Vaccinations: a new world order (3 graphs)

March 28, 2021merijntknibbe


India and China are taking over. Cuban vaccines have entered phase three. It’s not the case that western countries are tacking the backseat. Yet. However… There are of course issues with the global vaccination effort. According to rumors, there are 29 million AstraZeneca doses produced in the Netherlands and stored in Italy which are not entering the vaccination chain because of… nobody knows (personal opinion: it sometimes feels as if the ‘intern from hell’ chairs the AstraZeneca board). Also, vaccines work excellent at the micro level, at this moment, when it comes to protecting the vulnerable. Vaccinating old men and women leads within weeks to a staggering decline in the death rate. The macro level is another issue. Only Israel, the fastest vaxer of them all, however seems to have reached something like herd immunity since around ten days ago. The UK and the USA will have to double vaccination rates to reach this stage – will pressure to finally start to export vaccines mounts. The EU, china, India have a long road ahead. Interesting question: logic dictates that Israel will have to vaccinate inhabitants of the Palestine state, too. Will this happen? Is it already happening? Anyway, looking at daily data (the graph shows a seven day rolling average) China vaccinated 6 million people in one day, yesterday. For the time being, there are no limits to vaccination growth. Good.

Behind Amazon’s expansion in Detroit

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/27/8mil-m27.html




Kevin Reed
15 hours ago







Construction of a new Amazon distribution center on the former grounds of the Michigan State Fair in Detroit is well underway. The new 823,000 square-foot building is one of five new Amazon facilities being built in Metro Detroit that the company says will bring “more than 2,000 good jobs” and contribute “positively to the community.”

New Amazon Robotics Distribution Center under construction at the former Michigan State Fairgrounds in Detroit



Billed as a “robotics” distribution center, Amazon says it is spending $400 million to put up the massive building on the dilapidated 142-acre site that was the home of the Michigan State Fair from 1904 to 2009. A company statement announcing the Detroit expansion plans last January said the project would create 3,000 construction jobs and 1,200 “permanent full- and part-time jobs with a minimum $15 per hour wage and comprehensive benefits starting on the employee’s first day.”

The global corporation—Amazon has a Wall Street value of $1.5 trillion—also explained the infrastructure strategy behind the expansion in Detroit. The new buildings will “play critical roles in the fulfillment of large products and ‘middle mile,’ or the process of transporting packages between Amazon sites before last mile delivery for customers.” The company currently operates 10 facilities in Detroit and has “invested more than $2.5 billion across the state” since 2010, according to the statement.

All five new facilities are scheduled to be completed in 2021. The other four Metro Detroit locations are: a Sub-Same-Day Fulfillment Center in Hazel Park on the site of a horse racetrack that was closed in 2018; an Extra Large Fulfillment Center (XLFC) and Sort Center at Pinnacle Park near Metro Detroit Airport, on the site of the failed Pinnacle thoroughbred racetrack that closed in 2010; a Sort Center in Plymouth and a Robotics Fulfillment Center in Pontiac on the former site of the Pontiac Silverdome of the Detroit Lions professional football team.

The list of locations being redeveloped by Amazon shows that the company has selected areas of Detroit and its suburbs that have been devastated by a combination of deindustrialization and government-financed entertainment venue schemes that went belly up. In each case, there is a backstory regarding the real estate deals between Amazon and various property holding companies brokered by government officials, most of whom are Democrats.

The selection of the Michigan State Fairgrounds is a case in point. In 2018, the City of Detroit bought the 142-acre Fairgrounds site from the state government for $7 million. Last August, Democratic Mayor Mike Duggan announced a plan for the city to sell the property to Detroit-based Sterling Group and Dallas-based Hillwood Enterprises LP for development. The City Council rushed through a deal including a modification to the city master plan to allow reuse of the site for light industrial purposes, ignoring public opposition to selling it.

As part of the deals to obtain the various derelict properties for pennies on the dollar, Amazon and its development partners offered up $2.5 million in investments to local charity organizations such as Beaumont Children’s Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Detroit and Forgotten Harvest. Additionally, in response to public opposition to the deal, Mayor Duggan and the City Council worked in a plan for a new $7 million public transportation Transit Center on the property “paid for” by Amazon.

The investment in Detroit’s public transportation infrastructure is self-serving since Amazon and other industrial manufacturers in the area know full-well that $15 per hour jobs for the newly hired workers is not be enough income to support car ownership or the cost of auto insurance and many will need to take the bus to get to their facilities each day.

