Mass protests in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces against Wickremesinghe’s Anti-Terrorism Bill

W. A. Sunil

Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged northern and eastern provinces were brought to a standstill on Tuesday by a mass hartal (strike and business closure) in protest against President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s new Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB).

Jaffna streets deserted during April 25 hartal in Sri Lanka's north and east provinces. [Photo: WSWS]

As the WSWS has previously warned, “The Bill is so broad and vague that any anti-government political activity can be defined as terrorism.” So-called terrorist acts can be punished by life imprisonment or capital punishment.

But they can include such things as “wrongfully or unlawfully compelling the Government… to do or to abstain from doing any act; unlawfully preventing any such government from functioning.” That is a clear attempt to outlaw the mass opposition that exists to sweeping social cuts being implemented on behalf of international finance.

Tamils and Muslims across the provinces participated in the action which shut down schools, universities, some public sector offices, private transport services and other businesses. Courts were unable to operate due to the lack of lawyers. Only hospitals, banks and main administrative offices were open. Sri Lankan army personnel and Special Task Forces police officers were deployed to patrol the streets.

Both provinces have been under military occupation for decades, even before Colombo began its war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1983.

Workers were previously scheduled to hold island-wide demonstrations near their workplaces and institutions to protest the ATB. However, the trade union bureaucracies in Colombo sabotaged the planned protests, using the flimsy excuse that the government had postponed its parliamentary submission of the draconian measure.

The hartal was called by nine Tamil nationalist parties, including the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchchi, the Tamil People’s Alliance and the Tamil People’s National Front. These discredited bourgeois parties initiated the action in order to contain rising anger against the government’s repressive measures and its escalating attacks on social conditions.

The Anti-Terrorism Bill is to replace the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which has been in operation since 1979 and has been used by successive Colombo governments, particularly against the Tamil masses. While these parties called for a withdrawal of the ATB, they did not demand the repeal of the PTA. They also called for an end to new Sinhala settlements in the north.

The Tamil nationalist groups have an on-off approach towards the Wickremesinghe regime with no serious concerns about the democratic rights of workers and the poor. Their political manoeuvres are directed towards pressuring Colombo to negotiate the devolution of political power in the north and east and to secure privileges for the Tamil elite.

Colombo’s 26-year war against the LTTE was the culmination of ongoing communal discrimination against the Tamil minority since independence in 1948. It was used by the Sinhala elite to weaken and divide the working class across ethnic lines.

The war, which devastated the two provinces killing, and displacing tens of thousands of people, ended with the military defeat of the LTTE in May 2009. According to the UN, numerous war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan military during the conflict. At least 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final weeks of the war.

There are still regular protests by Tamils in the north and east demanding that the government and the armed forces release information about the hundreds of people “disappeared” by the military.

Tuesday’s hartal occurred amid rising anger over the deepening economic crisis and Colombo’s ruthless implementation of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity demands.

In April–June last year, Tamil and Muslim workers and the poor united with the Sinhalese masses across ethnic lines in nationwide protests and industrial action that ousted former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government. On March 1 and March 15, workers from the northern and eastern provinces joined nationwide strikes and protests against IMF austerity measures.

On Tuesday, Udayan, a three-wheel taxi driver, told the WSWS: “I extend my support to this hartal. We have suffered a lot over the years with the PTA and this new law will also be used against all people.”

A public transport bus driver said: “We were forced to work by the state Transport Board authorities today but we are giving our full support to this protest. The unions in our depot, however, because they are involved with many of the political parties, do not support such protests. That is why we weren’t able to participate in this protest. Even the Tamil parties that called this protest did not plan and organise it properly.”

On April 20, the Trade Union Collective (TUC) leadership held a press conference in Colombo declaring that it would call island-wide protests outside workplaces against the ATB on April 25. The demonstrations would also demand an end to the privatisation of national resources, the abolition of the unjust income tax system and a reduction of electricity tariffs.

The TUC is a combination of several unions, including the Inter Company Workers Union (ICWU), the Ceylon Teacher Service Union, the Development Officers Union (DOU) and the All Ceylon Port Workers Union (ACPWU) controlled by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Other front members include the All Telecom Workers Union (ATWU) and the Sri Lanka Professionals Trade Union.

Inter Company Workers Union president and JVP leader Wasantha Samarasinghe. [Photo: WSWS]

When a WSWS correspondent telephoned and asked why the protest had been cancelled, JVP leader Wasantha Samarasinghe, who is also president of the ICWU, claimed no action had been planned for April 25. This is a lie. Samarasinghe publicly announced this date at the April 20 press conference.

The WSWS asked the general secretaries of the ATWU and the DOU—Jagath Gurusinghe and Chandana Suriyaarachchi respectively—the same question. They said the protests were cancelled because the government had postponed its ATB submission to parliament.

“We planned to do it with a hartal in the north and east, but we postponed the protest because the Bill was not presented to parliament. We’ll do it when it is presented,” Gurusinghe said.

Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe initially announced that the ATB would be submitted on April 25 but then postponed in response to popular opposition. It would be tabled with changes, after “everyone” has submitted proposals, he said.

The “postponement” is just another political manoeuvre, aimed at derailing mass opposition. Any changes will be cosmetic, while retaining all of the legislation’s draconian components. The purpose of the bill will remain to bolster Sri Lanka’s state apparatus to brutally crush rising popular opposition to government attacks on social and democratic rights.

Last week, President Wickremesinghe threatened university and school teachers boycotting the marking of students’ university entrance exams that he would declare education an “essential service.” This would mean harsh punishments, including jail and fines, could be imposed on any teacher taking industrial action.

Both the government and the union bureaucracies fear the rising anger of Sri Lankan workers, who, in line with workers around the world, are taking action to demand jobs, improved wages and living standards. As the Sri Lankan ruling elite is strengthening its repressive apparatus, the trade unions are doing their utmost to prevent a working class fight to defeat this anti-democratic assault.

On April 25, Samarasinghe told a press conference that the TUC would meet foreign ambassadors, UN and International Labor Organisation officials, human rights organisations, opposition parliamentary party leaders and religious figures to pressure the government to withdraw the ATB.

While the TUC and other union leaders in Sri Lanka offer limited criticisms of austerity and the ATB, they are affiliated to parties, such as the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the JVP, which back the IMF program and the anti-terrorism laws. If these opposition parties came to power, they would ruthlessly implement the IMF’s demands themselves.

No amount of pressure will change the crisis-ridden ruling elite, its dictatorial moves and attacks on living and social conditions.

Corporations lay off thousands as US economy heads toward recession

Jerry White

Corporations are continuing to announce thousands of layoffs as signs of a major downturn in the US economy are growing. On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that the US gross domestic product rose by an anemic 1.1 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2023. This was a sharp decline from the 2.6 percent annual growth rate in the final quarter of 2022, and 3.2 in the previous quarter. 

The Stellantis sign is seen outside the Chrysler Technology Center, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021, in Auburn Hills, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The slowdown was largely due to a falloff in business investment and residential fixed investment, which includes money spent on construction and home buying. At the same time, manufacturing activity slowed down for the fifth straight month in a row. 

The number of new jobs rose by 236,000 in March, down significantly from the average 334,000 jobs added each month over the previous six months. The number of job openings has fallen to a two-year low, down by 1.3 million in the first two months of 2023 alone, according to a previous government report. 

The growth of unemployment is a deliberate policy aimed at undermining the demands of workers for wage increases that keep up with persistently high inflation. Over the last year, the US Federal Reserve, with the full backing of the Biden administration, has raised interest rates nine times to slow the economy, enlarge the pool of unemployed workers competing for fewer jobs and lower wages. The rate hikes have also triggered the failure of several banks and the ongoing meltdown of the First Republic Bank in San Francisco. 

While workers are being threatened with destitution, the Biden administration has assured the super-rich that their holdings will be backstopped by another massive government bailout. “We have used important tools to quickly stabilize the banking system. We could use those tools again, if needed,” Biden’s press secretary told reporters Thursday.

Despite the signs of major economic downturn and fears of a wider financial crisis, Wall Street rallied Thursday on news of higher first-quarter profits for Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Caterpillar and other corporations. Earlier in the week, General Motors beat Wall Street’s expectations by announcing $3.8 billion in first-quarter profits.

Although GM’s haul was down 6 percent due to expenses related to the “buyout” of 5,000 salaried workers in the US, who were removed as part of the company’s $2 billion worldwide cost-cutting campaign, CEO Mary Barra told investors GM expected to make $11-$13 billion this year.  

One company after another is slashing jobs in anticipation of the economic slowdown and to maximize profits. This week Disney began thousands of layoffs at the cable sports network ESPN, Disney’s entertainment division, Disney Parks and its Experiences and Product division. The company media giant is eliminating 7,000 jobs as part of a $5.5 billion cost-cutting plan. 

Retailer Bed, Bath and Beyond filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it will close hundreds of stores and lay off 14,000 workers if it does not find a new buyer. One of the major causes of its bankruptcy was the decision of the cash-strapped company to take on enormous debt for an $11.8 billion stock repurchase program for its richest investors.  

Meat giant Tyson Foods is laying off about 15 percent of senior leadership roles and 10 percent of corporate roles, according to an internal memo shared with CNN. This follows the layoffs of nearly 1,700 workers in March after closing two poultry plants to boost profits. 3M is laying off 6,000 employees around the world, after a January announcement of 2,500 layoffs at its manufacturing plants.  

Tech companies workers continue to get hammered. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced last week that it was cutting 10,000 jobs over the coming months, on top of the 11,000 job cuts last November.

