Military clashes raise danger of major escalation between Russia and Ukraine

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/ukra-a03.html




Clara Weiss
12 hours ago







The past week has seen a significant escalation of fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region. While the Western media is decrying an alleged “Russian aggression,” the military clashes have, in fact, taken place against the backdrop of a series of major provocations by the Ukrainian government which is calculating to receive NATO support in a potential war with Russia.

The level of tensions between Russia and Ukraine is greater now than at any time since a US-German-backed coup by far-right forces toppled the Yanukovich government in February 2014. The coup, part of a decades-long strategy by imperialism to encircle Russia, triggered the annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin and a civil war in the east of the country, which has claimed the lives of over 13,500 people.

A Ukrainian soldier, donning U.S. made equipment, takes his front line position at destroyed Butovka coal mine in the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Vitali Komar)

Earlier in March, Kiev approved a strategy aimed at “recovering Crimea.” The peninsula in the Black Sea is of major geopolitical importance and and home to the naval base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Any move by Kiev to seize it would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

On March 25, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky approved a new military strategy which emphasizes the need to prepare for the mobilization of the entire population in a war against Russia that would be conducted on Ukrainian soil. The strategy acknowledged that no such war could be won without NATO support and mentions Ukraine’s planned accession to the military alliance no less than 19 times.

In a recent interview, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Colonel General Ruslan Khomchak, discussed a possible offensive to retake the separatist-controlled Donbass in East Ukraine. Acknowledging that such an offensive would require huge civilian casualties, Khomchak stressed that Zelensky “has every power to give the command or take a decision.”

At the same time, a hysterical anti-Russian atmosphere is being whipped up in Ukraine. Over the past months, Zelensky has cracked down on key outlets and TV channels of the pro-Russian faction of the Ukrainian oligarchy. The leader of the opposition, the billionaire Viktor Medvedchuk, who has close ties to the Kremlin, has been sanctioned. On Friday, the head of the Independent Miners’ Union, Mikhail Volyntsev, spoke in the Ukrainian Rada (parliament), accusing Russia of a supposed attack on Ukraine’s electrical grid.

This week, reports have emerged of significant Russian troop movements in Crimea and East Ukraine, involving infantry fighting vehicles and anti-tank missiles. Reports have also indicated that Belarusian troops are being mobilized on the border of Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has warned that “Ukraine may take provocative actions which could lead to war.” He accused the US of using Ukraine as a means to create conditions for war, stating, “The West is preparing for nothing less than war with us.” That same day, Russian president Vladimir Putin met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss the situation in Ukraine.

On Friday, US President Joe Biden spoke with Zelensky for the first time since he took office. Biden pledged “unwavering support” for Ukraine against Russia. Throughout the week, there were at least three high-level calls between the American and Ukrainian government, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The Wall Street Journal described the crisis as a “test” for the Biden administration.

Map of the Black Sea region

Since coming into office, the Biden administration has made clear that it would pursue an extremely aggressive course toward Russia. In one of his first foreign policy acts as president, Biden bombed an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia position on the Syria-Iraq border, a move that was targeted against not just Iran, but also Russia. At a NATO summit last week, the NATO powers launched a “NATO 2030” effort to prepare for nuclear war against Russia and China. Just before the summit, Biden called Putin a “killer without a soul” in an interview—an extraordinary attack on the head of state of another country—triggering a diplomatic crisis. Underlying the growing danger of war and the increasingly reckless moves of the imperialist powers and their allies is the profound crisis of the world capitalist system which has been significantly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

In Ukraine, the social and political crisis is particularly sharp. Over a year into the pandemic, the coronavirus is ripping through the impoverished population completely unhinged. On April 1, 421 people died, and new daily infections hit the second highest number in the pand e mic. Over 33,200 people have officially died from the virus, but the real number is likely much higher. With hospitals overwhelmed and some people reportedly taking medication meant for animals, an adviser to the Ukrainian health ministry recommended people who contracted COVID-19 to be prepared “to die at home.”