In announcing the plan, Amazon’s Vice President of Global Customer Fulfillment Alicia Boler Davis said, “We are grateful for the strong support we’ve received from local and state leaders as we broaden our footprint throughout Michigan.” And the company quoted Mayor Duggan, who said, “We’re thrilled that Amazon selected Detroit for what will be one of the largest fulfillment centers in Michigan.”

Davis would know about the collaboration of “local and state” Democrats with corporate America. She served in various management and executive positions at General Motors for 25 years—including Executive Vice President of Global Manufacturing and Labor Relations—before joining Amazon. The global auto giant is eligible for up to $2.27 billion in tax credits from the state of Michigan through 2029.

Conditions for new hires at the Detroit automakers, most of whom start out as temps making less than $17 per hour with substandard benefits, are so low that the auto companies are struggling to compete with Amazon for low-wage labor. Quoting a US auto industry consultant, Automotive News said that there is currently “a significant shortage of workers” for manufacturing because Amazon and the others are “beating out the lure of lower wages to go work in the potentially dangerous close quarters of an assembly plant.” The industry has partially made up for the labor shortage with a regime of forced overtime, with its existing workforce working six and even seven-day work weeks.

David Kalb, president at Applied Tech Industries located in Chesterfield Michigan, told Automotive News he has not been able to find enough workers to staff production commitments shortly after the auto factories resumed operations in May. Kalb said, “We had to go to 10-hour shifts, six days a week because we couldn’t get good help ... We had to increase our pay by a couple of bucks an hour, because that’s what the market was doing at the time.”

Amazon is taking advantage of the conditions of poverty and unemployment in Detroit which are the product of decades of factory closures and job losses carried out with the collaboration of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. That $15 an hour poverty wages can be promoted in Detroit—which was at one time the city with the highest per capita income in the US—as a “good job” is an indictment of the role of the UAW and the Democrats.

As with the billions of dollars invested by Stellantis (formerly Fiat-Chrysler America) in Detroit—including the opening of a new Mack Avenue assembly plant and the expansion of its Jefferson North plant in east Detroit—the expansion of Amazon’s operations in the Motor City is creating several oases of new development surrounded by the ongoing reality of poverty and blight just one or two blocks away. The bottom line for these corporate investments is the expectation of enormous profits through the exploitation of a virtually limitless supply of low cost labor.

Among the working class, there is a growing anger against unhealthy working conditions during the pandemic and an expanding opposition to social inequality. Although Jeff Bezos has announced he is “stepping down” as CEO of Amazon, he increased his personal wealth by $75 billion in 2020 to a total of nearly $190 billion.

Breana Avelar, a processing assistant, holds a sign outside the Amazon DTW1 fulfillment center in Romulus, Michigan, April 1, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya]

Last April, workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Romulus near Metro Airport walked out to demand safe working conditions during the early days of the pandemic. The workers, who made their own placards denouncing the vast profits made by Amazon’s Bezos, demanded that the company disclose the truth about the rate of COVID-19 infection and that the facility be closed and sanitized.

Only a month before, wildcat strikes broke out in several auto plants throughout the region, forcing the industry into a two-month shutdown. The Romulus walkout also followed the actions of Amazon workers in other cities throughout the US and Europe demanding protective equipment, hazard pay, extension of sick leave and COVID-19 testing.

Top US admiral warns war with China over Taiwan “much closer than most think”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/27/usch-m27.html




Peter Symonds
15 hours ago







The US Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, testified this week that he regarded a Chinese attack on Taiwan as the most threatening flashpoint for war in the Indo-Pacific region and advocated a further build-up of US military force in the western Pacific to counter China. His remarks underscore the mounting bipartisan clamour in Washington against Beijing and the accelerating danger of the Biden administration, not China, provoking a war.

Aquilino was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing to replace Admiral Phil Davidson as head of the US Indo-Pacific Command—the largest US military command. He told the committee that “the dangerous concern is that of a military force against Taiwan.” He referred to the previous testimony of Davidson, who last week warned of a supposed Chinese takeover within six years, then added, “[M]y opinion is this problem is much closer to us than most think.”

Significantly, Aquilino agreed with the assessment of Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who told the Senate committee this month that Taiwan was “the most significant flashpoint now that could lead to a large-scale war.” In his bellicose anti-China remarks, McMaster argued that “China has a fleeting opportunity that is closing,” and the months between next year’s Winter Olympic Games in Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress later in the year presented the “greatest danger.”

