The scandal involving Conservative Party Baroness Michelle Mone is throwing oil on the fire of the deepening crisis of the Sunak government.
Mone admitted in a December 17 interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that she stands to benefit from tens of millions of pounds of profit from personal protective equipment (PPE) sold to the UK government during the pandemic by a company led by her husband, Doug Barrowman.
Michelle Mone presenting to Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, April 2013 [Photo by B Milnes / CC BY-SA 3.0]
Tens of billions of pounds in get-rich-quick COVID contracts were handed out from Westminster from the first days of the pandemic, with almost £20 billion awarded without any form of tendering. Government cronies in big business made a killing. Mone’s support helped PPE Medpro secure a place in a “VIP lane” used during the COVID pandemic to prioritise companies. PPE Medpro secured contracts worth more than £200 million.
Vast amounts of the PPE supplied by the private sector profiteers during the height of the pandemic was not fit for purpose. The government is suing PPE Medpro for a breach of contract, after rejecting the surgical gowns for which it paid £122 million. PPE Medpro maintained the gowns had been fit for purpose.
A separate civil case was launched by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the House of Lords commissioner for standards launched another investigation into whether Mone had breached the Lords’ code of conduct.
Mone, who fronted a lingerie company, shot to prominence in the Tory Party when she was appointed “Tsar” for business start-ups in David Cameron’s government and then elevated to the House of Lords in 2015.
It is established that the highly politically connected Mone contacted, on May 8, 2020, then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and fellow Tory peer Theodore Agnew, offering to supply PPE. Agnew referred PPE Medpro to the “VIP lane”.
In June 2020, PPE Medpro was awarded two PPE deals by the Department of Health—one for £122 million for 25 million sterile surgical gowns and one for £89 million for the supply of 210 million face masks. A HSBC bank paper trail establishes that in September 2020 Barrowman received at least £65 million in profits from the PPE deal. These profits were transferred to The Warren Trust, registered in the Isle of Man, with Barrowman the beneficial owner.
In December last year Mone took a leave of absence from the House of Lords in order to “clear her name”. This followed a series of exposures the previous month—led by the Guardian—indicating that Barrowman had transferred £29 million to an offshore trust, the Keristal Trust, of which Mone and her three adult children were the beneficiaries.
Mone had always insisted that she did not stand to benefit from the PPE deal and denied any role in it being awarded. Mone and her husband had clearly decided by the time of the BBC interview that it was no longer possible to maintain this fiction.
Barrowman said the deal created £60 million profit which was now in a family trust. Half of this is the Keristal trust, from which Mone and her children stand to benefit unless she and Mr Barrowman divorce. Mone will be able to access the millions if her husband dies first.
Kuenssberg asked Mone, “Your family as a unit will benefit from that cash. Why didn’t you just be more straightforward about it?” Mone responded, “I’m saying to you that I didn’t receive that cash. That cash is not my cash, that cash is my husband’s cash, we are married.”
She then told Kuenssberg, “If one day, if God forbid, my husband passes away before me, then I am a beneficiary, as well as his children and my children, so yes, of course.”
It is ludicrous to claim that Mone would not benefit from any such profits for years to come. Barrowman is a billionaire and Mone is a multi-millionaire herself. Until this year the couple lived in a luxury £19 million London townhouse. Barrowman has also put his 127ft yacht Lady M—named after Mone—on the market.
Mone admitted, “I did make an error in saying to the press that I wasn’t involved. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, and I regret and I’m sorry for not saying straight out, yes, I am involved.” She added that lying to the media was “not a crime”.
As justification Mone explained, “I was just acting the same way as every other baroness and lord who were also putting names forward.”
Barrowman and Mone are implicitly threatening to spill the beans on wider governmental corruption that resulted in an estimated £4 billion in taxpayers’ money being spent on unusable PPE.
Over a month prior to the BBC interview the Guardian reported that representative of Barrowman had said, “The UK government was fully aware of Baroness Mone’s involvement; like many other peers and MPs on the high priority lane, she acted as an intermediary/liaison between PPE Medpro and the Cabinet Office/Department of Health and Social Care.”
Following this Mone was interviewed by the pro-Tory Telegraph in a piece headlined, “Baroness Mone: The PPE scandal made me ashamed to be a Tory – I am purely a scapegoat.” The underline read, “Entrepreneur launches fightback over PPE equipment investigations with startling counter-allegations”.
This was the occasion for the launch of a YouTube programme, “The Interview: Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal”. The programme was paid for by PPE Medpro and fronted by investigative reporter Mark Williams-Thomas.
The Telegraph revealed that Barrowman and Mone have a recording from after 2021—when they were in mediation with Department of Health and Social Care—in which a government official is alleged to have told them, “Obviously we understand you’ve made an offer and it’s a sizeable sum of money. We’re just trying to piece together… and thinking through… and I think our view at the moment, and where we stand, is it is probably not likely to be enough to call the dogs off.”