Amazon said this week that it is shutting down its Halo Health Division by July 31, as part of the 9,000 job cuts it announced last month. Dropbox announced 500 layoffs Thursday. Ride-sharing company Lyft said it was laying off 26 percent of its workforce, about 1,072 workers. Since the beginning of the year, the tech sector has announced 168,243 job cuts and has already exceeded last year’s total, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.

The world’s third largest automaker Stellantis made $18 billion in profits last year and will report first-quarter earnings next week. The company is planning to cut 3,500 hourly workers in its US plants over the next several months to maximize profits and finance the costs for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). 

New United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain denounced the cuts as “disgusting” but did not propose a single thing to oppose them. In fact, UAW officials are collaborating in the cost-cutting plan and implementing a jointly run “voluntary employment termination” and early retirement program, which will pay workers a pittance to permanently sever their connections to the company. 

In the run up to the contract battle by 160,000 GM, Ford and Stellantis workers in the US and Canada this summer, the UAW and the Unifor union in Canada, are deliberately concealing the global automakers’ plans to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs as they transition to EVs. The union bureaucracy has already agreed to such a jobs massacre and is prepared to accept a drastically lower-wage scale in the new EV battery and component factories in exchange for union recognition.

The Hypocrisy of Anti-abortionists

Howard Lisnoff

Photograph Source: Tony Webster – CC BY-SA 2.0

There are lots of kids who live in poverty in the US. The poverty rate for children cited below from US Census figures is lower than prior to the pandemic because of pandemic policies, such as rent subsidies, child tax credits, and food assistance. But, in the wealthiest country in the world, 16.9% of children live in poverty. That is 16.9% of the 37.9 million people living in poverty in 2021, even with the pandemic assistance programs.

In 2003, the Guttmacher Institute noted, in answer to continued threats to Roe v. Wade (that have now become a reality) that women in the US faced the prospect of unintended pregnancies:

But regardless of the legal status of abortion, its fundamental underlying cause—unintended pregnancy—has been a continuing reality for American women. In the 1960s, researchers from Princeton University estimated that almost one in three Americans (32%) who wanted no more children were likely to have at least one unintended pregnancy before the end of their childbearing years; more than six in 10 Americans (62%) wanting children at some point in the future were likely to have experienced at least one unintended pregnancy.

Some might balk at this Boston Globe article as an apples to oranges comparison, but guns are the leading cause of death of kids in the US. There have already been 165 kids killed by guns this year and we’re only part way through the year. The anti-choice movement wants all pregnancies brought to full term, but where’s the outrage at guns killing kids?

Here are statistics about the issue of abortion as evaluated by the Guttmatcher Institute that need to make anyone celebrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade have their hair stand on end:

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis… concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.

One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women— nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number [sic] that were officially reported; the actual number [sic] was [sic] likely much higher.

Here are the personal testimonies of women who faced the crisis of an unwanted pregnancy in the pre Roe v. Wade era (PBS, June 21, 2022).

When I opened a copy of Providence College Magazine (Spring 2023), my heart sank in response to the column, “The Last Word.” Before reading the article, I perused it and thought about the ongoing battle over the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, commonly called the “abortion pill” or medicated abortion. The article was not about the abortion pill, but rather, the reversal of Roe v. Wade and penned by an assistant professor of theology at Providence College, Holly Taylor Coolman. Providence College is operated by the Dominican order.

The Supreme Court Dobbs decision in 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, and the draconian limitations on abortion in many states, are not enough for the anti-choice movement. In 1976, through the Hyde Amendment, federal Medicaid support ended for abortion,  except in limited cases, and this was the first legal blow against the right to abortion codified by Roe v. Wade.

Patriarchy has long dictated what women can and cannot do and reproductive issues have been adversely impacted by the dominance of men.

In “A Model for Civil Dialogue,” the professor said that overturning Roe v. Wade “marked a crucial moment for the protection of unborn life.” Here is the story of the Texas woman forced to carry her dead fetus for weeks because of the Texas stand on abortion. And here’s the story of a 10-year-old child forced to carry a fetus conceived through a rape  who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana for an abortion.

I think of the screaming and the threats and the ever-present specter of violence at the two women’s health clinics I volunteered at as an escort for 12 years. I used a technique called a perimeter search, which I learned in basic training in the army, to assess the environment around the clinics for potential violence. The anti-abortionists don’t just talk: they kill! I recall the day when one anti-abortionist yelled, “You aren’t Jewish, are you?” I continue to communicate with a former doctor at one clinic who wore a bulletproof vest to work. I don’t think that fear for one’s life or bulletproof vests are covered in medical school.

The professor continues: “None of us can simply coerce those who disagree with us. We have to make our case.” Maybe the professor hasn’t heard of the anti-abortionist who made his rounds throughout the US during the early 1990s and inflamed the already tense environment outside of clinics. The same day he came to town we were attacked by an entire line of anti-abortionists. A man dressed in religious garb repeatedly threw himself against me at the door to the clinic. Our line held.

In fairness to the Catholic Church, while it has spearheaded anti-abortion actions and organizations, other religious denominations and fundamentalists have played an equally horrific role.