The same imperialist powers that have pumped billions of dollars into Ukraine’s far right and military to prepare for war against Russia have refused to provide any meaningful help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution. The Zelensky government has rejected the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, arguing that accepting it would mean a “geopolitical blow.” As a result, only 220,000 people out of a population of 44 million had received the first jab of a vaccine and only two individuals were fully vaccinated as of March 30. Millions of migrant workers have lost their jobs, while many more were laid off or experienced significant income losses. In the war zone in East Ukraine, millions of people lack access to drinking water, with some villages having no access to water at all, according to UNICEF. Like capitalist governments across the world, the Ukrainian government, far from doing anything to alleviate the social suffering, used the crisis to carry out further social attacks on the working class.

While the Ukrainian oligarchy’s reckless provocations are no doubt in part an effort to divert the enormous class tensions outward, the main driving force behind the conflict is the historic decline of US imperialism and its efforts to offset it by military means. Aiming to gain full control over the vast resources of the former Soviet Union, the US and NATO have systematically encircled Russia since 1991 and orchestrated numerous coups on its borders, including two in Ukraine, in 2004 and 2014.

A 2019 document by the RAND Corporation, one of the most important think tanks advising the US government, outlined a strategy of forcing Russia to “overextend” itself militarily in conflicts on its borders. The aim of this strategy is to weaken the Putin regime economically and politically while enabling the US to focus more directly on its main strategic rival: China. The military conflict in East Ukraine is a central part of that strategy.

The report noted, “The Ukrainian military already is bleeding Russia in the Donbass region (and vice versa). Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it.” It then warned that such a strategy could come at a significant cost to the US itself and was extremely risky, yet it is precisely this strategy that the US has been pursuing.

Over the past seven years, the US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Ukrainian military, and US military advisers play a major role in training the Ukrainian army. The RAND Corporation acknowledged that all its proposed strategies involved the risk of an uncontrollable military escalation, including the deployment of nuclear weapons—risks US imperialism is clearly prepared to take.

The working class is confronting the catastrophic consequences of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR by the Soviet bureaucracy, which grew out of the Stalinist betrayal of the socialist October revolution of 1917. As the ICFI wrote at the time, the dissolution of the USSR did not mark the end of socialism, much less a period of the “triumph of capitalism.” Rather, it opened up a new period of imperialist wars of plunder and social revolution. 30 years later, this assessment has been fully confirmed. The critical question now is the construction of a socialist anti-war movement in the working class, based on these historical lessons. For more on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, click here.

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Baltimore Amazon workers: Amazon must provide all information relating to the death of Poushawn Brown!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/bwi2-a03.html




Amazon BWI2 rank and file safety committee
12 hours ago







The Baltimore Amazon rank and file safety committee calls on Amazon to publicly reveal all information that it has in relation to the death of Poushawn Brown in Springfield, Virginia in January of this year. In addition, we demand that Amazon provide compensation to Poushawn’s family members and completely revamp its COVID-19 testing sites inside its facilities.

Poushawn Brown was a 38-year old mother living in the Washington, DC suburbs of Northern Virginia. She worked inside Amazon’s DDC3 facility in its COVID-19 testing department. According to Christina Brown, Poushawn’s sister, she died on January 8 after arriving home from a shift complaining of a headache. After lying down to take a nap, Poushawn never again awoke. The cause of Poushawn’s death was never determined due to prohibitively high costs for an autopsy.

Poushawn Brown



The BWI2 rank and file safety committee was formed in December of 2020 following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in response to the efforts of Amazon and other multibillion dollar corporations to subordinate health and safety to their profit goals.

We are an organization of, for, and led by Amazon workers which defends the rights and safety of our fellow co-workers. Our goal is the exposure of conditions at Amazon and the lies of management meant to cover them up.

We call upon Amazon to provide a full account, with all information that it has available, about the cause of Poushawn Brown’s death. Brown’s job detail inside DDC3’s COVID-19 testing department would have brought her into daily contact with people who possibly had contracted the deadly illness. What was the daily case rate of COVID-19 infections at the DDC3 facility? Was Brown infected on the job?

The cause of Brown’s death may never be known due to the length of time since her passing. Amazon’s failure to obtain an autopsy for Brown is doubly suspicious as it aids a conspiracy of silence surrounding the circumstances of her death. Had the company shown an abundance of concern for the tragic loss of one of its employees, it would have reached out to Poushawn’s family and, after offering condolences, would have paid the cost of the expensive procedure to ascertain the cause of death.