Barrowman gave more details in his interview with Kuenssberg saying, “We get to November 2022, and I attend this negotiation, as opposed to a mediation.
“It’s very, very clear that, you know, they’re interested in settling but they want a sum of money that, quite honestly, we are not of a mind to pay.
“So, I then have a separate meeting, and this individual asked me would I pay more for the other matter to go away.” Barrowman added, “I was absolutely gobsmacked—I think it raises very serious questions as to what that official meant, what he was saying.”
Asked by Kuenssberg why he did not go to the police with the allegation, Barrowman stated, “I take the advice of my legal team, and the legal team at that point in time suggested that we park that one for now.”
The government responded by seeking to wash their hands of the growing stench. Interviewed by Sky News' Kay Burley on whether someone who had admitted to lying should be allowed back into parliament, energy minister and Tory peer Martin Callanan said, “It is a matter for her to decide... [but] I would hope she would not be coming back to the House of Lords.”
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden defended the government’s handling of PPE procurement, insisting there were “no favours or special treatment”, while stating that Mone was not being made a scapegoat.
Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said that no-one watching the BBC’s interview with Mone would be “shedding any tears”, adding, “There’s a fundamental point of principle here, which is, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, when so many people rushed to help others in all sorts of ways… and then there were others who saw the pandemic as an opportunity to make a quick buck at someone else’s expense… Our message to those people who sought to use the pandemic to get rich quick [is]: we want our money back.”
This is nauseating. While the crisis reveals the staggering level of profiteering that took place as the ruling class exploited a pandemic for financial gain, utilising government PPE policies that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the filthy operation could only take place because Labour, first under Jeremy Corbyn and then Sir Keir Starmer declared that the “task as the Opposition” was to “support the government’s public health efforts while being constructively critical.”
The recently issued United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report—“Making Our Future: New Directions for Human Development in Asia and the Pacific”—has revealed the depth of social inequality in Sri Lanka.
A market place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, December 8, 2023. [AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]
Presenting the UNDP report on December 14, the UNDP’s Sri Lankan economist, Dr. Vagisha Gunasekara, explained that Sri Lanka was one of the top five countries in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of wealth inequality. Other countries exhibiting the highest wealth inequality in the region include Thailand, China, Myanmar, India.
She added: “Sri Lanka is a country with fairly high-income inequality; we are in the top one third of the highest unequal countries in the world, and wealth inequality is also very high.”
The economist continued: “The top one percent of Sri Lankans own 31 percent of the total personal wealth, while the bottom 50 percent only owns less than 4 percent of the overall wealth in the country. This provides us with a snapshot of how unequal our country is.”
The UNDP report noted: “South Asia saw its wealth Gini index rise from 0.71 to 0.77.” [The Gini coefficient is a measure of the distribution of income or wealth among people in a country. A Gini coefficient of 0 means perfect equality, while 1 means total inequality—that is, all wealth is held by one person.]
Report explained that it is a “serious concern” that share of the bottom 50 percent of the population in many countries in the region does not even exceed 6 percent of the total wealth. The richest 10 percent of society continues to enjoy more than 50 percent of total wealth.
The UNDP report noted that the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing shutdowns affected around half the region’s informal workforce. Many countries suffered serious losses in income from tourism, remittances and manufacturing which employ a large number of informal workers. “In South Asia and South-East Asia in particular, the shocks exposed the weaknesses of healthcare systems.”
“Then came the war in Ukraine and the ensuing cost-of-living crisis.” The war in Ukraine, combined with the pandemic “led to a broad decline in the human development index in all sub-regions except for East Asia.”
According to the UNDP report, the indebtedness in the country is disastrously deepening; 31 percent of Sri Lankan households depended on loans; 24 percent are dependent on money lenders and 23 percent on bank loans. As of June, the country’s staggering household debt reached more than 7 percent of the GDP.
When Sri Lanka’s economic crisis was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, layoffs and wage cuts were legalised as necessary to maintain big business profits. Accordingly, more than half a million jobs were lost.
The Sri Lankan situation is part of global developments. Wealth inequality in South and South-East Asia is chronic and human development is also at an extremely unequal level.
Commenting on India, the most populous country in the world, the UNDP report stated that income distribution has become more skewed. “The top 10 percent of the population get 57 percent of national income and the top 1 percent get 22 percent—one of the most unequal income distributions.”
The top 10 percent controls 65 percent of the nation’s total wealth in India. In the post-2000 period, there was growing evidence of a strong rise in wealth inequality in that country.
In Sri Lanka, when President Gotabhaya Rajapakse imposed the burden of the country’s unprecedented economic crisis on the masses, a popular uprising erupted last year involving millions of workers and rural poor. Although Rajapakse was forced to flee the country and resign, the capitalist class was able to temporarily stabilise its rule as a result of the betrayals by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups.
Ranil Wickremesinghe was elevated into the presidency, with the backing of the Rajapakse’s discredited Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party. His government has imposed the harsh austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) leading to worsening living conditions and social inequality.