Many members of the Catholic Church in Rhode Island, where I volunteered at clinics, support a woman’s right to abortion and it remains legal there.

“We must make the pro-life case to our own young people,” the professor continues. A debate between so-called pro-life and pro-choice staff took place at a “public event” on the campus of Providence College involving about 500 people. Following the meeting, a person on the Campus Ministry staff “reported that several students said the event moved their vague and unexamined pro-choice convictions toward a new openness to a pro-life position.”

The president of Providence College “noted that ‘disputation of this type has been a hallmark of Dominican higher education.’”

While I served as an adjunct instructor at Providence College in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one year, around 1994, I was told I would not be rehired. A professor friend said that it was obvious that my writing about abortion had ended my tenure there. I don’t know if his observation was accurate, but I know that around the same time, Providence College required all new hires to sign a statement stating that the prospective employee agreed with the principles of the college.

The anti-choice horrors go on while they debate the issues around the end of Roe v. Wade at Providence College and elsewhere. The best that can be expected from many of the anti-abortionists is some very limited assistance to new mothers and their children. There is a so-called crisis pregnancy center near one of the women’s health clinics where I volunteered. Long-term child support, employment opportunities, housing, and a decent education are societal and family responsibilities and will never be covered by any agency offering pregnancy counseling usually intended to convince a mother to follow through with a pregnancy. How about equitable policies for women and children as part of this society… including full reproductive rights and health services for women?

The current Supreme Court had its majority carefully tailored by Donald Trump, who won election by a minority of the popular vote. He pandered to his base in the court’s elimination of Roe v. Wade.

Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

Colin Todhunter

The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

In 2022, it was estimated that a quarter of a billion people across the world would be pushed into absolute poverty in that year alone.

In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, as millions go without heat and skip meals. Due to the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, 10.5 million are experiencing financial difficulty. An additional 13.7 million people would be at risk of financial difficulty with further increases in costs.

Living standards in the UK are plummeting. For instance, 28 per cent (up from 9 per cent pre-COVID) of UK adults said that they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Absolute poverty is set to rise from 17.2 per cent in 2021-22 to 18.3 per cent in 2023-24, pushing an additional 800,000 people into poverty.

In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.

In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US.

Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate. Private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of COVID by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February 2023 was 73 per cent higher than in June 2020.

Meanwhile, nearly 100 of the biggest US publicly traded companies recorded 2021 profit margins that were at least 50 per cent higher than their 2019 levels.

The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock. In 2022, he said that a “very entitled” generation of people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.

Crisis – what crisis? 

Of course, Kapito is no doubt referring to ordinary US citizens and not himself. Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021.

Nor is he referring to the high-net-worth individuals who benefit from hunger by investing in BlackRock, a firm that continues to profit from a globalised food system which – by design – leaves around a billion people experiencing malnutrition. BlackRock is one of the rich ‘barbarians at the barn’ who continue to make huge financial killings from an exploitative food regime.

Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to their ‘new normal’ while business as usual prevails elsewhere, not least in one of the world’s most financially lucrative sectors – arms manufacturing. The war in Ukraine has been a ‘gold rush’ for Western arms makers as wealthy US neocons like Victoria Nuland continue to try to bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia by fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian.

When Huw Pill tells ordinary people to get used to being poorer, he is not referring to the  individuals and firms who have made hundreds of millions of pounds (courtesy of the taxpayer) from corrupt COVID equipment contracts thanks to the UK government prioritising politically connected suppliers at the start of COVID.

And this cannot be brushed aside as a ‘one-off’. These revelations are merely the tip of a massive corruption iceberg.

For example, Byline Times reports a cross-party parliamentary watchdog raised concerns that decisions on how to award money from the £3.6 billion towns fund, designed to boost economic growth in struggling towns, were politically motivated. It also notes that 40 potential breaches of the Ministerial Code were not investigated in the past five years.

Little wonder that in January 2023 the UK plunged to its lowest-ever position in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

Consider that the UN estimates that just $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. Then consider that 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021.

According to Global Witness, ‘excess profits’ are sudden and significant increases in a company’s financial returns that are due not to their own actions but to external events. The EU says profits count as ‘excess’ when they are more than 20% above the average return of the previous four years.

Global Witness finds that the 2022 annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – were $195 billion. Up by almost 120% on 2021 and the highest level in the industry’s history.

This means that these companies made $134 billion in excess profits, which could cover nearly 20% of the money all European governments together have allocated to shielding vulnerable households and businesses from the current energy crisis.

Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, reports record profits for 2022. Operating profits of £3.3bn were recorded, up from £948m in 2021. This surpassed its previous highest ever yearly profit of £2.7bn in 2012.

In May 2021, it was reported that COVID vaccines had created at least nine new billionaires. According to research by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, the new billionaires included Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer. Both CEOs were then worth around $4 billion. Senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics and early investors in Moderna have also become billionaires.

