Iran’s presidential elections head to a run-off amid escalating Mideast war

Keith Jones

Iran’s presidential election will be decided in a run-off next Friday between a so-called “reform” candidate, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, and Saeed Jalili, a leader of the Principalist or “conservative” faction of the Islamic Republic’s bourgeois-clerical political elite.

Pezeshkian favours renewed efforts to seek a rapprochement with Washington and the European imperialist powers, as was attempted under the administration of Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president from 2013 to 2021. He combines calls for a relaxing of clerical control over aspects of daily life and denunciations of widespread government corruption with the promotion of a neo-liberal, pro-market agenda aimed at boosting profits and investment at the expense of working people.

Candidate for the presidential election Saeed Jalili, third left, a former Iranian top nuclear negotiator, sits in a meeting with a group of his supporters during his campaign at a sports hall in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 30, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]

Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2007 and 2013, was among the most outspoken opponents of the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, which US President Donald Trump repudiated in 2018 so as to initiate a new US drive to subjugate Iran through military pressure and by wrecking its economy. He is an advocate of the “economic resistance” policy currently favoured by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei. Among the Principalists, who are divided into multiple, competing factions, Jalili is considered among the most strident in his promotion of reactionary Islamic mores and the dominant role of the Shia clergy in political life.

In the first round of the presidential election held last Friday, Pezeshkian narrowly bested Jalili, winning 10.41 million votes (42.5% of votes cast) to the latter’s 9.47 million (38.6%)

Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Tehran mayor and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps air force commander, and the current speaker of the Majlis (Iranian parliament), polled 3.38 million votes (13.5 %).

Once the results were known, Ghalibaf immediately declared his support for Jalili in the run-off—constitutionally necessary as none of the candidates won a majority of the votes. The three other candidates authorized to stand in the election under a highly anti-democratic vetting process overseen by the Guardians’ Council have also thrown their support behind Jalili. Two of them withdrew last Thursday before any votes had been cast. The third, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, won just 206,397 votes.

In a striking and highly significant indication of the narrowing popular support for Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime, overall voter turnout fell sharply despite a very public government campaign to encourage people to do their “civic duty” by voting. The Supreme Leader himself actively participated in this campaign.

Of the more than 61 million Iranians eligible to vote, less than 40 percent chose to cast a ballot on Friday, down 9 percentage points from the 2021 presidential election. That election was won by the Principalist cleric Ebrahim Raisi whose death with other leading officials in a May 19 helicopter crash triggered the current election.

Prior to the 2021 election, turnout in an Iranian presidential election had never fallen below 50 percent, and in the three preceding elections in 2009, 2013 and 2017, it always exceeded 70 percent.

The sharp drop in turnout is an indication of mass disaffection with all factions of the political establishment—conservative and “reform”—and mounting social anger. Since the beginning of 2018, Iran has thrice been convulsed by mass nationwide protest movements fueled by anger over social inequality, spiraling inflation, deepening poverty and the corrupt and repressive rule of the capitalist Islamic Republic.

All of these movements have been socially and politically heterogeneous, involving Iran’s workers and toilers, but also more privileged middle-class layers, backed by sections of the bourgeoisie, who resent the crony capitalism of the Islamic Republic and the political privileges of the Shia clergy only because they represent obstacles to their own enrichment.

Under Raisi as under Rouhani, the rulers of the Islamic Republic used bloody repression to suppress the anti-government protests. Hundreds, including scores of minors, were reportedly killed during the three months of large-scale nationwide protests triggered by the September 16, 2022 death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman arrested for not properly wearing the hijab.

The bourgeois clerical regime consolidated its rule by hijacking the mass revolutionary upsurge that overthrew the brutal monarchical dictatorship of the US-backed Shah in 1979 and savagely repressed the left and all independent organizations of the working class. For decades it has sought to balance between Iran’s oppressed masses and the imperialist powers.

However, the crisis of world capitalism and the attempts of the imperialist powers, led by the United States, to reassert their global dominance through a violent re-division of the world and the seizure of resources, strategic territories, and pools of labour to exploit, make this balancing act ever more precarious.

On the eve of the election, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken imposed new sanctions on Iran in response, or so he claimed, to Iran’s plans to augment its civilian nuclear program. Under conditions where the US and European powers are waging economic war on Iran and backing Israel to the hilt as it wages a genocidal assault on the Palestinians, Tehran has sought to pressure them to return to the 2015 agreement by increasing its enrichment of uranium and breaching other conditions of the accord.

Blinken punctuated his sanctions announcement with a threat of war, even a nuclear strike on Iran, declaring that US imperialism is “prepared to use all elements” of its “national power to ensure” Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon.

The next day, Iran’s UN mission issued a statement on X/Twitter warning that should Israel carry through on its threats to invade Lebanon, it would face an “obliterating war” and suggested Iranian-backed militias across the region would come to Hezbollah’s defence.

The reality is that none of the factions of the Islamic Republic’s bourgeois elite and clerical-political establishment have any progressive answer to the US imperialist war drive and the rampage of its Israeli Zionist attack dog.

While bitterly divided among themselves, their uniform response to mounting imperialist aggression is to intensify the exploitation and repression of the working class. Successive administrations, “conservative” and “reform” alike, have systematically gutted the little that remains of the social concessions granted to the working class in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, implementing wholesale privatization and massive subsidy and social spending cuts.