By the end of 2022, food inflation reached 90 percent and general inflation reached 70 percent. Prices have not gone down, but have continued to rise. The IMF-dictated program for the sale, privatisation or closure of 430 public sector institutions will destroy another half a million jobs.
Corporate taxes are kept low while exorbitant taxes are levied on working people. Chief among these are a higher income tax, value added tax (VAT) and various import duties. From the beginning of 2024, VAT will be increased from 15 to 18 percent and will be applied to 97 essential goods including fuel, cooking gas and fertiliser.
The IMF staff report released this month, after completing the first review on the bailout program of $US3 billion to Sri Lanka, admitted indirectly that the country’s growing social crisis was partly the result of the IMF’s policies.
“Social unrest could re-emerge, fueled by falling real incomes, including from tax rate hikes and cost-recovery pricing in the energy sector, insufficient anti-corruption efforts, and delayed local elections,” it warned.
The staff report repeatedly expressed this concern and pointed to the impact of the worsening global situation: “External risks arise in part from intensified regional conflicts, including Russia’s prolonged war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, resulting in commodity price volatility, and a sharp global slowdown, which could reduce capital flows and reserve accumulation and lead to sharp exchange rate depreciation.”
Whatever the catastrophic situation facing workers and the poor, the IMF insists that its program has to be implemented to the letter. Its concern is to ensure the repayment of Sri Lanka’s foreign debts and the boosting of the profits of investors.
Speaking in the parliament on December 13, President Wickremesinghe repeated his mantra: “There is no alternative other than implementing IMF policies.”
All the opposition parties, including Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and National People’s Power (NPP) led by Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) are committed to the IMF policies.
Replying to a question from the state minister for finance, SJB leader Sajith Premadasa told the parliament: “We are going to renegotiate the IMF deal.” The simple truth is, however, that the IMF will not renegotiate its austerity agenda.
The NPP/JVP leader keeps repeating that people are hostile to Wickremesinghe implementing the IMF program. In the same breath, however, he insists “people will allow a new government [under the NPP] two years to implement the rigorous program to come out of the crisis.”
The trade unions aligned with the SJB and the JVP are now campaigning for a new government led by the opposition parties as a means of undermining workers’ struggles to defend their jobs, wages and pensions and to oppose privatisation.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Secretary Alicia Barcena meet outside of Mexico's Presidential Palace, December 27 [Photo: @SRE_mx]
At the meeting, which took place in Mexico City and was convoked by AMLO, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and National Security advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall reportedly asked the Mexican government to place more checkpoints along the main routes and railways, to forcibly move migrants to southern Mexico and offer more visas to stay in Mexico.
The Mexican president said he was eager to “assist” Washington and had already agreed in a call with Biden to “strengthen containment measures in the southern part of the country.” Details will emerge in the coming days of what was agreed to on Wednesday.
AMLO, his Foreign Secretary Alicia Barcena and other officials embraced and joked with Blinken, who has spent weeks leading US efforts to secure economic and political support for the fascistic Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in its massacre and starving to death of Palestinians in Gaza.
In fact, the summit was an offshoot of talks to secure Congressional approval of a $110 billion package that offers Republicans a greater crackdown on migrants in exchange for the bulk of the money going to escalate the war against Russia in Ukraine and the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Similarly to how the Biden administration insists that it has no “red lines” for Netanyahu, it is not committed to any set of principles regarding its own treatment of migrants and refugees. The only real and major obstacle to employing open, mass violence as a “solution” to unrelenting migration is the American working class. AMLO’s hypocritical lamentations reflect similar fears about the Mexican working class.
The Biden administration also reportedly plans to raise the credible fear standard for asylum seekers to even be able to present their case to a judge and to allow the shutting down of the border to all asylum claims and fast-tracking removals once an arbitrary level of crossings is reached. Such policies would further worsen the numbers and plight of those stuck in Mexico.
As the summit was taking place, nearly 10,000 migrants of over 20 nationalities from all over the world were marching behind a large banner emblazoned with the words “Exodus of Poverty.”
They are among the hundreds of thousands stuck for months in southern Mexico, unable to get travel visas to take buses or other means of transportation or a formal work permit to pay for the journey. Meanwhile, the administration is demanding ways to make it even harder for them to move north.
On Wednesday, marchers carried out a protest, kneeling and praying in front of the migration offices of Huixtla, Chiapas, when the National Guard soldiers temporarily blocked their path.
One migrant then gave a speech: “The doors have been closed to us. This movement is a peaceful movement, and we are not going to fall into provocation. We are poor and that is why we do not have the documents because the documents are given to those who have money, corruption is the mother of the National Institute of Migration.”
After walking about 45 miles since Sunday morning, the caravan was arriving at Escuintla, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, with reports already of dehydration and sores.
The “Exodus of Poverty” caravan demonstrates that the so-called “legal pathways” set up by the Biden administration, including forcing migrants to apply from third countries and meet economic requirements, were merely a cover for illegally dismantling the right to asylum.