These declarations stand reality on its head. It is not Chinese “aggression” that threatens a devastating nuclear war between China and the US, but rather the relentless US military build-up throughout Asia. Combined with naval provocations in the South and East China Seas and trade war measures against China, this has dramatically escalated geopolitical tensions. Aquilino, Davidson and McMaster all used the alleged threat posed to Taiwan to justify their demands for a further major expansion of armaments and military spending for the US Indo-Pacific Command.

The deliberate US ramping up of confrontation with China began under the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” which called for the deployment of 60 percent of the Pentagon’s naval and air assets to the region by 2020. The Trump administration then launched what amounted to economic warfare against China, directed in particular at preventing its development of rival hi-tech products. This was combined with accelerated provocative “freedom of navigation” operations in Chinese-claimed territorial waters in the South China Sea.




Foreword to the German edition of David North’s Quarter Century of War
Johannes Stern, 5 October 2020


After three decades of US-led wars, the outbreak of a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons, is an imminent and concrete danger.


Within weeks of being installed, President Biden has accelerated the war drive against China. In his press conference on Thursday, Biden declared there would be “steep, steep competition” with China. He said his administration would nearly treble research and development funding to ensure US supremacy in hi-tech areas, and again insisted that China had to abide by the “international rules”—that is, those set by Washington.

In the last fortnight, Biden has convened the first leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, involving the US, Japan, Australia and India—a quasi-military alliance directed against China—and dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to Japan and South Korea to consolidate alliances against China. Blinken went on to Alaska, where he and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan opened a two-day meeting with their Chinese counterparts with a provocative attack on China across a broad array of issues.

The new focus in US military and strategic circles on Taiwan, underscored by a slew of commentary, including by the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, is particularly dangerous. Following the 1949 Chinese Revolution, it was only the intervention of the US Navy that prevented Taiwan’s incorporation into the newly-established People’s Republic of China. For two decades, the US maintained the fiction that the Kuomintang dictatorship on Taiwan headed by Chiang Kai-shek was the legitimate ruler of all China, enabling it to sit in the UN Security Council.

That abruptly changed in 1972 after the US, under President Nixon, reached a rapprochement with China, aimed at jointly confronting the Soviet Union. Taiwan became the greatest obstacle to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations, which were finalised only in 1979, when Washington conceded that Beijing, not Taipei, was the legitimate government of all of China, including Taiwan. Congress, however, passed the Taiwan Act in 1979, committing the US to arming Taiwan and defending it against alleged Chinese aggression.

This highly contradictory stance, known in Washington as “strategic ambiguity,” has been able to persist only because the US cut formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, severely limited contact between US and Taiwanese officials, and restricted arms sales. Tensions in the narrow Taiwan Strait between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, which repeatedly flared in the past, were defused.

Over the past decade, however, US actions, particularly under the Trump administration, have destabilised the inherently unstable and highly charged issues surrounding Taiwan’s status. Trump threatened to tear up the "One China" policy if China did not make economic concessions. He greatly boosted arms sales to Taiwan and increased the number of US warships passing through the Taiwan Straits.

In the final days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ended all restrictions on contact between US and Taiwanese officials—military as well as civilian. In a significant symbolic step, the de facto Taiwanese ambassador to the US was, for the first time, invited to Biden’s inauguration, signaling that the new administration would not reverse the policy.

Not surprisingly, China has responded with protests. It has repeated statements that Taiwan is part of China and conducted military exercises near Taiwan. This “aggression” is now being seized on by US imperialism as the pretext to justify a further military expansion along the so-called "first island chain," which includes Taiwan, immediately adjacent to the Chinese mainland, as part of its broader military build-up in the region.

In his confirmation hearing, Aquilino applauded steps taken by Taiwan to develop its own missiles. On Thursday, Taiwan’s defence minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, declared that the country was now mass producing long-range missiles—that is, offensive weaponry—capable of striking deep inside the Chinese mainland. The missile program is developing three more models as “a priority.”

On the same day, Taiwan and the US signed their first agreement under the Biden administration, establishing a joint Coast Guard Working Group to collaborate on maritime security. The excuse for the move was new powers granted by the recent National People’s Congress in Beijing to authorise the Chinese coast guard to use force when necessary. Taiwan is expanding its own coast guard, which is armed and can be drafted into naval service in the event of war.

