Dar, a Kashmir labourer, who apparently lived a few kilometres from the site of bomb blast. According to his parents, Dar was radicalised following the police arrest and torture of him and his friends three years ago while they were returning from school.

Pakistan’s reaction to Thursday’s attack and India’s bellicose reaction has been so far subdued and limited to a denial that it had any role in the incident. In previous cases, Islamabad has made its own blood-curdling threats of military retaliation in response to any Indian attack. It appears that Pakistan has been shaken by statements issued by several countries, including the US, condemning the attack and in support of India.

The Kashmir dispute and broader Indo-Pakistani rivalry have their roots in the reactionary communal partition of the subcontinent in 1947 into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India by the British colonial rulers with the assistance of both sections of Indian national bourgeoisie.

Kashmir was also divided into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and the Pakistani province of Kashmir, called Azad Kashmir. In pursuit of their geo-political ambitions, the Indian and Pakistan ruling elites have both abused and ridden roughshod over the rights of the Kashmiri people.

For decades, New Delhi manipulated elections and arbitrarily unseated governments in Jammu and Kashmir. When faced with mass political unrest in the late 1980s, it resorted to widespread violence. For its part, Pakistan manipulated the opposition within Jammu and Kashmir and promoted Islamist insurgent groups in a bid to undermine rival India.

The danger is that events could spin out of control between the rival nuclear-armed powers after last Thursday’s attack. Following India’s so-called surgical strikes on Pakistan in September 2016, the two countries teetered for months on the brink of all-out war. Shelling occurred on almost a daily basis, killing dozens of military personnel and civilians on both sides.

Adding to the explosiveness of the situation is the US drive to harness India in its strategic confrontation. As a result, the Indo-Pakistan conflict has become increasingly enmeshed with rising US-China tensions, with New Delhi allied with Washington and Beijing with Islamabad.

New Zealand housing crisis intensifies under Labour government

John Braddock

Fifteen months into the New Zealand Labour Party-led government’s term in office, the country’s housing crisis is worsening, affecting wide sections of the population.

Last month Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was forced to admit that initial targets for her government’s flagship KiwiBuild housing program could not be met, with just 47 of 1,000 homes promised by July built so far.

Housing minister Phil Twyford said there would be a “recalibration” of the policy, but he expects to have 300 new homes built under the scheme by July.

After four decades of market liberalisation under successive Labour and National Party-led governments, and a deepening assault on jobs and living standards, tens of thousands of people are being denied the basic social right to decent, affordable housing.

According to the latest Demographia International housing affordability survey, New Zealand house prices rank among the most unaffordable in the world. Auckland, the country’s main city, has the world’s seventh most expensive houses and all other NZ cities are defined as “severely unaffordable.” Property is priced out of reach for a greater percentage of the population than in the United States, Britain and Australia, with only Hong Kong less affordable than New Zealand.

The problem has worsened under Labour. The annual report, which compared median house prices with median incomes across cities in seven wealthy countries and Hong Kong, found that New Zealand’s median house price last year was 6.5 times the median income, up from 5.8 a year earlier.

Auckland house prices have almost doubled since 2009 amid the global frenzy of property speculation following the 2008 international financial crisis. In December 2015, Auckland, a city of just 1.6 million people, had 62 suburbs, a third of the total, where houses cost more than $NZ1 million on average, including the $2 million suburb of Herne Bay.

Meanwhile, according to figures based on the 2013 census, around 40,000 people, or nearly 1 percent of the population, live without adequate housing. A 2017 Yale University study found this was the highest level of homelessness in the OECD.

Private sector investors have driven housing costs to grotesquely unaffordable levels for the vast majority of workers, as wages have fallen and living standards deteriorated. Home ownership has become impossible for many workers and rents have skyrocketed, fueling widespread social distress. Young couples are unable to purchase homes and many families live in garages, vehicles and unhealthy overcrowded conditions.

The crisis of unaffordable housing has become a factor in driving workers’ struggles, including a wave of strikes over the past 12 months.

According to a housing stocktake commissioned by the government last year, rents for a three-bedroom house rose 25 percent between 2012 and 2017, while wages rose just 14 percent. In the capital city, Wellington, property values in working-class suburbs leapt more than 50 percent in the past three years.

Students needing accommodation have been hard hit in Wellington, where 30,000 students are competing with young professionals and families priced out of the property market. The median asking rent for a Wellington house increased 8.2 percent in the past year, reaching $565 a week in January 2019. Labour’s increase in student allowances and the amount students can borrow for living costs—amounting to just $50 extra per week—prompted many landlords to immediately hike rents by the same amount.