Meanwhile, the Mexican authorities could process asylum and work permits by sending migrants to offices in other regions but they are deliberately saturating the offices in Chiapas, forcing migrants to remain in the south without food, shelter, money or access to healthcare.
Horror stories about migrants, which are the deliberate consequences of these policies, often dominate news coverage in Mexico. On Saturday, a day before Christmas Eve, two young men drowned in mud thick with garbage in the Rio Grande as they attempted to cross from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas. The incident was recorded on video, and their relatives can be heard crying and yelling in horror from the shore.
Such official cruelty has not stopped record numbers of migrants from reaching the Rio Grande, however. Apprehensions by the US Border Patrol averaged 10,000 migrants per day during the first week of December. This year is expected to see 2.5 million migrants processed by the Border Patrol—the third consecutive yearly record.
Shortly before meeting Blinken, López Obrador recited his usual sanctimonious concerns about the “poor countries” in the region.
“We have to avoid putting people at risk, because these are very dangerous journeys,” he added, as tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers he has ordered to “contain” migrants have a record of shooting at, robbing and extorting migrants, as well as connections to gangs and cartels.
The dangers faced by migrants cannot be overstated. Biden and AMLO are emboldening—and the Democratic Party, Morena and their pseudo-left apologists bear the chief political responsibility— the fascists in the US who are preparing an even more brutal onslaught.
Leading Republican candidate Donald Trump, who led the January 6 fascist insurrection to establish a dictatorship, is vowing to carry out an unprecedented assault since “day one” to deport millions of migrants yearly.
Having threatened to act like a “dictator” during his first day in office and used Hitlerian rhetoric claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump has reportedly drawn up plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to the US-Mexico border, ostensibly to build massive detention camps, according to Rolling Stone.
A source told the magazine “I have heard anywhere between 100,000 to 300,000 from President Trump, Stephen Miller, and others.”
The agenda of imperialist war is intertwined by countless threads with attacks on refugees and migrants and the struggles of the working class. The onslaught against the democratic rights of migrants and the associated buildup of the repressive state apparatus serve as preparations to crack down on mass working class opposition to the genocide, war and the attacks on social spending, jobs and living standards used to pay for them.
Billions of dollars more are being discussed for the repressive US border and deportation apparatus, while the Biden administration and Republican and Democratic governors have invoked “border security” to deploy thousands of troops along the border. Both parties are already running roughshod over the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits active-duty troops from carrying out law enforcement activities domestically.
For his part, AMLO is demanding funds within Mexico and from his patrons in Washington for his own military build-up, with migrant “containment” operations used to maintain a permanent presence of troops across Mexico’s borders and in the interior. The Mexican president betrayed his longtime promise of sending the military to the barracks by instead enshrining its domestic deployment in the constitution.
More than 80 days into Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza, the ruling class is bitterly attacking democratic rights in the major capitalist countries in order to suppress and isolate mass protest against the genocide.
The marches that have, globally, involved tens of millions of people are being relentlessly and cynically labeled “antisemitic” by the bourgeois press. In Germany, protests against the massacre are outright banned and criminalized. On college campuses in the United States, films by young Jewish directors critical of the state of Israel are being barred and those showing them threatened with expulsion. Student groups opposed to the massacre unfolding in Gaza are being outright banned, including Jewish Voice for Peace.
The United States Congress has begun a witch-hunt which targets university administrators whose words and actions do not sufficiently target students’ right to protest. The congressional grilling of university presidents Liz Magill (Penn), Claudine Gay (Harvard), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) earlier this month was a McCarthyite event aimed at intimidating other institutional heads to march in lock-step with this assault on democratic rights. Those who are not adequately revoking or curtailing the basic rights of students and employees to protest face expulsion from their post. The media is entirely complicit, with the New York Times pushing out reporters and staff who become too “political” by characterizing Israel’s assault as genocide in their non-work-related writing, including social media posts.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, left, speaks as University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]
Twenty-two Democratic members of the House of Representatives and virtually all the Republicans voted to censure US House Representative Rashida Tlaib (Democrat-Michigan) for calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, figures like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham are cheered when they call for a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth,” that is, the residents of Gaza.
The Biden administration has played a leading role in the campaign to censor opposition to Israel on college campuses. In October the White House began a campaign to combat the surge of pro-Palestinian sentiment on campus, sending teams from the Department of Education to go to major universities and colleges throughout the country.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, reporting on the student protests against Israel, stated, “these grotesque sentiments and actions shock the conscience and turn the stomach. They also recall our commitment that can’t be forgotten: ‘never again.’” Yet, cynically, it is the White House which has provided nearly every bomb that has been dropped in Gaza, killing well over 20,000 civilians, primarily women and children, the worst ethnic cleansing of the 21st century.
The Biden administration’s support of Israel has nothing to do with protecting the world or the Jewish people from the horror of genocide. It is about geopolitical control over the Middle East by US imperialism and its regional allies.