Under Rouhani, with Khamenei’s approval, the Islamic Republic agreed beginning in January 2016 to dramatically curtail its civilian nuclear programme, with the aim of opening Iran’s abundant energy resources and working class to European and American imperialist exploitation. But the “investment boom” proved to be little more than a mirage. On assuming office at the beginning of 2017, Trump quickly served notice that he intended to sabotage the Iran nuclear accord as part of a still more aggressive America First global strategy.

In response, Rouhani aggressively wooed Berlin, London and Paris. But once Trump pulled the plug on the Iran accord, initiated his campaign of “maximum pressure” on Tehran, and threatened to use Washington’s control of the global financial system to sanction any foreign companies that traded with Iran, the European powers quickly fell into line.

Rouhani’s successor Raisi was ready to explore the possibility of reviving the nuclear accord, something Biden claimed to favour during the 2020 US election campaign. But to offset the ongoing brutal US-European economic sanctions, which among other things greatly exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tehran continued at the same time to expand economic and strategic ties with both Russia and China.

Washington responded with increasing intransigence and in August 2022, some six months after the outbreak of the US-NATO-instigated Ukraine war, the on-again off-again nuclear negotiations started to completely unravel.

The US has welcomed the now eight-month-old Israeli war on Gaza as a means to pursue long-developed plans to reorder the Middle East under unbridled US domination by incrementally degrading the position of Iran and its allies and ultimately waging all-out war against them. Blinken and Biden have themselves repeatedly tied the expanding war in the Middle East and US imperialism’s need to roll back Iranian influence to the NATO war against Russia and America’s all-sided economic and military-strategic offensive against China, admitting, in effect, that the US and its allies are engaged in a global war for imperialist hegemony.

When Israel, as part of an escalating series of provocations, killed leading Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel by striking Iran’s diplomatic mission in Syria, Tehran felt compelled to respond. But it signaled its first-ever direct military attack on Israel on April 13 well in advance and carefully calibrated it in the hopes of avoiding a wider war.

In the five televised debates held in the run-up to the first round of the presidential election, the “reform” candidate Pezeshkian repeatedly claimed he could resolve Iran’s acute economic crisis by pursuing friendly relations with “our neighbours” and reviving the nuclear accord. His Principalist opponents, he claimed, “didn’t let the JCPOA [the official name for the accord] succeed,” preferring like Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “to set it on fire.”  Needless to say, he offered no explanation as to how Iran could achieve such a rapprochement when the US and its European allies have made clear that their aim is to subjugate Iran and re-impose the type of neo-colonial regime that existed under the Shah.

While advocating conciliation with the imperialist powers, Pezeshkian advanced himself as the representative of “owners” and “company managers ... thirsty for the stability of a proper business environment” free “from government interference,” and “stock market investors” angered by the depreciation of their shares.

Meanwhile, Jalili, who enjoys the not so subtle backing of Supreme Leader Khamenei, claimed he would put Iran on the path of 8 percent annual growth, but again without offering any viable path as to how this could be achieved.

IMF says growing US debt must be “urgently” dealt with

Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund has warned that the rapidly growing US public debt must be “urgently” addressed lest it cause major problems for the global economy and its financial system.

IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. [Photo by IMF / CC BY 4.0]

The warning is the centre piece of the annual Article IV review of the US issued last week which estimated that the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise steadily and reach 140 percent by 2032. This would mean debt and deficits exceeding the previous highs they reached in the wake of World War 2 and there was a “pressing need to reverse the ongoing increase to public-debt GDP ratio.”

“Such high deficits and debt create a growing risk to the US and global economy, potentially feeding into higher fiscal financing costs and a growing risk to the smooth rollover of maturing obligations,” the IMF said.

“These chronic fiscal deficits represent a significant and persistent policy misalignment that needs to be urgently addressed.”

The prescriptions advanced by the IMF amount to nothing less than what would be called a “structural adjustment program” like those imposed on less developed countries. These have led to the eruption of mass social and class struggles as took place in Sri Lanka in 2022 and have now exploded in Kenya.

The IMF said that to put the debt-GDP on a “clear downward path, a frontloaded fiscal adjustment will be needed that shifts to a general government primary surplus of around 1 percent of GDP (an adjustment of around 4 percent of GDP relative to the current baseline.)”

With the US GDP currently at $27.6 trillion, this means an “adjustment” of more than $1.1 trillion.

Under conditions where military spending will continue to be increased as the US expands its global war front, this means years of an austerity program directed against social spending hitting the working class.

This is spelled out is clear terms by the IMF.

“There are various tax and spending options to achieve this adjustment over the medium-term. However, policies will need to go beyond finding efficiencies in discretionary non-defence spending. Policymakers will need to carefully consider raising indirect taxes, progressively increasing income taxes (including for those earning less than $400,000 per year), eliminating a range of tax expenditures, and reforming entitlement programs. Putting these measures in place will necessitate taking difficult political decisions over the course of multiple years.”

The sting here is in the tail. Under conditions where any tax increases on the wealthy and corporations will be only marginal at most or successfully evaded as has been the case in the past, the chief burden of the shift in resources would be borne by an attack on social services, to which the IMF points with the euphemistic phrase “reforming entitlement programs.”