Labour’s 2017 election manifesto heavily promoted KiwiBuild as a policy that would tackle the housing crisis by working with private developers to build 100,000 “affordable” homes in 10 years. The houses were purportedly designed for first-time home buyers who earn below $120,000 for singles and $180,000 for couples. Workers earn nothing close to those incomes.

The promise was always a hollow fraud. Far from being a public housing program backed and organised by government, KiwiBuild is based on the assumption that the “market” will provide the solution. There is no state subsidy for families to buy KiwiBuild houses. The government simply acts as a guarantor to facilitate properties built by the private sector. Local governments have been pressured to open up new tracts of land while regulatory measures have been eased.

Even the government’s latest much-reduced goal remains doubtful. The country is half a million housing units short of demand. The gap between housing demand and completed new builds has grown every year since 2013. Shamubeel Eaqub, a housing economist, said the scale of the problem is such that it would take decades to fix, regardless of whether the government could accelerate KiwiBuild.

Many of the KiwiBuild homes are already languishing on the market, with working class people finding $525,000 for a two-bedroom home unaffordable. The Demographia survey classes a house as affordable if the median price is up to three times the median wage—making KiwiBuild houses “severely unaffordable” for most.

Housing Minister Twyford told reporters: “No government in the last 40 years has seriously tried what we are trying to do, and that’s change a failed market.” In fact, Labour has no intention of “changing the market.” As Shamubeel Equab explained: “It is not profitable to build houses for poor people… The government is telling builders to use exactly the same processes we have in place now, but build cheaper houses.” This is why “very few” builders have participated in the scheme.

Twyford claims that the government has built 1,000 new public housing units, separate from the KiwiBuild initiative, to cater for poor people. These have, however, housed only 1,800 low income tenants, while more than 11,600 people and families still languish on public housing waiting lists.

Like governments in the US, Europe, Australia and throughout the world, the Labour-led coalition meanwhile is seeking to divert working class anger over social inequality, including the lack of affordable housing, into the most reactionary channels.

Last August, in a policy aimed particularly at Chinese investors, the government, which includes the Green Party and NZ First, banned purchases of houses by non-citizens and non-residents. Finance Minister David Parker declared that New Zealanders “should not be tenants in our own land.” House prices should be “set by local buyers, not by the wealthy 1 percent from international markets.” Foreign buyers in fact account for only around 4 percent of house sales.

The KiwiBuild fraud is a further demonstration that the working class cannot give any credence to Labour’s rhetoric of “transformation” and “kindness.” There is an urgent need to spend billions of dollars to create genuinely affordable housing. The fight must be taken up, in opposition to the Labour Party and its allies, for high-quality housing for all as a fundamental social right. This requires the reorganisation of society along socialist lines, including the nationalisation of the banks and investment giants that have profited from the housing boom.

Sri Lankan president denounces opponents of the death penalty

Vijith Samarasinghe

Addressing parliament on February 6, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena reiterated his commitment to ending the country’s 43-year moratorium on the death penalty. He warned the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) and other human rights groups not to hinder his efforts.

Sirisena told parliament that although death row prisoners had filed appeals against their convictions since he began calling for the reinstatement of executions, “we would be able to implement the death penalty in one to two months. Whatever opposition would be raised against it, I have taken a firm decision to implement it.”

Citing the death penalty in India, the US and Singapore, he cynically declared: “We need stringent laws to make a law abiding and spiritual society.”

During his visit last month to the Philippines, Sirisena hailed President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”—the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers—as an “example to the whole world” and vowed to reinstitute the death penalty in Sri Lanka.

Sirisena’s campaign for executions and his praise of Duterte drew immediate criticism from human rights groups in Sri Lanka and internationally.

Sirisena responded by telling parliament that any invocation of human rights in relationship to the drug trafficking underworld was “wrong” and demanded human rights organisations “not object” to his death penalty campaign.

Sirisena singled out the toothless, government-appointed HRCSL for attack and referred to the brutal beating of prisoners in Angunakolapelessa jail last November by Special Task Force (STF) officers and prison staff. A secretly recorded video of the incident drew wide criticism of the government.

Sirisena criticised the HRCSL chief for daring to ask the STF commandant who had given the order to send in the STF.