As Biden explained in 1986, speaking about US support for Israel on the Senate floor, “There is no apology to be made, none. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there were not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”
A campaign based on a narrow and isolated group
One of the most remarkable things about this campaign is how little support it has beyond the thin layer of economic, political, and cultural powerholders at the height of capitalist society. In stark contrast to the hundreds of millions of people shocked and outraged by the brutality and hypocrisy of the massacre of Gaza, the pro-genocide forces amount to a handful of billionaires, and the political and media apologists and state functionaries who serve them.
In this sense, the significant resources that are being devoted to shutting down and intimidating pro-Palestinian protests are not a sign of strength. Rather, they reflect the isolation and nervousness of the ruling stratum.
The leaders of the United States, and its key imperialist allies, face a sea of troubles: a stagnating, indebted global economy; an increasingly restless and combative working class; mass opposition to its drive towards war; a failed attempt to dismember Russia which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine and Russia; a technological scramble to control an energy transition dominated by China; unending inflation, particularly in housing, food, and energy; the growing delegitimization of the major political and cultural institutions, including the bourgeois political parties, the media, and the trade union apparatus; and now, to add to all this, a mass global protest movement opposed to the imperialist slaughter of Gaza. As the World Socialist Web Site stated recently, “The genocide in Gaza is politically radicalizing an entire generation of workers and youth in the US and internationally.”
These problems terrify the ruling class. For all the trillions of dollars at its disposal, it cannot escape this historic, engulfing crisis of its own making.
The billionaires
To better understand the isolated character of the campaign to silence opposition to Israel’s genocide, it is useful to understand who is leading it.
The first major group involved are a handful of multi-billionaires and economic power players whose stranglehold over the global economy positions them to control the political and cultural leadership of the major universities and other significant institutions.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted in an article written by an anonymous Harvard employee:
Just as inequality in general is increasingly incompatible with what remains of democracy, so is the subordination of universities to wealthy donors incompatible with academic freedom. The right-wing, pro-Zionist “donor revolt” is a qualitative development in big-money university donors attempting to use their power and influence to shape campus discourse. That these donors wield such influence—and that many of them seek to do so publicly—is an indication of how deeply compromised academia already is.
Indeed, universities are largely reliant on this stream of cash. According to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, in 1980 private donations to US colleges and universities amounted to $4.2 billion. Today they have surged to $59.5 billion.
These are some of the major billionaires whose “donor revolt” is leading to the attack on basic rights of free speech and protest on US campuses.
Leslie Wexner receives the Woodrow Wilson award, July 2008.
Les Wexner – One of the most important capitalists in retail sales, Wexner has amassed $10.6 billion, and is the 192nd richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg. Wexner founded L Brands, which controls, or previously controlled, Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, and several other major brands. While Wexner no longer controls L Brands, his foundation, the Wexner Foundation, donated tens of millions of dollars to Harvard over the last few decades and has now pulled millions of dollars of future support. (He is also the billionaire who became the launching pad for convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s personal holdings for nearly two decades).
Idan Ofer – Idan and his brother Eyal are the 77th and 87th richest people in the world, owning $42 billion, according to Bloomberg. Together they control Ofer Global, the Zodiac Group, Quantum Pacific Group and Global Holdings, each of which are massive industrial, energy and real estate investment firms. They own about half of Israeli Corp., Israel’s largest holding company. Collectively their companies take in hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue through shipping, fertilizers, industrial chemicals, energy and real estate. Miller Global Properties, one of the various “small”’companies that they have a leading ownership in, is notable for controlling various landmark properties, such as the Pebble Beach golf course, the Aspen ski resort and the Bevely Hills Hotel. Idan Ofer and his wife Batia both quit the board of Harvard in an attempt to pressure the university to crack down on the outcry of pro-Palestinian sentiment on the campus. Idan Ofer’s companies have been at the heart of multiple chemical leak and environmental scandals in Israel. Eyal was formerly an intelligence officer in the Israeli Air Force; he now resides in Monaco.
Bill Ackman – Ackman is an American billionaire who runs Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with about $20 billion under management. Ackman owns $4 billion personally. Pershing Square Capital holds significant shares of major US companies, including a 10 percent ownership of Target, one percent of Procter & Gamble, 10 percent control of Chipotle, a 7 percent share of Universal Music Group, and over a billion dollars in Netflix. Ackman is currently leading a vicious campaign to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Previously Ackman fought to get Harvard to release all the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement, demanding that employers refuse to hire these students.
Ken Griffin – Griffin is the 35th richest person in the world, with over $37 billion in assets. He is the CEO of Citadel, a massive $52 billion hedge fund based in Miami. Citadel owns a significant share in some of the largest technology and bioscience companies, including Microsoft, Activision, Boston Scientific, Nvidia, Humana, Apple, Comcast, Merck, and Adobe. Griffin has donated over half a billion dollars to Harvard and is pressuring the university to adopt a stronger pro-Israel stance.