Underlying the sharpening tensions over Taiwan is the island’s strategic and economic significance. Situated about 150 kilometres off the Chinese mainland, the island was described by US General Douglas MacArthur in the early 1950s as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier”—that is, a major military asset. A number of Taiwanese-controlled islets, all heavily fortified, lie just kilometres off the Chinese coast. Any move by the US to establish military ties or a military presence on Taiwan would be regarded in Beijing as a major threat to its security. Economically, Taiwan plays a central and highly sensitive role in the production of the world’s semiconductors.

By heightening tensions with China over Taiwan, the Biden administration is pouring petrol over what is correctly regarded as the most dangerous flashpoint in Asia, threatening to not only trigger war between the US and China, but drag in the entire world.

Australian government and media seek to bury Afghanistan war crimes

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/27/afgh-m27.html




Oscar Grenfell
15 hours ago







Four months after the government-commissioned Brereton report said there was “credible evidence” of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, including the murder of at least 39 civilians and prisoners, and multiple acts of torture, the perpetrators remain in the military. No investigations for criminal prosecutions have begun.

This is only the starkest expression of an ongoing cover-up involving the Liberal-National Coalition government, the Labor Party opposition, multiple state agencies and the official media. For years they have sought to hide evidence of the atrocities, which occurred under a Labor government between 2009 and 2013.

The Brereton report was a damage-control operation, initiated after some details were leaked to the media. It suppressed more information than it revealed and absolved governments and senior military command of any responsibility, based on the implausible assertion that they had been unaware of the crimes. The report’s release was greeted by brief hand-wringing from politicians and the media over the impact that the revelations would have on “our military.” The issue was then dropped almost entirely.

It resurfaced at a Senate estimates hearing on Monday. Chris Moraitis, director-general of the Office of the Special Investigator, established at the recommendation of the Brereton report to conduct a criminal investigation into the allegations, provided an update on the progress of its work.

In short, Moraitis indicated that the body he heads has done virtually nothing. The organisation does not even have any investigators.

“We’re in the process of engaging investigators and we’re going to do that in the next one, two, three months,” Moraitis said. “That involves them being sworn in as special members of the Australian Federal Police and involves at least three weeks of induction in preparation, and involves us also doing a few other things.”

Moraitis is clearly working to a timetable prepared by the government. After the report’s release last November, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and other government representatives declared that any criminal prosecutions, if they eventuated at all, would likely take up to a decade. These statements had the character of a directive rather than a prediction.

Moraitis’ comments underscored the character of the Brereton report, as a continuation of the cover-up. Conducted in secret, it was dragged out from 2016 to 2020. Investigators provided an untold number of military personnel with immunity for testimony, and much of the evidence was given on the proviso that it could not be used in a court. This was justified on the pretext of encouraging witnesses and participants in the crimes to testify freely.

The overwhelming majority of the material remains classified. The publicly-released version of the report contains few details that had not been previously reported in the media. Its descriptions of the war crimes were as vague as possible.

The main outcome of the Brereton investigation was to create a potential legal minefield, as to what evidence is admissible and what is not. Moraitis said his staff were sifting through the Brereton material to “help ensure investigators will only receive information they can lawfully obtain and use in criminal investigations and any future criminal proceedings.” This process is being conducted under a shroud of secrecy.

Moraitis’ testimony followed a report in the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph on March 16, which revealed that at least some of the 25 soldiers implicated in the war crimes remain in the military. The alleged criminals would not be sacked. They would be allowed to discharge from the army on unspecified “medical grounds.” No other media outlet picked up the story.

The article, apparently based on information provided from within the military, appeared just days before the Coalition, Labor, the Greens and other MPs voted for a royal commission into the treatment of military veterans and their high rates of suicide. The timing indicates that the hardships faced by soldiers, resulting from their deployment to predatory and illegal wars, will be exploited to obfuscate the criminality of what occurred in Afghanistan.

As for the victims and their relatives, the Coalition government stated after the release of the Brereton report that it did not intend to provide them with any compensation. A Google search indicates that the issue was last mentioned in the corporate media in December.

The obvious attempts to forestall any criminal prosecutions of the soldiers involved are all the more extraordinary, given that millions of people have seen cast-iron evidence of at least some of the crimes.