“The human rights commission, which was appointed by us, should have defended us,” the president told parliament. “Instead, it is questioning the STF chief.” He also condemned the HRCSL for vetting Sri Lankan military officers for human rights violations before they were sent abroad on so-called UN peace keeping assignments.

HRCSL chairperson Dr. Deepika Udagama responded in writing to Sirisena’s allegations, saying these actions were “in accordance with human rights law” and not “an attempt by the Commission to protect criminals.”

Sirisena’s broadside in parliament has only one meaning. He will not tolerate any opposition to the reinstitution of the death penalty or any government violation of basic democratic rights. Sirisena is sending a clear message to the police, and its notorious STF, and the military, that he will back them in all circumstances.

Sirisena’s defence of the military is indicative. Between 1983 and 2009, it conducted a vicious communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The bloody conflict was a culmination of the communalist policies pursued by the ruling elite since 1948 to suppress and divide the working class along ethnic and religious lines.

Sirisena, like his predecessors, is committed to shielding the political leaders of successive governments and the military hierarchy responsible for all the war crimes committed since 1983.

While officially there have been no official executions since 1976, the Sri Lankan state has a horrifying record of eliminating its political opponents, workers and young people through extra-judicial killings.

Military and associated paramilitary death squads abducted and executed, without trial, tens of thousands of people during the war against the LTTE and in crushing the youth insurgencies of 1987–89 in Sri Lanka’s south.

The Constitutional Council (CC) was another target of Sirisena’s speech to parliament.

Established by the 19th amendment to the constitution in 2015 under the Sirisena presidency, the CC is supposed to ensure the “independence” of the judiciary and the government service. Consisting of representatives of the president and the parliamentary parties, and headed by the parliamentary speaker, it is not independent in any sense.

Sirisena complained that the CC had not approved his nominees for judges and the chief justice. “They are yet to inform me the reasons for turning down those names,” he declared.

The president is not alone in his provocative and authoritarian outbursts. His views are endorsed by the entire political establishment, including Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s ruling United National Party (UNP), which is working hand in glove to tighten up the instruments of state repression. Last week, Justice Minister Thalatha Athukorala announced that the “administrative procedures for the execution of five drug convicts had been completed.”

Every faction of the ruling elite is turning toward police-state forms of rule. For about two months last year, these factions were engaged in open political warfare. Sirisena unconstitutionally sacked Wickremesinghe, replacing him with his arch-rival, former President Mahinda Rajapakse, and then dissolved the parliament after Rajapakse was unable to gain a parliamentary majority.

The plot failed because the US was hostile to Rajapakse, whom Washington considers sympathetic to Beijing, and the Supreme Court overruled Sirisena, compelling him to reinstate Wickremesinghe.

Behind the ongoing infighting within the political elite is the eruption of plantation and other workers’ struggles as part of an international working-class upsurge.

Two days before Sirisena’s death penalty address to parliament, he made an unprecedented Independence Day speech in which he hailed the military and declared that governments had failed to resolve the country’s democratic and social questions.

The death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment, with most of its victims around world coming from the most oppressed layers of society. Sirisena’s call for the speedy restoration of this barbaric practice, endorsed by all the major parliamentary parties, is a clear indication that the capitalist class is lurching toward dictatorial forms of rule.

In a signal that the Sirisena government is pushing ahead with its reactionary agenda, the government-owned Daily News newspaper ran a grotesque advertisement on February 11 for people to apply to become the official hangmen. The two people who will be employed to carry out state killings must be males aged between 18 and 45 and possess “mental strength.” They will reportedly be paid 36,410 rupees, or $203, a month to hang other human beings.

Wealth concentration increases in US and globally

Nick Beams

The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.

This trend is most apparent in the United States but is revealed in the data for other countries included in research published by Zucman last month. According to his analysis, the top 1 percent in the US now owns about 40 percent of total household wealth, increasing its share by at least 10 percentage points since 1989. Over the same period “the share of wealth owned by the bottom 90 percent has collapsed in similar proportions.”

The acceleration is even more marked in the highest income levels. The share of wealth owned by the top 0.00025 percent (roughly the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes Magazine data), rose from 1 percent in the early 1980s to over 3 percent in recent years. A similar tripling of wealth is seen in the top 0.01 percent.

The trend is reflected globally. The proportion of wealth held by the top 1 percent in China, Europe and the US combined has increased from 28 percent in 1980 to around 33 percent today.