Cliff Asness – Asness is an American billionaire who founded AQR Capital Management, which has over $100 billion under management. Asness severed all his donations to the University of Pennsylvania and has publicly begun a campaign to pressure the university to stop “support[ing] evil.” In a diatribe published in the Wall Street Journal, he described the pro-Palestinian protests as a reflection of the “deep and systematic rot on elite college campuses.”
Marc Rowan – Rowan is co-owner of Apollo Asset Management, one of the largest private equity firms. He has over $6 billion in personal wealth. He halted his donations to University of Pennsylvania, using “Wall Street tactics to ‘strong-arm’” the university, in the words of Business Insider. Apollo has sprawling investments in real estate, cruise companies (Norwegian, Regent), hotels (Harrah’s Entertainment), education (McGraw Hill), entertainment (Chuck E. Cheese), private security (ADT) and retail (Smart and Final). Apollo co-founder Leon Black was formerly CEO of the company before revelations emerged that he had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $100 million for tax planning and consulting services.
Zionists, antisemites and ethno-nationalists
Complementing this group of billionaires are a series of ethno-nationalists, both Zionists and MAGA Trumpers, who are more closely coordinating the effort to censor outrage against Israel’s genocide.
A recent, 2023 film, Israelism, made by two Jewish filmmakers, provides a window into the mechanisms used to promote Zionism in American culture and equate it with Judaism. One central figure in the film is Abe Foxman, an American lawyer and multi-millionaire who was the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1987 to 2015. Foxman and the ADL are major fixtures in the American Zionist lobby, heavily promoting organizations such as Birthright.
In this Wednesday, June 17, 2015 file photo, Jonathan Greenblatt, left, incoming national director for the Anti-Defamation League, talks with Abe Foxman, outgoing director of the ADL, in New York. [AP Photo/Julie Jacobson]
The ADL characterizes all Jewish organizations opposed to the policies of the state of Israel as “hate groups.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the current ADL chief, described organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace as the “photo inverse of white supremacists,” on Twitter. “We long have said that these are hate groups,” he stated.
The comparison of left-wing Jewish activists opposed to an apartheid ethno-nationalist state with white supremacists is as slanderous as it is ignorantly absurd. It is precisely these types of comparisons that are being used as ammunition in the effort to ban anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine from campuses.
Foxman previously provided political cover for the rise of Donald Trump, declaring in an interview, “I don’t think he’s a racist, I don’t think he’s an antisemite.”
The marriage between the Zionist lobby—many of whom are Democrats, like Foxman and Ackman—and the fascistic right-wing must be underscored.
Henry Schwartz, an executive committee member of one of the main US Zionist lobbies, the Zionist Organization of America, stated that Jews were “blessed by heaven with Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.”
To these wealthy, indifferent layers, who solidarize themselves not with the plight of millions of working-class Jews but rather the capitalist elite, Trump’s openly fascistic ethno-nationalism is warmly greeted. When, in 2017, fascists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists took up torches and marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” Trump commented that they were “very fine people.” But this was no problem for these donors, who by antisemitism simply mean opposition to the government of Israel.
This Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017 image shows white supremacists and Nazis at the entrance to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia at the deadly "Unite the Right" rally. [AP Photo/Steve Helber]
The lead “prosecutor” in the December 6 McCarthyite hearing for the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn was Republican Representative Elise Stefanik (New York). Stefanik is a close ally of Donald Trump, who has expressed support for the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” an openly fascistic and anti-Semitic theory, which holds that a conspiracy of elite Jewish liberals is trying to “poison the blood”—in the words of Trump—of white Western Christian nations through mass immigration. She supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election through the coup of January 6, 2021.
The close connections between the Zionist lobby and the far right are well documented.
One of Trump’s largest donors was the late Sheldon Adelson, who in 2015 had amassed $28 billion through the addictive and exploitative casino industry. According to Forbes he was the 18th richest person in the world a few years before his death in 2021. Adelson was a major figure in the Israeli American Council, acting both on its executive board and as a lead donor.
Adelson was introduced to Trump through Michael Steinhardt, an American hedge fund manager and billionaire, who co-founded the Birthright Israel program. Steinhardt was also a major donor to Trump, and also to New York University, where he was a member of the board before resigning over accusations of illegally trafficking in antiquities.
It is notable that one of the founders of Birthright is a major Trump supporter.
Birthright is a critical institution both in garnering political support for Israel within the US and in facilitating migration to Israel, especially its illegal settlements on the West Bank. About one in every six Israeli settlers in the West Bank are American citizens. Some 800,000 young people have gone on free trips to Israel sponsored by the Birthright Israel Foundation, described by the New York Times as a “rite of passage” for many young American Jews. Rabbi Bennet Miller, the national chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, is interviewed in the film Israelism, insisting, “Every one of our kids should be going over, not for ten days, but for a semester or a year.” In recent years, thousands of young people have been protesting on the trips, walking off in the middle to visit Palestinian settlements in opposition to the program’s guided tour.