Last March, for instance, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published footage from a soldiers’ helmet camera, showing the point-blank execution of an unarmed Afghan civilian in 2012. Had the murder occurred in any other context, the perpetrator would have been arrested, charged and sentenced years ago. Military whistleblowers, as well as Afghan victims, have also provided eyewitness accounts of some of the crimes to the media.

The bid to prevent the cases from ever reaching a court is motivated by several factors. When the report was released, some of the soldiers implicated indicated through the press that they felt “betrayed” and “scapegoated.” Shortly after, an image was leaked to the media, showing a senior special forces commander drinking beer from the prosthetic leg of a dead Afghan.

It was rapidly revealed that the man pictured was warrant officer John Letch. When he stood down after the publication, Letch was the Command Sergeant Major of Special Operations Command. Letch had worked at Army Headquarters and Headquarters Special Operations Command.

Whoever leaked the image of Letch, it was directed against the claim of the Brereton report that no one above the level of squadron command was aware of the violations of international law. The government and military command are undoubtedly fearful that if soldiers are tried, they will testify that they were merely following orders.

Many of the murders occurred after the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard ordered greater involvement of Australian troops in US-led “kill and capture” raids, supposedly targeting insurgent leaders in 2011.

In April 2013, then Chief of the Defence Force General David Hurley issued a secret directive to soldiers, warning that they could be “exposed to criminal and disciplinary liability, including potentially the war crime of murder” if they could not prove that those they killed were participating in hostilities. In other words, the crimes flowed from the government-led prosecution of a neo-colonial war, and were known to military command.

Clearly, there are also concerns that the true scale of the war crimes could be revealed if the alleged perpetrators are pressed in court. The Brereton inquiry acknowledged that there were likely many more incidents that were not covered in its report.

The latest proof that murder and torture were commonly used instruments of the occupation was provided by Shamsurahman Mamond, who worked as a translator for the Australian military in Uruzgan Province.

Mamond told the Special Broadcasting Service this week: “[In the] provincial reconstruction team, it was our job to connect with local elders and local people. They were coming and telling us what was going on out in the fields. They would say, ‘They’re destroying the whole house. They’re killing the kids and ladies and everyone because they’re looking for insurgents and Taliban.’”

The translator indicated that torture was routine at the Australian base in the town of Tarin Kowt. “My accommodation was a few metres away from the jail,” he said. “I saw sometimes they were taking people out of the car like toys, we also sometimes heard people yelling, it was sad because if someone is in the detention centre, they don’t have a weapon, they are not a threat anymore, there was no necessity for punishment.”

Such information runs counter to the promotion of the military by the entire political and media establishment, and preparations for its involvement in new and even greater crimes.

The last major media mention of the war crimes came in December, when Zhao Lijian, a Chinese foreign ministry representative, tweeted a condemnation of the killings. This was accompanied by a graphic, produced by a visual artist, showing an Australian soldier holding a knife to the neck of an Afghan child. The picture clearly referred to an incident described in the Brereton report, involving soldiers slashing the throats of two 14-year-old boys.

Labor, the Liberal-Nationals, the Greens and various independents all denounced Zhao’s tweet as a Chinese “attack” on Australian soldiers. The media treated the tweet as a far more serious offence than the killings themselves.

The hysterical reaction was a warning that ongoing exposure of the military was beyond the pale and would be treated as treasonous and “un-Australian.” This was directed against anti-war opposition, and was the signal for the war crimes to be dropped entirely from the press.

The denunciation of China also highlighted the fact that the cover-up of the war crimes is aimed at ensuring that the atrocities committed in Afghanistan do not get in the way of the preparations for Australia to play a frontline role in US plans for a catastrophic war against China.

US-backed UNHRC resolution puts Sri Lanka on notice

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/27/unsl-m27.html




K. Ratnayake
15 hours ago







On Tuesday, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) passed a new resolution on Sri Lanka and called on the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to monitor human rights violations in the country.

The resolution was presented by the UNHRC’s “Core Group on Sri Lanka,” whose members include the UK, Canada, Germany, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Malawi. The US State Department issued a statement declaring that it was a co-sponsor.

Entitled “Promoting reconciliation, accountability, and human rights in Sri Lanka,” the purpose of the resolution is to pressure President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government to break relations with China and more actively integrate with Washington’s military-strategic preparations against China. The resolution was supported by 22 countries, with 11 in opposition and 14 abstentions.