Determining the cause of death would have informed Amazon if its employees and the public at large were at risk of an illness or disease connected to its facilities. In Ontario, Canada, outbreaks of COVID-19 at Amazon warehouses have resulted in disease transmission rates that are greater than that of the surrounding community and have driven the pandemic in the region.

In Brown’s case, none of this was done. Christina Brown, in remarks made last month to the International Amazon Workers Voice, stated: “I was told [by Amazon] that they would get back to me [about Poushawn’s death, but] they never did.” The IAWV reported in February that Amazon only offered condolences after news of Poushawn’s death went viral on social media.

The reason for Amazon’s silence is obvious: If her death is connected to the DDC3 facility then Amazon could be held liable for the tragic loss. Had Brown’s death been the result of COVID-19, it would have not only made the company liable, but it would have also raised questions about the effectiveness and safety of Amazon’s COVID-19 protocols.

Brown was not a registered nurse nor did she have any specialized background in healthcare. This could potentially make Amazon responsible for criminal negligence in its on-site operations. Workers in discussion with the IAWV have noted that Amazon’s self-administered swab tests are not well-explained; giving the company a level of deniability if workers themselves fail to detect positive cases.

Furthermore, the discovery of an outbreak at the DDC3 site would have resulted in calls to shut the facility down for mandatory cleaning and sanitizing. Amazon took none of the necessary precautions. Nor did it seek to inform workers at the factory, or throughout the company, that a COVID-19 tester had mysteriously fallen ill and died. As frontline workers and fellow Amazonians, we have a right to this information.

Amazon, which spares no expense in equipping its facilities to monitor the movement of every single worker in its workforce, should reveal what it knows about Poushawn Brown’s interactions and potential exposures. The company has boasted previously about the supposed unparalleled safety of its warehouses during the pandemic and should have nothing to fear from revealing whatever information it has on Brown’s death.

In addition, we demand that Amazon provide adequate resources and support to Brown’s family, whom have been traumatized by their loss. To this date, all that has been offered to the Brown family is two months of grief counseling, the last of which was used up last week.

The Brown family’s loss is irreparable, but Amazon, which posted a record-breaking profit of $21 billion last year and whose owner and founder Jeff Bezos has reported a personal fortune of over $180 billion, has more than enough wealth to provide assistance and to make sure such a tragic loss befalls no one else in its warehouses.

With this in mind, our independent rank and file committee at BWI2 calls on Amazon to provide:
A genuine system of contract tracing within Amazon’s facilities. Workers must know, in real time, the number of cases, the department and the shift time in which a COVID-19 case has been detected. All workers known to have been in proximity to infected individuals must be allowed to quarantine for two weeks with full pay and health benefits.


Paid time off with no threat of termination for workers unwilling to risk themselves during the pandemic. The rehiring at the same wage or higher for workers previously terminated for protesting and resisting Amazon’s abuses.


Accessible, reliable, safe testing and vaccination for all employees who desire them. These items should be overseen and administered by medical professionals with the required background training and experience in their fields.


Closure of facilities for necessary cleaning. If an outbreak is detected at a fulfillment center, it must be closed for at least two days and deep-cleaned with no loss of pay to the workers affected.


An end to abusive speed-up. Extended break periods at the end of every hour to maintain health and safety. “Time Off Task” (TOT) tracking and other forms of harassment must be abolished.


Immediate reinstatement of hazard pay with retroactive pay increases.

In relation to Poushawn Brown’s tragic death, we demand:
The release of all information relating to the death of Poushawn Brown, including job requirements, on-site interactions and potential exposures. This should include internal company communications and deliberations about how it should respond to Brown’s death.


Full financial and medical support for the Brown family, paid for by Amazon.

A struggle for such demands must be completely independent from all representatives of the capitalist two-party system as well as the corporate-controlled trade union bureaucracies. The latter have done nothing to protect workers from exploitation before or during the pandemic.

For its part, the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which is wrapping up a unionization drive at Amazon’s BHM1 facility in Bessemer, Alabama, has said nothing publicly about Poushawn Brown. Nor has it published any demands for raising the living standards of workers at the BHM1 facility.