The IMF report card on the US economy claimed that it has turned in a “remarkable performance over the past few years” but then detailed major problems building up not far below the surface.

Besides the explosion of public debt, it pointed to major issues in the financial system. It warned that there was “insufficient progress in addressing the vulnerabilities” highlighted by the 2023 bank failures, when three major banks failed as a result of the interest rate hikes initiated by the US Federal Reserve in March 2022.

Fed policy could also lead to financial turbulence. It is seeking to reduce its holdings of debt built up because of the quantitative easing program introduced after the crisis of 2008 and expanded further in response to the crisis in the market for US government debt in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

This process, known as quantitative tightening, is now being eased somewhat because of the possibility of liquidity problems in the $26 trillion Treasury market and the short-term, sometimes overnight, repurchase (repo) market where interest rates jumped from their normal level of a fraction of a percentage point to as much as 10 percent in September 2019.

“The decision on when to stop the shrinking of the balance sheet will need to be handled carefully so as to prevent inducing volatility on short term funding markets,” the IMF said.

The IMF took aim at the increase in tariffs and other restrictive policies being rapidly introduced the US, supported by both sides of the political aisle. It stated that their ongoing intensification and “the increased use of preferences in the treatment of domestic versus foreign commercial interests represents a growing downside risk for both the US and the global economy.”

It said the US should address the core issues with its trading partners that risk undermining the global trade and investment system.

“Tariffs, nontariff barriers, and domestic content provisions are not the right solutions since they distort trade and investment flows and risk creating a slippery slope that undermines the multilateral trading system, fragments global supply chains, and spurs retaliatory action by trading partners.”

The US, it said, should unwind obstacles to free trade and instead seek to bolster its competitiveness.

There is no chance of this happening because the dominant view in Washington is that the system of free trade, which the US once promoted, has worked against its national interests, undermining its global economic dominance which must now be rectified by a combination of economic and military warfare.

Speaking to a press conference on Thursday on the IMF report, managing director Kristalina Georgieva said the fund did not support the Biden administration’s tariffs on Chinese green technology goods nor the plans of Trump to introduce a 10 percent tariff on all imports.

But she then effectively endorsed the measures saying there was a “political case” for such actions.

On the issue of fiscal debt, she said the US had the space to deal with its fiscal problems but there was always the temptation to postpone decisions related to debt and deficits to the future. The role of the IMF, she added, was to be the “voice of reason.”

The voice of IMF “reason” has thundered out on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, where the government has shot down protestors demonstrating against the imposition of its austerity program.

Conditions in the US have not yet reached the stage of those in Kenya, but the same underlying financial processes are at work. The US has been deeply involved in the attacks of the Ruto government on the working class.

Right-wing Supreme Court majority approves making homelessness a crime

John Burton

The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday along its now familiar ideological divide that local governments can penalize and arrest unhoused people for sleeping in public, including in their own cars, even where there are no public shelters available and nowhere else to go.

A Purple Patrol security guard checks the wellbeing of a homeless man in downtown Los Angeles Thursday, July 27, 2023. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]

There are more than 650,000 unhoused people in the United States, according to a 2023 count by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson will vacate multiple injunctions presently in effect within the jurisdiction of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompasses the nine western states and two Pacific territories, embracing a population of 65 million, almost double that of the next largest circuit.

Friday’s ruling overturned a 2018 Ninth Circuit ruling, Martin v. City of Boise, which was itself grounded in the Supreme Court’s own 1962 decision in Robinson v. California that the constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” found in the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights prevents criminalizing someone’s “status”—in that case drug addiction—rather than conduct. The Ninth Circuit ruled that this same principle applies equally to people compelled by circumstances beyond their control to sleep in public.

Prior to the decision Friday, courts in the Ninth Circuit interpreted Robinson and Martin to mean that the unhoused could not be arrested, their encampments cleared nor their meager possessions confiscated unless the local government could demonstrate the availability of public shelters or other realistic options.

Several federal judges, notably David O. Carter of Orange County, California, became deeply involved in working out complex and practical logistical arrangements between public officials and the unhoused by issuing and then modifying detailed injunctions. Over the last year, following Judge Carter’s intervention, the City of Los Angeles registered a more than two percent drop in its homeless population, the first decline since 2018.

Grants Pass, with a population around 40,000, has an estimated 600 unhoused, many of whom are long-time residents unable to find or afford a place to live, but who do not want to leave their family, work or friends. To force them out of the city limits and into nearby federal lands, in 2013 the City Council criminalized sleeping in public with any form of “bedding … for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live.” Penalties escalated from a $300 fine and keep-out orders to 30 days in jail.

The only alternative to sleeping in public or leaving Grants Pass was 138 beds at Gospel Rescue Mission, where stays were limited and residents were required to attend religious services.

Two residents of Grants Pass who slept in their cars sued in federal district court, which enjoined enforcement based on testimony that Grants Pass police officers rousted unhoused residents repeatedly and cited them for sleeping unless they could show they had a “place to live,” thus subjecting them to fines, arrests, and criminal prosecutions.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for the court’s fascist wing. He began with sickening crocodile tears over “those experiencing homelessness,” who are, supposedly, “as diverse as the Nation itself—they are young and old and belong to all races and creeds,” and “become homeless for a variety of reasons, too, many beyond their control.”