Senior Sri Lankan leaders, including President Rajapakse himself, heavily lobbied the UNHRC members to oppose the resolution. The US and UK intensely campaigned to isolate and reduce support for Colombo. The media reported that it was the lowest number of votes for Sri Lanka, when similar UNHRC resolutions were first moved against the country.

Washington backed a 2009 resolution a month after Colombo’s ended its bloody war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and sponsored all UNHRC resolutions on Sri Lanka between 2012 and 2017.

This week’s 16-point resolution called for the devolution of power, protection of human rights, and a “review” of the prevention of terrorism act, accountability, respect of religious freedoms and protection human rights defenders. It also expressed concerns about militarisation of the civilian government.

In formulating the resolution, its sponsors have cynically exploited the anti-democratic measures of the Colombo government. Accountability is a reference to the crimes committed during the final months of the war against the LTTE when at least 40,000 civilians were killed, including surrendering LTTE leaders. The Tamil population has continuously demanded Colombo provide information about the hundreds of young men disappeared after surrendering to the army.

In recent months, the Rajapakse regime has inflamed anti-Islamic sentiment and alienated the community with the forcible cremation of Muslims killed by COVID-19. It has also stepped up the militarisation of his administration with the elevation of retired generals into key government positions.

Significantly, the resolution calls on the OHCHR “to collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence and to develop possible strategies for future accountability processes for gross violations of human rights or serious violations of international humanitarian law in Sri Lanka to advocate for victims and survivors, and to support relevant judicial and other proceedings including in Member States with competent jurisdiction.”

According to media reports, establishment of a relevant database for “future accountability processes” would cost $US2.8 million over an 18-month period. The body would be staffed by 12 personnel, including three legal advisors, two analysts, two investigators and human rights officers. It is the first time a UNHRC resolution has outlined specific measures for an international intervention in Sri Lanka.

Concerns about war crimes, suppression of democratic rights and militarisation of the government by sponsors of the UNHCR resolution are utterly hypocritical.

In the last three decades alone, the US, UK, Canada and Germany have unleashed neo-colonial military interventions killing hundreds of thousands of people and committing countless war crimes.

The ruling elites in these imperialist countries have responded to the economic and social crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic by promoting extreme right-wing and fascistic forces. A sharp expression of this extreme-rightward turn was the Trump-led fascistic coup attempt in Washington on January 6.

The UNHCR resolution has nothing do with exposing war crimes or defending human rights but is another expression of intense US efforts to undercut Beijing’s influence in the region by placing putting Colombo on notice over its relations with Beijing.

The US and its strategic ally India are concerned about the Rajapakse government’s increasing financial dependence on Beijing. Teetering on the brink of default, the cash-strapped government last week obtained a $1.5 billon swap loan from People’s Bank of China to boost its falling foreign reserves.

In 2015, Washington orchestrated a regime-change operation against former President Mahinda Rajapakse, the brother of the current president, after “human rights” resolutions at the UNHCR failed to persuade Colombo to distance itself from Beijing.

Last week, Beijing, well aware of Washington’s political manoeuvres, campaigned against the UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka. China’s envoy in Geneva urged UNHCR members to oppose the resolution and condemned the “double standards and politicisation of human rights.” He called on the UN body to “promote and protect human rights through genuine dialogue and cooperation” and “respect the sovereignty and independence” of other countries.

President Rajapakse spoke to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, appealing to him to oppose the resolution. India, however, abstained on the UNHRC vote. New Delhi maintains close contact with the Tamil nationalist parties in Sri Lanka who are pressuring Colombo for a power-sharing arrangement.

Pawankumar Badhe, India’s envoy in Geneva, called on Colombo “to address the aspiration of Tamil community… [and] engage constructively with the international community to ensure that the fundamental freedoms and human rights of all its citizens.”

Addressing parliament on Thursday, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena ludicrously declared that the resolution “will have an adverse effect on the ongoing efforts to maintain peace, reconciliation and economic development in the country.”

Conscious that Colombo is under immense pressure from Washington, he insisted, however, that “Sri Lanka will continue to engage constructively with the UN and its agencies in the same spirit of cooperation...”

Sajith Premadasa, leader of Samagi Jana Balavegaya, the main opposition party, told parliament that the reason the UNHRC resolution had been passed was “because the government has adopted policies that have led to disunity and mistrust among different communities in the country.” In the same breath, Premadasa declared that his party “is willing to support the government to take forward a domestic mechanism.”