We issue a call to all of our Amazon co-workers to read the International Amazon Workers Voice and to become familiar with the story of Poushawn Brown. For workers in the Baltimore region, join our rank and file committee. For workers across the United States and the globe, join our growing network of independent rank and file safety committees and help fight to defend yourselves and fellow coworkers from the callous efforts of management and the corporate-controlled two-party political system to allow COVID-19 to run rampant in our workplaces.

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Drone war whistleblower Daniel Hale pleads guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/hale-a03.html




Kevin Reed
12 hours ago







Former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Daniel Everette Hale pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 on Wednesday for disclosing “classified national defense information” to a reporter.

The documents that Hale provided to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept contributed significantly to public awareness of the US military drone warfare and assassination programs developed during the Obama administration. The information helped to expose the existence of the secret programs, that drone strikes killed many more innocent people than their supposed “targets” and that US citizens had been killed extrajudicially by drone strikes in violation of their constitutional rights.

Daniel Everette Hale. (Nashville Police Department via AP, File)

The reason Hale cited for pleading guilty is because the Espionage Act charges prevent a public interest defense. In other words, Hale’s lawyers were barred from arguing that the need of the public to be made aware of the criminal activities of the US government was more important than his obligation not to disclose classified information to anyone.

With a trial set to begin next week, Hale was forced to plead guilty in order to avoid potentially spending decades in federal prison. Although four of the five counts still remain against him, he is scheduled for sentencing on July 13 and is expected to be punished with no more than ten years in jail. According to the Washington Post, Judge Liam O’Grady of the Eastern District of Virginia has “indicated that Hale’s sentence would probably not change based on the number of convictions and said he would take up that issue at sentencing.”

In a Justice Department press release, Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers said of the case, “Hale has now admitted what the evidence at trial would have conclusively shown: that he took classified documents from his work at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), documents he had no right to retain, and that he sent them to a reporter, knowing all along that what he was doing was against the law.”

Of course, Demers made no reference to the information that Hale brought to light or the fact that his exposures revealed activities carried out by the Obama, Trump and now Biden administrations that are known by everyone in the world for being against the law in the US and internationally.

Hale, 33, of Nashville, Tennessee, enlisted in the US Air Force in 2009 and received language and intelligence training and was assigned to work for the National Security Agency (NSA) and deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst. He left the Air Force in 2013 and went to work for a defense contractor at the NGA in July 2013. His specialty at NGA was political geography and he held top secret security clearances.

Unlike other whistleblowers—such as the former defense contractor and intelligence analyst Edward Snowden who was inspired to join the US military in the period after September 11, 2001—Hale entered the service out of desperation because he was homeless and had nowhere else to go. As he explained in an on-camera interview for the film “National Bird,” Hale was well aware before he joined the Air Force that he was joining something that he was against and that he disagreed with.

In his work at the NSA Hale was assigned to locate drone strike targets. He became increasingly disturbed by the uncertainty about how many civilians were killed in each strike and the fact that the government repeatedly claimed that those killed were combatants regardless of the actual facts.

According to the Justice Department press release, Hale began his collaboration with “a reporter” in April 2013 while he was still in the Air Force. The document states, “Hale met with the reporter in person on multiple occasions, and communicated with the reporter via phone, text message, email, and, at times, an encrypted messaging platform. Then, in February 2014, while working as a cleared defense contractor at NGA, Hale printed six classified documents unrelated to his work at NGA and soon after exchanged a series of messages with the reporter. Each of the six documents printed were later published by the reporter’s news outlet.”

In total, Hale is accused of printing 36 documents from his computer including 23 that were unrelated to his work at NGA and he gave 17 of these to the reporter, 11 of which were marked either “secret” or “top secret.” The information contained in these documents—which detailed the protocol for ordering drone strikes and exposed civilian casualties and the internal discussion within the military over the accuracy of the intelligence before and after the strikes—was used by Scahill in a series of articles for The Intercept and appeared in a book he wrote in 2016, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.