Of course, homelessness does not affect all equally. Gorsuch ignores the class divide in US society. What the homeless share in common is extreme impoverishment in a society dominated by oligarchs with no interest whatsoever in homelessness, as long as encampments do not interfere with their privileged and sheltered life.

Writing that the Eighth Amendment was enacted to prohibit “barbaric” punishments such as “disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive,” Gorsuch called that constitutional provision “a poor foundation” for the Ninth Circuit rulings protecting the unhoused. He attacked as well the Supreme Court of 60 years ago, criticizing it for “reading the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to impose a limit not just on what punishments may follow a criminal conviction but what a State may criminalize to begin with.”

“Public camping ordinances like those before us are nothing like the law at issue in Robinson,” Gorsuch wrote, disingenuously adding:

“It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”

Setting aside Gorsuch’s ominous reference to college encampments, such as the recent mass protests against the Zionist genocide in Gaza, one cannot but help but hear the echoes of poet Anatole France’s famous aphorism:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.

Gorsuch attacked the lower court judges such as Carter who sought to balance local efforts to address homelessness with the constitutional rights of those affected, claiming without evidence that judicial efforts “to alleviate the homelessness crisis” may have “inadvertently contributed to it.”

“A handful of federal judges” cannot match “the collective wisdom the American people” when responding to “a pressing social question like homelessness,” Gorsuch concluded.

The last point is particularly rich, as the same six-justice right-wing bloc on the same day overruled the Chevron doctrine, thus effectively transferring control over the regulation of United States industry and finance from agencies established by the executive branch to unelected federal judges, who, as this decision illustrates, cannot act without the approval of the right-wing Supreme Court.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two moderate justices, wrote that “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” and for “some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”

Making it criminal for people to “sleep anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow” punishes people for being homeless, in violation of the Eighth Amendment, Sotomayor concluded.

French snap elections: Macron’s party collapses as New Popular Front, neo-fascists rise

Alex Lantier

President Emmanuel Macron suffered another humiliating setback yesterday in the first round of the snap elections he called after his party’s defeat in the European elections. Both the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) surged in the vote, to 29 and 28 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, Macron’s Ensemble coalition fell to 20 percent.

French President Emmanuel Macron casts his ballot, Sunday, June 30, 2024 [AP Photo/Yara Nardi]

Projections of who will win seats in the July 7 second round are uncertain, with most showing the RN falling short of the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority in the 577-seat Assembly. It is expected to win between 230 and 280 seats. The NFP is expected to have between 125 and 165 seats, while Ensemble will likely fall to a rump of between 70 and 100 seats. The right-wing The Republicans (LR) party, which took 9 percent of the vote, will have 40 to 60 seats.

This is a resounding disavowal of Macron. He campaigned as a defender of French democracy against the “extremes” of the NFP and the RN, and advocated a deployment of ground troops to Ukraine for war with Russia. Neither of these arguments won him support.

It is well known among workers that Macron rules against the people, slashing pensions and other social programs in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, and that the war plans he and NATO are supporting pose the risk of catastrophic escalation.

Instead, on voter turnout of 66 percent—the highest in 30 years for a legislative election—voters reduced Macron’s party to a rump in the National Assembly. All projections show his party being a junior partner in whatever governmental coalition is assembled in parliament after the second round on Sunday.

Macron issued a statement last night indicating that he would likely seek a government alliance with the NFP and LR against the RN. He said:

The high voter turnout in the first round of these legislative elections shows the importance of this vote for our compatriots and their desire to clarify the political situation.

Calling for an all-party anti-RN alliance, Macron advocated “against the National Rally, a broad, clearly democratic and republican coalition for the second round.”

Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal called for coalitions to be formed that are “capable of defeating the National Rally and with whom [Ensemble] shares the most important thing: the values of the Republic.” Attal also announced he was suspending his widely unpopular plans for cuts to unemployment insurance after Ensemble’s defeat.

RN party leader Marine Le Pen and prime ministerial candidate Jordan Bardella both appealed to voters to give the RN an absolute majority in the second round, so it could form a government.

Le Pen said:

The French have shown their desire to turn the page after seven years of a government that was contemptuous and corrosive. We need an absolute majority. I invite you to renew your vote if you voted for us … If you made another choice, I invite you to come join the coalition of security, liberty and unity.

“The presidential camp … is no longer in a position to win,” Bardella said, calling his party “a patriotic rampart that can make France win” against the far-left threat. He said that, if elected, he would be “respectful of the Constitution and the office of the President of the Republic, but intransigent on the policy we want to put into action.”

For his part, NFP leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon framed the second round of the snap elections as a choice between his party coalition and neo-fascism.

He said:

We are going towards a second round of exceptional intensity. The country must choose. Will it aggravate the worst of its divisions, those of social inequalities, religion, skin color, of social or geographic origin, or will it come together to form just one people without any preconditions? That is the choice in the second round. … In these conditions, we can have no other propositions or reasonable demands beyond this: the New Popular Front needs an absolute majority.

As of last night, Mélenchon’s position within the NFP was somewhat strengthened by the election debacles facing two of his rivals inside the NFP.

Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) leader Fabien Roussel, who made virulent law-and-order criticisms of Mélenchon, was eliminated outright in the first round in his Nord district.