Leading Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) member Bimal Ratnayake said that the government “has betrayed the country for its vicious and dictatorial power. Even now we should admit our mistakes without being conceited. We urge the government to respect human rights, abolish the 20th amendment to the Constitution, stop militarisation and we will win at the UNHRC next time.”

These organisations have consistently downplayed the geo-strategic issues underpinning the UNHCR resolution. The SJB leadership, previously in the United National Party, and the JVP fully backed the war and deny that the military committed any war crimes. Like Rajapakse’s ruling party, they depend on the military and know that it will be needed to defend the ruling elite against the mass eruption of social tensions.

The UNHRC resolution is not just about Sri Lanka but is another indication of the intense pressure being exerted by Washington on its allies in preparation for US-led military operations against China. A war between these nuclear-armed nations would rapidly escalate into a catastrophic global conflagration.

After the January 6 coup attempt, Republicans escalate attack on voting rights

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/27/pers-m27.html

Barry Grey
16 hours ago







On Thursday, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law a sweeping attack on voting rights aimed at crippling the ability of poor, minority and working class people to cast a ballot. Kemp, a Republican, signed the misnamed “Election Integrity Act” in a closed-door ceremony only hours after both Republican-controlled houses of the state legislature passed the measure on a party-line vote.

Georgia is one of 43 states whose legislatures are, for the most part, controlled by the Republican Party, and that have introduced bills attacking the most basic of all democratic rights, the right to vote. This drive was dramatically accelerated in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 election and retain power as de facto dictator. Georgia is the first of these states to turn its proposals to gut voting rights into law.

Trump’s plot to overturn the Constitution was based on the lie, supported by virtually the entire Republican Party, of pervasive voter fraud and a “stolen election.” His conspiracy culminated in the fascist assault on the US Capitol on January 6, which, assisted by Trump and his appointed leaders of the Pentagon, came within seconds of achieving its goal of taking lawmakers hostage and blocking congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.

Given Georgia’s history of lynch law and Jim Crow segregation, the arrest and jailing of state Representative Park Cannon, an African American woman, for demanding entry to Kemp’s office so as to protest the rollback of key gains of the civil rights movement, has a sinister symbolic significance.

Georgia was one of five “swing states” that switched from the Republicans to the Democrats in the 2020 presidential race, giving Biden a substantial victory in the electoral vote and contributing to his lopsided 8 million vote majority in the popular vote.

In an election that saw record voter participation nationally, Georgia voters cast ballots in record numbers, with black and working class Democratic voters in particular choosing to cast mail-in ballots due to the pandemic.

Trump’s defeat in November was followed in early January by the victory of Democratic challengers in two Senate runoff races, fueled by large turnouts among young and black voters. Those wins in Georgia shifted control of the Senate from the Republicans to the Democrats, giving them control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House.

The Republican “election integrity” provisions are in line with Trump’s unsuccessful demands on state officials and the courts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump repeatedly attacked Kemp and the Georgia secretary of state after they rejected his claims of election fraud and refused to carry out his demand that they overturn Biden’s win.

Provisions in the Georgia law include voter ID requirements for absentee ballots, a shorter period for voters to apply for mail-in ballots, limits on the use of ballot drop boxes, and a ban on mobile voting vans (which were used in the heavily black and Democratic Atlanta area).

The law even makes it a crime to offer food and water to voters waiting in line. It allows any state resident to lodge an unlimited number of challenges to voter registration and eligibility. It also allows state lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards, giving them legal cover to block local officials in poor, minority and working class counties from certifying Democratic victories—something Trump attempted to do extra-legally by personally intervening to overturn the results in cities such as Atlanta and Detroit.

Similar provisions are included in bills being introduced in other states, from Arizona to Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida and Texas to northern industrial states such as Michigan. Some include even more overtly unconstitutional provisions, such as giving the state legislature the power to override the popular vote and choose its own slate of electors.

The entire working class must be united in the struggle to defeat the attack on voting rights. The first prerequisite for such a struggle, however, is to understand that no confidence can be placed in the other party of the American corporate-financial oligarchy, the Democrats, to defend the right to vote.

Trump and the Republicans speak for the most predatory and fascistic sections of the ruling class. They have been emboldened to lay siege to democratic gains won through the struggles of millions of workers of all races by the feckless and duplicitous response of Biden and the Democrats to the January 6 attempted coup.