This intertwining of the fascistic right, US imperialism, and Zionist forces can also be seen in the lawsuits underway in the US right now claiming rampant antisemitism on US campuses. An investigation by Grayzone notes that all of the lawsuits are being filed by one firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres. David Friedman was also one of the principal lawyers at the firm until 2017, when he became the US Ambassador to Israel under Trump. Friedman is currently campaigning for NYU to begin a crackdown against pro-Palestinian protest.
Image from the law offices of Kasowitz, Benson and Torres.
The firm has been described by Eric Garland, a geopolitical analyst and influencer, as “Netanyahu’s guys in the Trump White House.” The law firm was founded by a Big Tobacco lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, a long-time donor to both the Republican and Democratic parties, including to Trump, Biden and Obama. The firm was previously registered as a foreign agent, representing Israel, with the US Justice Department. Another of its clients was the Ukrainian-Israeli billionaire Ikor Kolomoisky, a major early donor for the fascist Azov battalion, who is now in prison for fraud.
The Grayzone report also notes that the “witnesses” who have launched lawsuits through this firm have all been semi-employed, despite being students, by Israeli lobby organizations, particularly the Alliance for Israel, Israel Alliance, and Students Supporting Israel. While these paid employees of these groups have claimed instances of hate, such as being told, “You’re a dirty little Jew and you deserve to die,” their lawsuits do not provide any specific examples or references to such moments of antisemitism, just confrontations with pro-Palestinian activists, shouting matches, and the use of the supposedly antisemitic slogan, “from the river to the sea.”
The defense of Palestine is a class question
This marriage of Zionists, billionaires and outright fascistic antisemites testifies to the fact that the campaign underway to assault basic democratic rights, including free speech, has nothing to do with the popular demands of students, nor, for that matter, anything to do with a campaign against genuine antisemitism.
In a critical lecture delivered December 14 at Humboldt University in Berlin, World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North outlined the fascistic ideology that underpins the Netanyahu regime in Israel,
In the midst of the crimes being committed by the Israeli regime, there is no greater and more insidious lie than the claim that opposition to Zionism is, and must be, antisemitic. This is a lie that is refuted by the long history of pre-1948 opposition to Zionism among countless thousands of Jewish workers and intellectuals, spanning several generations, who rejected the myth-based call for a return to Palestine.
The working class, socialist movement played a key role in opposing Zionism:
[Socialists] identified and denounced the politically reactionary character of the perspective of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. It was understood that this project was a colonialist enterprise, which could only be achieved in alliance with imperialism and at the expense of the Palestinian Arab population that had lived in the territory for 2,000 years.
The genocide of Gaza has nothing to do with the defense of the Jewish people. In fact, insisting that the horrific death of more than 20,000 people serves Jews or Judaism, is itself a deeply perverse, fundamentally antisemitic notion—claiming that Jews or Judaism require this massacre.
Those censoring the mass upsurge and awakening of anger in young people and workers worldwide do not reflect a genuine popular movement, let alone a genuine popular movement of Jewish people. Rather, this campaign is the product of an alliance of multi-billionaires, Trump-loving antisemites, and American imperialist strategists and cheerleaders dedicated to Israel as a geopolitical necessity. Safeguarded and promoted by the media, this alliance of reaction represents the interests of a tiny minority.
“December 20, 2023, will go down in history,” said European Union Parliament President Roberta Metsola after representatives of the EU member states and the European Parliament finally agreed on a reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) a few days before Christmas. She was “very proud that we have found and implemented solutions with the Pact on Migration and Asylum.”
Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, right, welcomes European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as she arrives for an international conference on migration in Rome, Sunday, 23 July 2023 [AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia]
The day will indeed go down in history as the day on which the EU and its national governments openly adopted the anti-refugee programme of the far right. The implementation of the “solutions” approved by the EU means the abolition of the right to asylum, the extension of Fortress Europe, mass deportations and the detention even of women and children in deportation facilities similar to concentration camps.
Immediately after Metsola announced the deal, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) rejoiced on X/Twitter:
Parliament and the Council of Europe have now agreed on more decisive action against illegal migrants. Controls, registration of all non-EU citizens without passports without exception and asylum centres directly at the external borders to deport immigrants from safe countries as quickly as possible. The AfD has been calling for all of this for a long time.
The planned measures are barbaric and recall the darkest times in European history. With the deal, “the dystopian vision of a Europe of detention centres … will become reality,” writes the refugee organisation Pro Asyl. Eve Geddie, director of Amnesty International’s Office for European Institutions, warns:
This agreement will set back European asylum law for decades. The likely result is an increase in suffering at every stage of the journey of a person seeking asylum in the EU.
Among other things, the deal provides for refugees to be detained directly at the EU’s external borders in the future. The press release issued by the European Council and the European Parliament on December 21 states that the so-called Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR) will introduce a “mandatory border procedure” aimed at “quickly assessing at the EU’s external borders whether applications for asylum are unfounded or inadmissible.”