François Ruffin, an aggressive promoter of the Ukraine war within LFI, was trounced and took second place to RN candidate Nathalie Ribeiro-Billet in the Somme district and is now fighting to keep his parliamentary seat.

Mélenchon, who has repeatedly offered to serve as prime minister under Macron, also signaled that the NFP will support Macron’s candidates against the RN. If the NFP could take away votes from an Ensemble candidate and thus allow the RN to win, he said, “we will withdraw our candidates, wherever it is, in all circumstances … Not a single vote, not a single seat more for the RN. Our policy is clear, our policy is simple.”

In reality, the only clear and simple element of the situation is the massive rejection by workers and youth of Macron’s policies of war, austerity and police state dictatorship. The vote in France is simply one expression of the far broader rejection in the working class internationally of military escalation in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and austerity policies that are being imposed by capitalist police states around the world.

But the French political establishment does not give expression to these sentiments of workers and youth, and the outcome of the elections still is impossible to foretell. The balance of forces in the Assembly remains unclear, as is the position that LR would take were Macron to ask it to support a coalition government between the NFP and Ensemble.

Eric Ciotti, the leading partisan inside LR of unity with the RN, issued a statement last night calling for the formation of a RN-LR government alliance.

Ciotti said:

Tonight, it is no longer possible to refuse to choose between our responsible, patriotic and Republican union and the terrifying far left danger. I call upon all The Republicans to follow the path to unity that I have opened up.

Above all, a coalition government formed between Mélenchon’s NFP, Macron’s Ensemble and possibly a faction of LR offers nothing to the working class. It would be a capitalist government based on coalitions with explicitly right-wing forces. Moreover, the NFP’s program commits it to troop deployments and arms deliveries to Ukraine and a build-up of French military police and intelligence services that would make it compatible with Macron’s aggressive anti-worker agenda.

Were such a coalition government to be formed, it would amount to an attempt by French finance capital to integrate the NFP and Mélenchon more directly into the halls of power as instruments to pursue its imperialist interests. This government would, sooner rather than later, find itself in overt conflict with the working class.

New COVID-19 surge driven by KP.2 and KP.3 variants

Bill Shaw

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to sicken millions of people, with a growing surge driven by the newly evolved KP.2 and KP.3 variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The surge impacts multiple countries, including the US, Australia and the UK.

In Australia, COVID is surging along with two winter respiratory viruses, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Surveillance data show increases in the numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, nursing home outbreaks, and healthcare provider absences due to illness, as well as increased levels of the virus in wastewater.

In the United Kingdom, hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are up 24 percent in the past week. In addition, the percentage of COVID-19 tests that are positive has risen from 8.4 to 10 percent.

According to Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, “This is a wakeup call. The virus hasn’t gone away and is certainly not a seasonal infection.” 

In the United States, there are 15 states seeing high or very high levels of the virus in sewage, according to the CDC. The CDC maintains a map of current virus levels, shown below, which it updates on a regular basis.

COVID-19 Current Wastewater Viral Activity Levels Map (Source: CDC) [Photo: CDC]

The 15 states are concentrated mostly in the Southern and Western US and include the nation’s three most populous states: California, Texas and Florida. In California, the surge comes earlier than experts anticipated, with current cases of COVID-19 already nearing last summer’s peak. California’s percentage of COVID-19 tests that are positive is 7.7 percent, exceeding the national average of 6.6 percent.

With COVID-19 surging in California, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass proposed banning the wearing of masks. This follows proposed mask bans in New York and the passage of this reactionary measure in North Carolina. 

The mask bans have nothing to do with their stated purpose of “public safety,” but instead are retaliatory measures aimed at suppressing widespread demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. Their goal is to intimidate protestors by stripping them of anonymity. Indeed, the proposed mask ban in New York is broadly supported by several Zionist groups.

A few days after proposing the mask ban in LA, Mayor Bass herself contracted COVID-19. Her office announced that she will be working remotely, something denied to the vast majority of American workers.

In Hawaii, there are very high levels of the virus in sewage, and there is a statewide average test positivity rate of 16.7 percent. The city of Honolulu has an even higher test positivity rate at 20.1 percent. The number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 in Hawaii, 126 per week, is the highest level in the state since last August. In response to the surge, Kaiser Permanente and other healthcare systems in Hawaii have resumed masking requirements for all healthcare providers and staff.

The surge in Hawaii coincides with a major event held on the island of Oahu from June 6 to 16. FestPAC is the largest celebration of indigenous Pacific Islanders. Ironically, it had been postponed from 2020 due to the onset of the pandemic. Over 500,000 people from 28 island nations converged on the small island for the 10-day event.

Given the confluence of the event and the emergence of the new viral variants, which have been shown to escape existing immunity, it was a recipe for widespread transmission of the virus. The test positivity rate among festival attendees during the event was 13 percent. The state department of health offered testing and N95 masks to attendees.

Texas and Florida, despite having high and very high levels of the virus in wastewater, have test positivity rates of 5.5 and 4.1 percent respectively, below the national average. However, these states have been at the forefront nationally of dismantling their public health infrastructure, especially as it relates to COVID-19. Thus, the stark contrast between their wastewater levels of virus and other traditional public health metrics is to be expected when the virus is spreading uncontrolled in their regions.