Although the nine new billionaires were at that time worth a combined $19.3 billion, the vaccines were largely funded by public money. For instance, according to a May 2021 report by CNN, BioNTech received €325 million from the German government for the development of the vaccine. The company made a net profit of €1.1 billion in the first three months of the year, thanks to its share of sales from the COVID vaccine, compared with a loss of €53.4 million for the same period last year.

Moderna was expected to make $13.2 billion in COVID vaccine revenue in 2021. The company received billions of dollars in funding from the US government for development of its vaccine.

This article has briefly touched on four horses of the economic apocalypse – agribusiness, oil, arms and big pharma. But let’s finish by mentioning the fifth and the most powerful – finance. The sector which sparked the devastation that we now see.

By late 2019, a financial crisis was looming. It was multiple times worse than the 2008 one.

Investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019:

“All talk about big finance bankrupting the nation by looting public funds, politicians destroying public services at the behest of large investors and the depredations of the casino economy were washed away with COVID. Predators who saw their financial empires coming apart resolved to shut down society. To solve the problems they created, they needed a cover story. It magically appeared in the form of a ‘novel virus’.”

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

What happened in Europe was part of a strategy to avert the wider systemic collapse of the hegemonic financial system. And what we now see is an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history under cover of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’.

As millions of workers take strike action in the UK, Huw Pill implies that they should accept their plight as inevitable. But they have no reason to.

The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months. Between April and July 2020, during the initial lockdowns, the wealth held by these billionaires grew from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion.

The only thing inevitable about the current crisis was the collapse of a debt-fueled, unsustainable neoliberalism set up to facilitate outright plunder by the super-rich who have offshored more than $50 trillion in hidden accounts.

Japan dispatches military to evacuate citizens from Sudan

Ben McGrath

Amid ongoing fighting in Sudan among rival factions, Japan announced on Tuesday that it had evacuated 45 of its citizens from the country while more Japanese nationals were transported out by other governments. Tokyo dispatched three Air Self-Defense Force (ASDF) planes to Africa to participate in the evacuation.

Deputy Foreign Minister Shunsuke Takei, centre, meets evacuees from Sudan at a base in Djibouti, Monday, April 24, 2023. [AP Photo/Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan]

While portrayed as a rescue operation, the ASDF mission provided Tokyo with the pretext to dispatch its military overseas and further challenge the legal constraints placed on Japan’s ability to wage war. ASDF is the formal name for Japan’s air force.

Three ASDF planes arrived at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa by Sunday, according to Japan’s Defense Ministry. These were a C-130 transport plane, a C-2 transport plane, and a KC-767 refueling and transport aircraft. Djibouti is the location of Japan’s only overseas military base. A total of 370 ASDF and Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF, Japan’s army) troops took part in the operation.

According to Tokyo, 63 Japanese nationals were working in Sudan when the conflict began on April 15, with Tokyo stating that all those who wished to evacuate had done so. These are mostly employees of the Japanese embassy and of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as well as their families. The evacuees working in the Sundanese capital of Khartoum traveled to Port Sudan in the northeast where they were picked up by the Japanese military.

Fighting between different factions of the Sudanese armed forces erupted in no small part due to efforts by imperialist countries like the United States and Japan to exert control over Sudan and cut off Khartoum’s relationship with China and Russia. The faction led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, military chief and de facto head of the country, has supported the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The opposing faction led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, has connections to Moscow.

Sudan has long been the scene of violence and intrigue promoted above all by the US. Sudan was carved up in 2011, creating the country of South Sudan, where numerous oil fields are located. It is access to these resources which motivates Tokyo’s involvement in the region through its base at Djibouti, Self-Defense Forces (SDF) deployments, and organizations like JICA, ostensibly providing economic aid to developing countries.

The Japan Times on April 23 quoted Magdi el-Gizouli, a Sudanese analyst from the Rift Valley Institute, who stated, “Everyone wanted a chunk of Sudan, and it couldn’t take all the meddling. Too many competing interests and too many claims, then the fragile balance imploded, as you can see now.”

Japan is heavily dependent on other countries to meet its energy needs, with oil accounting for approximately 40 percent of this. In 2022, Japan imported 94.1 percent of its oil from the Middle East, leaving Tokyo searching for other sources, such as in Africa, to meet demand while simultaneously trying to undercut competitors in the region.

Above all, Japan is looking to remilitarize, which means continually chipping away at Article 9 of the constitution, with so-called rescue missions providing a pretext to do just that. The Japanese ruling elite ultimately hopes to overturn Article 9, known as the pacifist clause, which explicitly bars Japan from maintaining armed forces or waging war overseas. Tokyo also announced in December that it would double military spending over the next five years.

Tokyo’s operations in the region are meant to further the goal of remilitarization. In 2015, Japan revised its Official Development Assistance charter and created the Development Cooperation Charter, with one of the goals the integration of organizations like JICA with the SDF. In other words, JICA plays a military role in Africa, no less than the SDF itself.