In court on Wednesday, Hale admitted that he was the author of a chapter written by an anonymous author in Scahill’s book called, “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents.” In an interview published on The Intercept on October 15, 2015, an anonymous source (presumably Hale) tells Scahill that the “outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.”

Jesselyn Radack, an attorney representing Hale, issued a statement about the guilty plea through the organization Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts which said, “Daniel Hale may have pleaded to a count under the Espionage Act, but he is not a spy. He was accused of giving an investigative journalist truthful information in the public interest about the secretive US drone warfare program.”

Radack also explained the broader implications of the prosecution of Hale and others under the Espionage Act, “the government repeatedly chooses the heavy-handed Espionage Act to punish media sources and whistleblowers. The government’s use of the Espionage Act against media sources has everything to do with chilling speech and journalism and nothing to do with justice. … The U.S. government’s policy of punishing people who provide journalists with information in the public interest is a profound threat to free speech, free press, and a healthy democracy.”

Another organization, Defending Rights & Dissent, issued a statement that it stands with Hale as a courageous and heroic whistleblower. At the time of Hale’s indictment, the organization issued a statement of support for him that was signed by 50 civil rights groups, journalists, and anti-war and other activist organizations.

Chip Gibbons, Policy Director for Defending Rights & Dissent, has been involved in the campaign to defend Hale and pointed to the political alignment against whistleblowers who expose the crimes of US imperialism. “It is a disgrace to this country that time and time again when brave truth tellers, many of them relatively young, expose the crimes of our government it is they who go to jail. Shame on both [political] parties for their role in this and Congress for failing to act. … Hale’s case spans three administrations, including presidents from both major parties. Espionage Act abuse to prosecute whistleblowers is a bi-partisan disgrace.”

Scahill wrote an open letter to the Biden administration pleading for the Democratic Party president to “stop the war on journalism” that goes back to the administration of George W. Bush, which “used the Espionage Act and sought to jail reporters who refused to give up their sources, not to mention killing journalists in war zones.”

The killing of journalists in war zones is a reference to the infamous “Collateral Murder” video provided by Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks and published online by editor and founder Julian Assange in 2010. Assange remains in jail in London as he awaits possible extradition to the US to face 17 counts under the Espionage Act for exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Archegos meltdown: another warning of a deep-seated crisis

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/arch-a03.html




Nick Beams
12 hours ago







The blowup of the private investment firm Archegos last month has not set off a crisis of the global financial system. But the type of highly speculative operations in which it was engaged, financed to the tune of tens of billions of dollars by some of the world’s biggest banks, certainly have the potential to do so.

In the wake of the debacle, a number of questions arise: how many more, much bigger, time bombs are out there ticking away? Where are they located, and what could set them off?

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Writing in the Financial Times, columnist Gillian Tett noted that when an avalanche takes place on a snowfield, the root cause is not an idiosyncratic shock, but instability in the underlying snowpack.

The immediate trigger of the Archegos avalanche was the decisions by the US media group ViacomCBS to take advantage of the near tripling of its share price over the past year—one of many companies whose shares have skyrocketed as a result of the trillions of dollars pumped into the financial system by the Fed—to issue a further $3 billion worth of stock.

This set off a fall in the company’s shares which hit Archegos because it had made big bets on the share price continuing to rise, together with similar bets on other companies, including Chinese tech stocks, which also had started to fall.

Archegos, a so-called family firm set up in 2012 by Bill Hwang, who had been convicted of illegal share trading and forced to pay a $44 million fine, had financed his deals with funding provided by major banks using a derivative known as total return swaps.

Under this system, the banks purchased shares, in return for a lucrative fee, which they held, agreeing to pay Archegos what it would have received had it actually owned the shares. If the price went up or dividends were paid, then the bank paid a return to Archegos. But if the investment failed, then Archegos would have to pay the bank.

The extent of the leverage was extraordinary. Attracted by the fat fees from such services, the banks enabled Archegos to amplify its buying power, sometimes by as much as eight times its own capital.

When the share price of ViacomCBS and other stocks bought on behalf of Archegos began to fall sharply, the banks made a margin cal,l requiring Archegos to put up more collateral to the banks. When it was unable to do so, there was a rush for the exits as the banks then sought to sell off the stocks they held in order to try to minimise their losses.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were first out the door and managed to escape with relatively little damage. But the Japanese investment bank Nomura and Credit Suisse were not as fast and now face losses of $2 billion and $3 billion to $5 billion, respectively. Total losses incurred by the banks that financed Archegos could reach as much as $10 billion.