This COVID-19 surge is driven by the emergence of two new viral variants called KP.2 and KP.3. At the end of March, these two variants made up less than 4 percent of cases in the US. Per the most recent data on June 22, they together are projected to make up 53.9 percent of cases, with KP.3 comprising 33.1 percent of cases, while KP.2 comprises 20.8 percent. Over the same time period, the previously dominant JN.1 variant dropped from 52.9 percent of cases to a projected 1.6 percent of cases.

In the United Kingdom, KP.2 and KP.3 currently make up 22 and 44 percent of cases, respectively. In New South Wales, Australia, KP.2 and KP.3 together make up over half of cases.

Early data have shown that immunity to previous variants provides less protection against KP.2 and KP.3. A new preprint which is undergoing peer review confirms early analysis of the new variants. Namely, antibodies developed by either vaccination against, or infection with, previous viral variants do not “neutralize” the new viral variants as effectively as they do prior variants. Neutralization means the antibodies bind to the virus in such a way as to prevent it from infecting cells.

Thus, the spread of these new variants is occurring because they “escape” pre-existing immunity. This phenomenon is typical of viruses that are not eradicated: They continue to evolve into new forms to overcome pre-existing immunity in their host populations.

The emergence of the new viral variants and the consequent surge of COVID-19 that is currently underway has been enabled by a ruling class indifferent to the suffering caused by the virus. To push their genocidal agenda, the ruling class is further destroying what little protections individuals have available to them by imposing cruel mask bans that disproportionately impact society’s vulnerable elderly and immunocompromised people.

Zelensky replaces general at the behest of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion

Jason Melanovski

President Volodymyr Zelensky has replaced Ukraine’s Joint Forces Commander Lt. General Yuriy Sodol with Brigadier General Andrii Hnatov at the behest of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Sodol was also in charge of ground forces along the frontline in the eastern Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov (Kharkiv) regions, where Ukrainian forces have continued to incrementally lose territory to Russia for the past year.

Andrii Hnatov [Photo by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine / CC BY 4.0]

Following his dismissal, Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda obtained a letter from Bohdan Krotevych, Chief of Staff of the Azov Brigade of the National Guard, that had been sent to the State Investigation Bureau of Ukraine (SBI) and published its key points.

In the letter, Krotevych blamed Sodol for the loss of Mariupol, a major shipping port now under Russian control.

In addition to poor planning and communication attributed to Sodol, Azov did not receive “a single extra cartridge prior to the defense of Mariupol,” according to Krotevych. He also blamed Sodol for having killed “more Ukrainians than Russians” due to his use of undermanned and outgunned counterattacks. Krotevych wrote that “the Lieutenant General commands the troops ‘inadequately’.”

For a junior officer such as Krotevych to publicly criticize a senior commander during war time would be highly unusual and grounds for discipline, as the Kyiv Post reported: “In most NATO armies an officer making public charges in wartime would have been arrested for insubordination—at least.” But to date, Krotevych, an open neo-Nazi, has not been sanctioned. On the contrary, bloggers with hundreds of thousands of followers that are allied with Zelensky repeated Krotevych’s charges, arguing the Azov officer had an excellent point, and Zelensky himself responded to Krotevych by dismissing Sodol. 

Zelensky’s bowing to the Azov Battalion on the appointment of a key general underlines both the highly unstable situation and the reactionary character of his regime. Under conditions of growing anti-war sentiments and an ongoing bloody debacle at the front, Zelensky is relying ever more heavily on far-right forces, allowing them to call the shots.

Although Ukraine is constantly touted as a bastion of “democracy” by the NATO war propaganda, in reality, fascist forces such as the Azov Brigade have been given extraordinary powers at the highest levels of the state. This policy has been encouraged by the imperialist powers which have played the central role in promoting and arming Azov. 

Azov Battalion soldiers with Nazi flag. [Photo by Heltsumani / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Earlier in June, the United States lifted a ban on sending weapons and training to Azov under the Leahy Law, which prohibits the US government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces that may have committed human rights violations. “This is a new page in the history of our unit,” Azov said in a statement following the news of its now official assistance from United States imperialism.

“Eligibility for US assistance will not only increase Azov’s combat effectiveness, but, most importantly, will help save the lives and health of the brigade’s personnel,” the unit said. “Azov is becoming more professional and more effective in defending Ukraine against the invaders.”

The State Department justified its decision by blaming Russian disinformation, which “has actively worked to discredit” the unit. It also stated that while vetting Azov for military assistance they “found no evidence of Gross Violations of Human Rights” committed by the 12th Azov Special Forces Brigade. Around the time that the ban was lifted, the elite Stanford University welcomed the Azov Battalion at its Slavic Department and removed the Azov Battalion from the website of its “Mapping Militants Project, an influential government-funded initiative that tracks extremist groups. 

Francis Fukuyama (left) with Arsenyi Fedosiuk, Julia Fedosiuk and Kateryna Prokopenko. [Photo: Facebook page of the Ukrainian Student Association at Stanford]

While American news outlets such as CNN and NBC uniformly claim that Azov had “moved on” from its neo-Nazi background and attributed its former stigma to “Russian disinformation,” the truth is that its leaders continue to support neo-Nazism.