Rather than demanding the criminal prosecution of Trump and his Republican co-conspirators, they have incessantly pleaded with their “Republican colleagues” for unity and bipartisanship. At the same time, they have sought to cover up the massive scale of the coup conspiracy and the role of the Republican Party and high-ranking officials in the military, the police and the state intelligence apparatus. They have to this point held only a handful of public hearings, and refused to call Pentagon officials who delayed for hours the dispatch of National Guard troops to protect the Capitol from the fascist mob.

At his first press conference, held Thursday, even as the Georgia bill was being rushed through the legislature, Biden repeated his appeal for “unity” and refused to endorse calls from voting rights advocates and some Democrats for the Democratic-controlled Congress to put an end to the anti-democratic filibuster, which gives the Republicans an effective veto on any and all legislation to protect the right to vote.

The current assault on voting rights is an escalation of an attack that has been ongoing for decades, against which the Democratic Party has mounted no serious opposition. It demonstrated its lack of any genuine commitment to the defense of voting rights in 2000, when Al Gore and the entire party accepted the Supreme Court ruling halting the counting of votes in Florida and handing the election to the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush.

In 2013, the Supreme Court carried out the next major attack on voting rights in its 5–4 decision to overturn Section 5 of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important gain of the mass civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. That ruling invalidated the enforcement mechanism of the act, lifting the requirement for former Jim Crow states in the South to pre-clear any changes in voting procedures with the federal government.

The Voting Rights Act put an end to the systematic exclusion of blacks from the ballot box, enforced mainly through KKK bombings and the murder of civil rights activists, white as well as black, by “law enforcement.” This reign of terror was carried out with the tacit support of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which declared the struggle for civil rights to be a communist plot. All of this took place under the aegis of the Democratic Party, which based its political control of the South on its brutal enforcement of segregation.

The bill’s passage was extracted from the Johnson administration at the cost of the blood and lives of hundreds of martyrs. These included the three young activists, two white and one black, who joined the drive in the summer of 1964 to register blacks in Mississippi and were murdered by the KKK and local police. Passage of the act was preceded by the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches, in which a number of participants and supporters were murdered by police and FBI informants.

Neither the Obama administration nor the congressional Democrats mounted any effort to pass legislation restoring the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, emboldening the Republicans to expand their drive to impose barriers in states across the country to block working class voters.

No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to defend the right to vote. The Democrats are above all motivated by fear of the emergence of a left-wing, anti-war and socialist movement of the working class outside of the two-party system. When it comes to blocking ballot access to parties to their left, above all, socialist parties, they are no less ruthless and contemptuous of democratic rights than the Republicans.

In the 2020 election, Democratic governors, election officials and judges played the leading role in blocking the presidential candidates of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) from obtaining ballot status. The Democratic governors of Michigan and California opposed legal motions by the SEP and its candidates, Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz, to suspend already prohibitive and undemocratic signature requirements—12,000 in Michigan and 200,000 in California—in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which made petitioning for signatures a threat to the health of both SEP supporters and the general public.

They refused to place the SEP candidates on the ballot, arguing that they should risk their lives and violate state lockdown requirements even as the infection rate and death toll surged.

The Democratic attorney general of California argued that allowing the SEP on the ballot would cause “an unmanageable and overcrowded ballot” that would create “voter confusion” and “frustration of the democratic process.” Of course, the opposite was the case. The Democrats were, and remain, determined to prevent working class voters from having an opportunity to vote for a socialist alternative to the capitalist politicians.

As the WSWS has explained, the pandemic is a trigger event that has intensified the global crisis of capitalism and accelerated the drive of the ruling classes to war and dictatorship. This is an international process. The criminal and incompetent response of capitalist governments all over the world to the pandemic, knowingly sacrificing millions of lives in order to protect and expand the profits and wealth of the rich and the super-rich, is discrediting the entire system in the eyes of the working class.

The turn toward fascism and dictatorship is the universal ruling class response. None of the social and democratic gains of the past century can be defended within the framework of a system that fuels ever more staggering levels of social inequality.

The defense of the right to vote is impossible without a political break with the Democratic Party and the building of a mass socialist movement of the working class. Millions of workers all over the world will come to understand that today there is no democracy without socialism, and will, under the revolutionary leadership of the SEP and its sister parties in the world Trotskyist movement, act accordingly.

Workers in Bessemer are “gonna start a movement”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oqvfhF0Pzk&t=1s