As documented in previous studies by Zucman, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, wealth concentration in the US has followed a U-shape during the past century. The share of the top 0.1 percent peaked at close to 25 percent in 1929, fell sharply with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s and continued to decline into the late 1940s, then stabilised in the 1950s and 1960s. It reached its lowest point in the 1970s, before rising to close to 20 percent in recent years to “levels last seen in the Roaring Twenties.”

This pattern follows the broad curve of economic developments and the class struggle. The 1930s fall in wealth concentration was the outcome of both the financial crisis and the impact of the New Deal measures introduced by President Franklin Roosevelt in order, as he acknowledged, to avert social revolution in the US.

During the 1950s and 1960s and the development of the post-war economic boom, when it was said that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” wealth concentration remained relatively stable. The ongoing increase in wealth concentration since the 1980s is the outcome of two interconnected factors: the rise of financialisation in the US economy, and consequent changes in the accumulation of profit, coupled with the decades-long organised suppression of the class struggle by the trade union bureaucracy.

One of the indicators of the role of finance in boosting the wealth of the ultra-wealthy is that in 1980 the top 0.01 of interest earners had 2.6 percent of all taxable interest, whereas by 2012 this had increased ten-fold to 27.3 percent.

Zucman’s paper details the increase in global wealth inequality. In the US, China and Europe combined, the top 10 percent owns more than 70 percent of the total wealth, the bottom 50 percent less than 2 percent and the middle 40 percent less than 30 percent.

The higher up the income scale, the faster the rate of wealth accumulation. In the US, Europe and China, from 1987 to 2017 the average wealth of the top 1 percent rose by 3.5 percent per year, the top 0.1 percent by 4.4 percent per year, and the top 0.01 percent by 5.6 percent per year.

The trend has been most marked in Russia, following the privatisation of state assets as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist regime. “In Russia, wealth concentration boomed after the transition to capitalism, and inequality appears to be extremely high, on a par or even higher than in the United States,” the report notes.

A parallel development can be seen in the restoration of capitalism in China. In both countries “the available evidence suggests a high increase in wealth inequality over the last two decades.” The top 1 percent wealth share has almost doubled, rising in China from just over 15 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2015 and in Russia from below 22 percent to around 43 percent.

Zucman notes that as wealth inequality increases, it is becoming more difficult to measure, because of the development of a “large offshore wealth management industry” that makes some forms of wealth, particularly financial portfolios, harder to track.

The problem is revealed in the widely varying estimates of how much wealth is held offshore. Zucman has calculated that 8 percent of the world’s individual wealth—the equivalent of 10 percent of global gross domestic product or $5.6 trillion—was held offshore on the eve of the global financial crisis in 2007. He cites other analyses that put the figure much higher. According to one study, the global rich held around $12 trillion of the wealth in tax havens in 2007, with another putting the figure at between $21 and $32 trillion.

This means that the existing studies on wealth concentration, which Zucman and others have carried out using self-reported survey and tax return data, are inadequate to grasp its real extent.

“Because the wealthy have access to many opportunities for tax avoidance and tax evasion— and because the available evidence suggests that the tax planning industry has grown since the 1980s as it became globalized—traditional data sources may underestimate inequality,” Zucman states.

Zucman is well aware of the political consequences of the rise in social inequality that he and others have documented. He notes that “for the rich, wealth begets power” and wealth concentration “may help explain the lack of redistributive responses to the rise of inequality observed since the 1980s.”

Zucman’s latest findings will no doubt be used by Democratic presidential hopefuls such as Elizabeth Warren and the newly-elected Democratic Socialists of America Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they seek to give the Democratic Party a “left” face by calling for increased taxes on the wealthy.

But the data produced by Zucman and others refute the assertion that social inequality can or will be rectified by legislative changes. This is because the concentration of wealth—though aided and abetted by successive administrations, both Democrat and Republican—in the final analysis is rooted in vast changes in the very structure of American and global capitalism, arising from its deepening historical crisis.

In other words, it is the outcome of a process of capital accumulation, based on financialisation, that has institutionalised the siphoning of wealth up the income scale.

This cannot be overcome through appeals to the financial oligarchy to change course but only by a frontal assault against its rule, that is, the development of a mass struggle for socialism by the American and international working class. The conditions for this fight are emerging as a result of the resurgence of the class struggle being driven forward by the consequences of deepening social inequality. The aim of Warren, Ocasio-Cortez et al, is try to divert this movement and bring it under the wing of the Democratic Party.