The organization traces its heritage back both to Nazism and far-right Ukrainian nationalist organizations, such as Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), which were responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, as well as Ukrainians during World War II. Its founder Andriy Biletsky, previously the leader of the fascist paramilitary Patriot of Ukraine organization, is an outright white supremacist who in 2010 stated that the mission of Ukraine is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”

Despite the State Department’s assurances regarding Azov’s supposedly sparkling human rights record, between 2015 and 2016, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights connected Azov with war crimes, including mass looting, unlawful detention and torture.

As for Krotevych, who personally intervened to remove Sodol, X user and Azov investigator Moss Robeson revealed that Krotevych recommended that new Azov recruits read a 1953 memoir by Nazi war criminal Albert Kesselring and has clearly not “moved on” from neo-Nazism, as suggested by the pro-NATO Western media.

At the same time, the removal of Sodol also speaks to ongoing intense conflicts within the Ukrainian ruling class and military leadership. Sodol himself was reportedly an “old school” member within the leadership of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and promoted by former top General Valery Zaluzhny. Meanwhile his replacement Hnatov is younger and part of Zelensky’s plans of “cleaning house and replacing Soviet-trained senior officers with a new, younger generation of generals,” as the Kyiv Post reported. Zaluzhny, who reportedly refused to order major attacks the presidential administration wanted, was himself removed in February after months-long public conflicts with the president.

Short-lived military coup fails against Arce in Bolivia

Andrea Lobo

Bolivian President Luis Arce named a new military high command on Wednesday in the wake of an abortive military coup launched by the former commander of the Army, Gen. Juan José Zúñiga. 

Bolivia's President Luis Arce with Gen. Juan José Zúñiga on the Day of the Army in December 2022. [Photo: Min. Defensa Bolivia]

In one of the most short-lived attempts in Bolivia’s long history of coups, just over four hours passed between Zúñiga’s declaration of his bid to overthrow the government and his arrest at 7 p.m. (local time). 

On Tuesday, Arce deposed General Zúñiga from his post for threatening to detain former President Evo Morales if the latter seeks another term in the August 2025 elections.

A day later, Zúñiga led hundreds of heavily armed soldiers with faces covered to surround the former government palace, Palacio Quemado, which is adjacent to the new building in the capital, La Paz. 

At the Plaza Murillo in front of the palace, Zúñiga declared, “There will be a new cabinet of ministers, surely there will be changes, but our State cannot continue like this. We want to recover our homeland.”

An armored vehicle was then slammed into the gates of the Palacio Quemado, and the soldiers invaded it with rifles and shields.

Inside the building, Arce unsuccessfully ordered Zúñiga to remove the troops.

Protests and a general strike had been called by Arce, his ministers, Evo Morales and the main union body, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB). Hundreds of demonstrators began gathering around the Plaza Murillo to tell the heavily armed soldiers to “Get out!” 

Morales cited reports that snipers had been placed around Plaza Murillo as proof that the coup had been prepared beforehand.

While the character of the agreement—and concessions—will become clear in the following days and weeks, a dominant faction of the military reached a deal to keep the elected President Arce in power, for now.

Arce was allowed to return to the government headquarters, the Great House of the People, and name a new military high command in a televised ceremony. The new top commander, Gen. José Wilson Sánchez, then took the podium and ordered all mobilized troops to return to their barracks.

Zúñiga drove back to the military headquarters in one of the eight armored vehicles that participated in the mutiny, and the troops cleared the plaza, dropping tear gas canisters behind them.

An arrest warrant was issued against Zúñiga, who was then detained while claiming on live television that it had all been a “self-coup” planned by Arce himself to improve his popularity. 

On Thursday morning, Zúñiga and his alleged co-conspirator Vice Adm. Juan Arnez Salvador, the former head of the Navy, were formally charged with the charges of terrorism and armed uprising.

Zúñiga was appointed by Arce, who described him recently as “the people’s general,” an echo of similar declarations by Salvador Allende in the run-up to his own overthrow in 1973. It remains to be seen whether Bolivia follows the Chilean pattern, in which an abortive coup served as a dry run for the real thing, which imposed a blood-soaked military dictatorship.

The explosive context leading up to the coup attempt

The failure of the coup attempt marks a new stage in the economic and political crisis gripping Bolivia ahead of the 2025 elections, where the major drivers are the escalating third world war led by US imperialism against Russia and China and the deepening crisis of global capitalism. 

Morales and the MAS were first elected in 2005—and again in 2009, 2014 and 2019—following a series of popular protests against inequality, including the 2000 “Cochabamba water war” and the 2003 “natural gas war” that had toppled five presidents. With the aid of pseudo-left organizations, Morales channeled the upsurge behind his election. 

Taking advantage of a boom in oil and other commodity prices, the Morales-MAS administration carried out partial nationalizations of oil and minerals and limited increases in social spending which resulted in a lowering of the poverty rate from 61 percent in 2005 to 36 percent in 2023, while increasing profits for global corporations and making timely payments to global finance capital. The country’s GDP tripled.

But, as early as 2014, the Morales administration responded to the end of the commodity boom, which had been caused mainly by Chinese growth, by adopting austerity measures to pay back the rapidly growing government debt. This brought to a halt the social improvements and was accompanied by police repression against working class protests. 