The use of derivatives has proved very popular among banks in recent years because it has enabled them to obtain fees without having to report their dealings.

According to a report in the Financial Times, in 2019 global banks earned an estimated $11 billion from equity financing via the use of derivatives, including total return swaps used by Archegos, double the level in 2012. And the rate of their use has been accelerating.

The New York Times reported that there has been a sharp rise in the use of stock-related derivatives in the recent period. The amount of outstanding equity derivatives has more than doubled since 2015, rising from $50 billion to more than $110 billion in the first half of 2020, according to calculations by the Bank for International Settlements.

The implosion of Archegos as a result of a margin call draws attention to the significant expansion of this form of speculation over the past year as banks have sought to take advantage of the ultra-cheap money provided by the Fed.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that according to the US Financial Industry Regulation Authority, margin loans have risen from $479.3 billion a year ago to more than $813 billion, outstripping even the accelerated growth in the market capitalisation of Wall Street.

The Archegos debacle has brought forward the now familiar calls following every incident of financial turmoil for greater oversight and regulation by authorities. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued what amounted to a pro forma statement that it was monitoring the situation.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the party’s advocates for greater oversight, said in an emailed statement that the Archegos meltdown had “all the makings of a dangerous situation.”

“We need transparency and strong oversight to ensure that the next hedge fund blowup doesn’t take the economy down with it,” she said.

But such calls, based on the illusions promoted so assiduously by the Democrats over decades, that the capitalist financial system can somehow be regulated and made to work in the interests of society, have been exposed by long experience.

There were similar calls after the implosion of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. But then came the tech wreck of 2000-2001 and the collapse of Enron. This was followed by the sub-prime mortgage speculative bubble that sparked the global financial crisis of 2008.

The response of the Democrats in the Obama administration was to bail out the banks. The Fed, under the chairmanship of Ben Bernanke and then Democrat appointee Janet Yellen, now Treasury Secretary in the Biden administration, provided the banks, hedge funds and Wall Street speculators with trillions of dollars of essentially free money to continue the very activities that led to the 2008 crash.

And as for the Dodd-Frank legislation, introduced under the claim that it would prevent a recurrence of the 2008 collapse, the increased use of derivatives at the centre of the Archegos debacle, was the outcome of the efforts by the banks and Wall Street to get around the very minor restrictions it imposed.

As the managing principal of the financial consultancy firm Finadium, Josh Galper, told the Financial Times that the growth of the equity swap market at the centre of the Archegos operations developed as the “natural outgrowth” of the Dodd-Frank regulations.

The outcome of this process has been that rather becoming more transparent, the system has become even more opaque. The increased use of financial derivatives means that several banks can provide financing to a single client without other banks being aware of it. Consequently, if a bank thinks it can reduce its exposure by offloading it to another bank it can find that the bank is also exposed to the same fund.

The Archegos event is not a one-off isolated incident, but another indication of broader trends. It comes in the wake of the Wirecard debacle last year and Greensill meltdown earlier this year, both of which involved major banks.

Fuelled by the endless supply of money from the banks, used to finance ever-increasing speculation, the entire global financial system is heading at ever greater speed towards a disaster.

One indication of that speed came on Thursday when Wall Street’s S&P 500 index set a new record high of 4000 in the midst of the largest decline in global growth, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, since the Great Depression. It took 1227 trading days for the S&P to advance 1000 points from 2000 to 3000, but the advance from 3000 to 4000 was achieved in just 434.

The threat of another financial disaster—the consequences of which will far outstrip the devastation of the 2008 crisis—now hangs over the entire global economy. The answer is not calls for greater regulation to try to contain the explosive contradictions of the financial system for experience has shown that is impossible.

The only viable and realistic perspective is the fight for a socialist program—the taking of political power by the working class, ending the domination of society by the financial oligarchy, and the complete economic reorganisation of society starting with the bringing of the entire financial system into public ownership under democratic control.