Persons subject to these asylum border procedures are “not authorised to enter the member state’s territory.” Instead, they must “remain at the disposal of the authorities at the screening location,” and “may be placed in detention.”
What this means in concrete terms is clear. Refugees will be locked up in detention centres surrounded by barbed wire, as is already the case at Europe’s external borders, where they can expect to be deported at any time.
In the press release, the EU calls on its member states to create “adequate capacity, in terms of reception and human resources”—specifically, 30,000 detention slots—to “allow them at any given moment to carry out the border procedure and to enforce return decisions for an identified number of applications.”
Practically all refugees who survive their deadly voyage across the Mediterranean are affected by the measures. The border procedure will be applied when a refugee “makes an application at an external border crossing point following apprehension in connection with an illegal border crossing and following disembarkation after a search and rescue operation at sea,” according to the EU press release.
The application of these border procedures is “mandatory” for three groups of people seeking protection:
People from countries of origin with a “recognition rate below 20 percent,”
People—including unaccompanied minors—considered to be “a threat to national security or public order,”
People seeking protection who are accused of having “misled the authorities with false information or by withholding information.”
Pro Asyl describes the fact that there are no exceptions even for children and their families as “particularly dramatic.” This “ultimately means the detention of minors for months on end, which is incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
In the eyes of the EU, refugees are not people with rights who are in need of protection, but potential enemies who must be monitored, deported and eradicated.
“Another pillar of the pact is the screening regulation,” boasts the EU. Its aim is to “strengthen checks on people at the external borders.” It “also ensures that the right procedure—such as repatriation to the country of origin …—is initiated.” The checks include “identification and health and security checks, as well as fingerprinting and registration in the Eurodac database.”
In addition, the new law includes rules that apply when “migrants are instrumentalised for political purposes, i.e., foreign state actors using migratory flows to try to destabilise the EU and its member states.” In this case, member states will be allowed to detain all asylum seekers at their borders.
This is Orwellian Newspeak, which turns reality on its head. In fact, it is the EU that is “instrumentalising” refugees in several ways and with murderous consequences. Following their destruction of entire countries with their neocolonial wars in Africa and the Middle East, the leading European NATO powers and the US have decided to let refugees die in order to deter others and keep them away from “Fortress Europe.” According to official figures, over 28,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 alone. This year has been the deadliest since 2020, with more than 2,500 deaths.
Now, the same European governments that cynically justified past wars as “humanitarian” interventions are organising an even bigger bloodbath. They are escalating the NATO war offensive against Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And in the Middle East they openly support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and are preparing a wider war against Iran and its allies, which will turn the entire region into an inferno.
The terror against refugees and the escalation of war are directly linked. The more aggressively the ruling classes pursue their imperialist war aims and push ahead with the associated social austerity, the more they rely on dictatorship and fascism to suppress the growing social and political opposition at home. With their incessant agitation, the politicians and the media seek to make refugees and immigrants the scapegoats for the deep social crisis, while strengthening the extreme right.
The attacks on refugees are only the spearhead of a comprehensive attack on the democratic rights of the entire working class. In recent weeks, efforts have been made throughout Europe to suppress the mass protests against the genocide in Gaza. In Germany, in particular, this process is well advanced: Bans on demonstrations, attacks on critical artists, brutal police operations against students at universities and raids on left-wing groups are now part of the daily routine.
The reactionary offensive is being driven by the nominally “left” and liberal parties, in particular.
In Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in the government are organising the pro-war, authoritarian offensive and celebrating the tightening of asylum laws. “We are thus limiting irregular migration and relieving the burden on countries that are particularly hard hit—including Germany,” wrote Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on X/Twitter. The agreement was a “very important decision,” he said.
Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also welcomed the agreement, issuing a statement that described the deal as “urgently needed and long overdue.”
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has effectively formed a coalition with Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National to push one of the EU’s toughest immigration laws through parliament. The measures adopted are racist through and through. The law blocks immigrants’ access to social benefits for five years, and even young people born and raised in France will no longer automatically receive French citizenship at the age of 18.
The European pseudo-left is paving the way for this policy. For example, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) reform was drafted under the leadership of the Spanish PSOE/Sumar coalition, which currently holds the European Council presidency and continues to be supported by the pseudo-left Podemos.
In many respects, Madrid, Berlin and Brussels used the pseudo-left Syriza government in Greece as a model. Syriza massively tightened immigration policy between 2015 and 2019 in alliance with the far-right Independent Greeks (Anel), and introduced measures similar to those now being implemented by the EU. These included cramming refugees into concentration camp-like “hotspots,” such as Moria, illegal push-backs, and the use of the military against migrants in the Aegean Sea.
The European asylum deal, which is to be finally adopted before the European elections, held from June 6–9, 2024, threatens millions, but it also creates clarity. The fact that all sections of the ruling class support a policy of terror against refugees shows that workers and young people are confronted not simply with one or another government, but with the entire ruling class and its social system.