In the past, the government has also lied about the situation in South Sudan in order to keep SDF troops in the region. In July 2016, fighting broke out in the country that threatened to pull Japanese GSDF troops into the conflict. Stationed there as part of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan, a condition for the Japanese soldiers’ involvement was the existence of a ceasefire, a condition GSDF logs showed had been broken.

The government covered up these facts not only to keep the military in the country to secure access to resources, but to test military legislation passed in 2015 that allowed the SDF to take part in battles alongside allied countries, ostensibly by coming to their defense. This raises the serious question if Tokyo is not once more looking to place SDF troops or Japanese citizens in a conflict zone in order to justify the use of military power, further eroding legal constraints.

Tokyo uses so-called “aid” not only in Africa, but around the globe in pursuit of its imperialist aims. Japan announced on April 5 that it would begin supplying military aid to countries as part of its new Official Security Assistance (OSA) program, which Japan’s Foreign Ministry website states will be used to “strengthen a free and open international order.” The US, Japan, and their other allies regularly use this phrase to denounce Beijing for not acquiescing to the “order” established by Washington in the post-World War II period. The Philippines, Malaysia, and Fiji are likely to be the first to receive support from this program.

Tokyo claims that the aid will not be used to purchase weaponry that could be used in a conflict. Instead, recipient governments would use it to boost satellite communication, radio systems, and radars in order to monitor Chinese activity in the region, which would bring these countries further in line with US war planning in the Indo-Pacific targeting China.

Japan and the Philippines also reached an agreement in February to allow Japanese troops to take part in exercises in the country, officially to respond to natural disasters. The two sides are also discussing a reciprocal military access agreement that would make it easier to dispatch Japanese troops to the Philippines, alongside a tripartite agreement with the US.

In the end, none of Tokyo’s machinations in Africa or the Indo-Pacific are based on “humanitarian” concerns. These efforts are above all aimed at deepening Japan’s own plans for promoting war with China.

Georgia National Guard to use location data to target students for recruitment

Emma Arceneaux

As the United States recklessly accelerates the drive to nuclear world war through its escalation of the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and preparations for war against China, the US military is desperate to offset its recruitment difficulties. One method to reach wider layers of vulnerable young people is to target their cellphones with recruitment advertisements and military propaganda. 

A National Guard soldier maintains watch and directs traffic at a shopping center in Brooklyn Center, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, Monday, April 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

The Georgia Army National Guard plans to use cell phone location data to target high school students, as well as their “centers of influence,” such as teachers and parents, with recruitment advertisements. First reported by The Intercept, which obtained a copy of the federal contracts materials detailing these plans, the National Guard will create virtual perimeters (“geofences”) around 67 high schools throughout the state and target phones that enter within a one-mile radius of these locations. 

The contract material states that the ad campaign should deliver a minimum of 3.5 million impressions and 7,000 clicks, using data such as IP addresses and mobile device IDs to target students on a variety of platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and music and television streaming services. Its “primary objective is to reach the core targets of various segments of 17–24 year-olds in Georgia high schools and colleges, with the intent of generating qualified leads of potential applicants for enlistment.”

In other words, the National Guard will invade the privacy of both children and the adults around them, track their location data without their knowledge or consent, and use it to coerce them into joining the military. 

The plans underscore the hypocritical, war-mongering nature of the US government’s propaganda campaign against China, which it claims uses the social media platform TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see, and exploit your future generation.” As part of the anti-China witch hunt, the Department of Defense bans the use of TikTok for official purposes, including advertising.

Potential vendors must have the ability to determine which media types are most popular within a specific geographic area and to run ten different campaigns simultaneously. Gizmodo reported that the Georgia Army National Guard did not confirm whether any vendor had secured the contract yet. 

Through a marketing technique called retargeting, advertisements will also follow students home and off campus, even if they are no longer within the boundary of the geofence. Once a student interacts with an ad, their phone data is saved, and they will be even more aggressively targeted.

Although the National Guard claims the campaign is specific to 17-24 year olds, children much younger will be hit with military advertisements. Speaking to The Intercept, ACLU of Georgia attorney Benjamin Lynde noted that, “There are middle schools within a mile of those high schools... There’s no way there can be a specific delineation of who they’re targeting in that geofence.” 

This new campaign is the latest in the evolving but ever predatory recruitment practices of the US military, which is in the midst of a crisis. Last year, every branch of the military struggled or failed to meet recruitment goals, with the Army falling short by 15,000. Three decades of unending war has had a profound impact on America’s youth who are increasingly leery of, if not outright hostile to, military enlistment. 

Recruitment officers are known for trying to ingratiate themselves with young people, traditionally in school settings, in practices that public health professionals have described as “disturbingly similar to predatory grooming.” The strategy is to weasel themselves into students’ lives and lure them into the military, usually by exploiting the financial difficulties facing working class youth as they consider college. 