Having lost confidence in his ability to suppress popular opposition, sections of the Bolivian oligarchy and US imperialism backed a military coup that overthrew Morales, only two weeks after the October 2019 elections, on the basis of fabricated claims of vote fraud. 

A massive uprising against the coup, centered in the urban centers of El Alto, around La Paz, was brutally crushed by the military and police with numerous massacres. 

Unable to quell the opposition and facing a worsening global economic situation, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the coup regime led by Jeanine Áñez decided to call elections in October 2020 and allow the MAS to return to power under Luis Arce, a former minister of Morales. 

In the last two years, however, amid the ongoing pandemic, the eruption of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and the escalating US-led economic war and preparation for military conflict against China, Bolivia’s crisis of bourgeois rule only deepened. 

In this context, the country’s key minerals, especially the world’s largest lithium reserves, have become a key target in the emerging re-division of the planet between major powers. 

At the same time, the country’s gas and oil reserves have begun running low and increased exploration is not yielding significant results. In the months immediately before the latest coup attempt, the country had been mired in shortages of fuel and dollars. 

A 75 percent drop in the price of lithium in the past year, mainly due to lower-than-expected electric vehicle demand and the economic war tariffs against China, explosively worsened Bolivia’s economic outlook. 

Reflecting a conflict between factions of the ruling class in response to this crisis, the MAS was riven by a rivalry between Arce and Morales over control over the party and the 2025 presidential candidacy. Both factions have spent months launching allegations of unconstitutionality, corruption, alignment with the far-right and US imperialism and “soft-coup” preparations. Morales convoked major roadblocks greatly worsening the supply of fuel and other goods. 

Last December, the Constitutional Court ruled that Morales was not allowed to run for reelection in 2025, although a Congress with tens of thousands of supporters in Villa Tunari on June 10 ratified his candidacy.

A major factor in these conflicts within the ruling class has been getting a share of the proceeds from future lithium projects. In April, Alberto Echazú, an ally of Morales and his key official in charge of launching the lithium industry, was arrested on charges of approving contracts detrimental to state finances, while Morales has denounced Arce’s son for making corrupt deals with Elon Musk. All these claims are murky and not backed by strong evidence.

Wednesday’s events, however, were preceded most immediately by discussions of a MAS “Unity Congress” and a suspension of demonstrations backed by Morales.

Morales’s ally and former interior minister Carlos Romero said earlier this month: “The former president Morales is doing everything possible to contain a social mobilization, there are social mobilizations of all kinds, for dollars, for fuel, for the increase in prices of the family basket; for the economic crisis to increase once more is what we do not want.”

A meeting on June 11 between Arce and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow led to the announcement of a partnership to “industrialize” Bolivian lithium production starting in 2025 by the state-owned companies Yacimientos de Litio Bolivia (YLB) and the Russian Uranium One Group. 

At the same time, Chinese companies have played the main role in developing lithium projects within Bolivia, while the Chancay port that is set to open in November in Peru is expected to greatly facilitate the transportation of Bolivian minerals to China. 

There was also an agreement to import Russian oil, in the context of unrest among consumers and transportation employer groups over shortages. On June 14, Arce deployed the military to gas stations across the country to oversee purchases, ostensibly to prevent hoarding and contraband. Bolivia spends over $1 billion yearly to subsidize fuel imports. 

Hours before the coup, however, transportation employers reached an agreement with the government which canceled planned roadblocks along major highways and border crossings to protest taxes and shortages in fuel and dollars in the economy. 

Even though the US corporate media, the Bolivian far right and allies of Morales have given credence to the claim of a “self-coup,” and this possibility cannot be immediately discounted, the context and events leading up to the coup attempt points to US imperialism as the main force interested in overthrowing Arce. 

Unable to secure a US puppet regime in the 2019 coup, Washington is eager to try to elevate the role of the military, push politics to the right and secure control over Bolivia’s natural resources against its rivals, above all China. 

In the week before the coup attempt, the Arce administration focused its allegations of coup plotting against the US Embassy, which Washington denied. The Bolivian Economy Minister declared last week that the shortages and recent protests were part of “a soft coup against the economy” being hatched at the US Embassy.  

On Tuesday, in an interview with El Deber after his firing, the coup leader Zúñiga declared: “Our homeland is once again under attack by internal and external enemies that seek division, destabilization and hatred among Bolivians in order to take control of natural resources for the benefit of petty interests and power groups that respond to the caudillismo.” This is a thinly veiled reference to the competition between factions of the ruling class over lithium.

During the coup itself, General Zúñiga demanded the liberation from jail of the leaders of the fascistic 2019 coup, including Jeanine Áñez, the fascist Luis Fernando Camacho and military officials—all closely associated with Washington.

Suspiciously, the US Embassy in Bolivia did not publish a statement until after the arrest of Zúñiga, and more than five hours after the coup was launched, writing on X: “We reject any attempt to overthrow the elected government and demand respect for the constitutional order.” 

The South American country with 12 million people has seen 36 completed military coups in its two centuries since breaking from Spain. It has also been involved in 12 wars against neighbors and other conflicts that left it landlocked and made it lose more than half of its original territory.

Bolivia is a case study in the failure of the capitalist ruling class in backward economic countries to secure its independence from imperialism or secure democratic forms of rule, no matter how radical the pretensions of the ruling bourgeois parties.