Contemporaneous with the launch of US imperialism’s “War on Terror,” the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 made it mandatory for public schools to provide military recruiters with students’ contact information or risk losing federal funding. With many schools misunderstanding this requirement, “schools allow military recruiters to coach sports, serve as substitute teachers, chaperone school dances, and engage in other activities. In some cases, recruiters are such a regular presence in high schools that students and staff regard them as school employees,” noted EdWeek.

The military has also tried to adapt its tactics to match the interests of Gen Z, including through exploiting the wide popularity of video games, which is the largest market within the entertainment industry. The Army’s esports team, launched in 2018, competes in and hosts tournaments, tours the country visiting colleges and high schools, and spends hours chatting with online viewers through livestream videos. In 2020, the team faced backlash for banning users on its Twitch page, a popular livestreaming gaming platform, who raised criticisms about US war crimes. The team was also caught hosting fake prize giveaways which directed clicks to the Army’s recruitment website. 

Other recruitment practices are outright illegal, as in the widespread scheme whereby thousands of high school students have been forced into the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps without their consent. 

Ensuring an ample supply of troops is imperative to the American ruling class, not only for carrying out its war plans abroad but also for suppressing the growing class struggle at home. The National Guard is a state-based military reserve force for the US Army and the Air Force, but also functions as an occupying force against the American population itself that has been routinely used to suppress strikes and protests, including the 1970 murder of four students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. 

In 2020, amid the largest mass protests in US history following the police murder of George Floyd, the National Guard was activated in at least 26 states, including Georgia, to assist police in violently suppressing protesters with rubber bullets, pepper balls, tasers, batons, and other so-called “non-lethal” munitions. 

Earlier this year, Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp again deployed 1,000 National Guard troops to Atlanta to work closely with police under Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens to crack down against opposition following the police murder of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who was killed for protesting the planned $90 million “Cop City” military-style police training center. Both history and current experience teach that the revolutionary movement of the working class, driven by the intractable crisis of world capitalism, will be met with the full repressive force of the capitalist state. However, the international working class is a far more powerful force.

Dire shortages in essential chemotherapy drugs will mean “people will die” needlessly

Benjamin Mateus

“People will die from this shortage, for sure.” Director of the division of molecular imaging and therapeutics at the University of Alabama, Jonathan McConathy, referring to the drug Pluvicto.

Recently, hospitals across the country have been notified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of severe shortages of critical but commonly used chemotherapy drugs that will persist for the next three to six months. These are creating hopeless situations for possibly hundreds of thousands of patients with either new or recurrent malignancies, while placing the entire edifice of oncologic care into crisis mode.

Jeffrey Pilz, assistant director of Pharmacy, Medication Safety, and Drug Policy at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, noted recently, “Drug shortages are impacting every therapeutic area of practice at this time. In 2023, shortages are reaching record numbers, and unfortunately, our oncology medications are not immune.”

For instance, according to a recent statement issued by the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) on April 21, 2023, “Currently, a US shortage of carboplatin and cisplatin exists that will likely last several months and possibly longer. Platinum drug [the molecular basis for the two mentioned drugs] shortages were first reported to the FDA on February 10, 2023. The recommendations below address how we can conserve carboplatin and cisplatin and allocate the limited supply to those patients who will experience the most significant benefit.” 

These platinum-based agents are front and center of the treatment of women with advanced ovarian and uterine cancer. Both drugs have proven their importance in head-to-head randomized control trials spanning more than three decades. 

In their strategy, the SGO issued the following guidance: “Ration doses by rounding doses down to the nearest vial size as a first step to ensure efficient use. If the shortage becomes more critical, consider reserving carboplatin and cisplatin for curative intent treatment” [my italics-BM]. Medical oncologists at some hospitals have been given this rationing guidance, implying the shortages are quite pronounced.

Besides these, other cancer drugs such as Pluvicto, made by Swiss drugmaker Novartis, for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer, are facing manufacturing delays and will only “meaningfully” increase by the second half of the year. 

Other shortages include methotrexate, fluorouracil, and BCG [Bacillus Calmette-Guerin] that treat a variety of diseases including cancers of the skin, bone, blood or lymphatic, and lungs in all ages. BCG, also known as an anti-tuberculosis vaccine, is effective in the management of bladder cancers. Without these treatment options available to patients, treating physicians may have to turn to less effective options with worse side effects. Some may find their disease progressed beyond hope as they wait to hear from their oncologists.

Drug shortages are not new, but in the last decade, the shortages have been skyrocketing, including for cancer drugs. The American Society of Health Systems Pharmacists has reported that there are over 300 drugs in short supply in the US, which include all classes of drugs. These shortages are also taking longer to mitigate. Moreover, the COVID pandemic has added fuel to the fire.

A Johns Hopkins Medicine report from 2020 noted, “Over the past 10 years, eight of the 10 commonly used drugs in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer affecting thousands of children each year in the US, have temporarily been unavailable.”

According to a Senate report released in March by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Michigan Senator Gary Peters, new drug shortages in the US increased by 30 percent from 2021 to 2022. At the end of last year, 295 active drug shortages were reported, a five-year high. Additionally, while shortages on average last about 1.5 years, more than two dozen vital medications have been in scarcity for more than a decade.

In the US, each year, more than one million people are undergoing chemotherapy or radiation across the country. In a report on the estimated number of individuals living with metastatic cancer in the US, more than half are recurrent cancers. For this population of patients, systemic treatment with chemotherapy and other cancer treatment agents is essential to place their disease in remission with the hope it will not recur. 

Estimated numbers of Individuals living with metastatic cancer in the US 2018. [Photo: Journal of the National Cancer Institute]

According to a study published in 2019 in the journal Lancet Oncology, at a global level, the incidence of cancer is projected to rise to 26 million annual cases by 2040, an increase of over 52 percent in the next two decades. Should evidence-based guidelines be applied according to a person’s cancer diagnosis and stage, the number of patients who would need first-line chemotherapy would increase from 9.8 million to 15 million by 2040. 

Sixty-seven percent of these patients reside in low or middle-income countries, which means that the shortages presently being faced in the US are amplified in these regions who do not have the resources to compete for these life-saving treatments. Researcher Brooke Wilson at the University of New South Wales, lead author of the Lancet study on the global cancer outcomes, told Cancer World magazine, “The rising cancer burden and the increasing demands for chemotherapy globally will be major health crises during the next 20 years. The gap between available service provision and demand is substantial, especially in low-income and middle-income countries.”

She added, “Strategic investments to expand capacity for chemotherapy delivery globally are urgently needed.” And when the issue of capacity is raised, this also implies a legion of physicians, nurses, technicians in almost every discipline of health care that includes laboratory, radiographic, pathology, surgical, patient care, infectious diseases, and the assortment of equipment and well-stocked pharmaceuticals to tend to urgent health needs. 

These raise the present questions of the shortage in chemotherapy to a socioeconomic and, therefore, a political level. What are the mechanisms in place to ensure the world’s population, when faced with such a devastating diagnosis as cancer, can be provided with evidence-based treatment that should be available to all as a democratic and social right?

As the report notes, by 2040, 53 percent of the 26 million cancer cases will need chemotherapy. By then there will be around 2.5 million lung cancers, 1.9 million breast cancers, and 1.7 million colorectal cancers; the report warns “the greatest absolute increases in new cases will occur for these three types of cancer (around 900k cases of lung cancer, 620k of colorectal and 500k breast cancer requiring chemotherapy annually).”

A study published in the British Medical Journal in November 2020, in the midst of the raging COVID pandemic, found that delaying chemotherapy by even one month meant the risk of dying increased by six to 13 percent. And the longer the delay in providing treatment, whether it was surgery, radiation or chemotherapy, the higher grew the risk of dying. 

The authors concluded, “Taken as a whole, these results suggest there is an urgent need to consider how we organize our cancer services. The prevailing paradigm has been around access to new treatments to improve outcomes, but from a system level, gains in survival might be achieved by prioritizing efforts to minimize the time from cancer diagnosis to initiation of treatment from weeks to days.”

With regards to the March 2023 Senate report and shortage of active drugs, Senator Peters states, “Drug shortages are not a new problem. They are caused by a number of factors, including economic drivers, insufficient supply chain visibility, and a continued US over-reliance on both foreign and geographically concentrated sources for medications and their raw materials.” And over the last two decades much of the manufacturing has shifted to China, and even more so to India, in line with economic diktats to decrease production costs.

Active active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) Drug master Files, by year of filing and country of manufacture. [Photo: US Pharmacopeia ]

Revenue from oncology drugs for 2023 has been estimated at over $200 billion and is expected to rise by nearly 70 percent over the next four to five years. The shortages being felt are mainly affecting older generic drug products, which account for 90 percent of all the drugs sold in the US. According to the FDA, of the drugs that went into shortage between 2013 and 2017, two-thirds were generic, with a median price of $8.73 per dose, and first approved for use more than 35 years ago.

In short, delays in manufacturing have more to do with the narrow profit margins that do not incentivize the markets to produce them in sufficient quantities to forestall critical drug shortages. As Dr. Vimala Raghavendran, senior director of the pharmaceutical supply chain center at US Pharmacopeia, testified, “Manufacturers only receive pennies per dose for some of these drugs.”

As an FDA report to Congress noted in 2020 and reiterated in the Senate report by Peters, “With few incentives to enter or remain in the market for a narrow but critical set of generic drugs, manufacturers of these products often decide to leave the market, and few if any others decide to enter, which can lead to shortages and have lingering effects on a product’s availability over time.”

Although the report attempts to couch the crisis of drug shortages in the oft-used rhetoric of national security risk, warning that the US is overly reliant on “foreign and geographically concentrated sources for critical drugs,” the driving force is, in final analysis, the crisis of capitalist production based on profit, and the ossified nation-state system.