Biden Fuels Ukraine War with $61 Billion in Military Aid; Military-Industrial Complex is the Big Winner

IN THIS ISSUE:

• EDITORIAL: Biden Fuels Ukraine War with $61 Billion in Military Aid;  Military-Industrial Complex is the Big Winner —  $95 Billion Package Includes War Funding for Israel and Taiwan

• UKRAINE – RUSSIA: Joint Initiative by Ukrainian and Russian Activists “Against the Imperialist War of the Oligarchs and Capitalists!”

• RECORD Global Military SPENDING in 2023,  And Biden Adds US$95 Billion for War!

• UKRAINE: A Full-Scale “Conscript Hunt” in Towns and Villages

• RUSSIA: “Joining Forces to Help Political Prisoners…” (letter from prison by Boris Kagarlitsky)

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$95 Billion Package Includes War Funding for Israel and Taiwan

On April 22, the U.S. Congress approved a massive $95 billion foreign-aid package in three parts: $61 billion Ukraine, $26 billion Israel, and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region with the bulk of it designated for Taiwan.

Since November 2023, due to obstruction by Members of Congress linked to Donald Trump, the vote on this additional military spending had been blocked. But 48 hours before the vote, Trump declared that “the defense of Ukraine is important to the United States,” giving his supporters the green light to end their obstruction. 

Once again, the higher interests of the capitalist class imposed themselves on all its representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike.

What’s in the $95 Billion Package?

– $61 billion devoted to the U.S.-NATO-provoked war in Ukraine. This is in addition to the hundreds of billions already spent by the Biden administration, the European Union, and NATO members and allied countries. 

The details reveal a significant story. Included are: $14 billion to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, in which the Pentagon purchases advanced weapons systems for the Ukrainian military directly from U.S. corporations for new weapons purchases and $8 billion in non-military “economic assistance” in forgivable loans.

The Pentagon also will receive $23 billion to replenish its stockpile already sent to Ukraine — opening the door to future military transfers — and a further $11 billion to fund U.S. military operations in the region.  [The U.S. has sent Ukraine approximately $113 billion since Russian troops invaded in February 2022.]

– $26.3 billion dollars in aid relating to Israel, including $9.7 billion Israel’s weapons purchases, $6.8 billion to the Pentagon to replenish weapons that the U.S. turned over to Israel already and to carry out U.S. military operations in the region resulting from Israel’s genocidal war. Included as well are $9 billion in humanitarian aid that is but a drop in the bucket to alleviate the starvation caused by Israel’s genocidal attack on and siege of Gaza.

A considerable sum: It represents almost eight times the basic annual United States allocation to the State of Israel (around $3.3 billion in the US. budget).  

– And more than $8 billion in military aid to Taiwan and for U.S. war preparations against China, including $3.3 billion for U.S. submarine development and infrastructure..  

Ninety-five billion to fuel the ongoing bloodbaths in Gaza and Ukraine and stoke the flames for a war against China … while 37.9 million U.S. citizens live below the poverty line.  

There is no hiding the fact that the bulk of this package benefits the U.S. military and the country’s “defense” contractors. About 23% will enable Ukraine to rearm itself by purchasing equipment and ammunition from the U.S. “defense” industry, and 38% will go to replenish the U.S. Army’s weapons and ammunition systems.

This means that a huge percentage of the sums pledged to Ukraine will go directly to the U.S. military and its war industry! The same is true for the Israel and Indo-Pacific portions.

DSA Members of Congress Vote for War Funding for Ukraine!  

On April 20, when the U.S. House of Representatives approved the $61 billion war appropriation for Ukraine, DSA’s two Democratic Congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, voted unhesitatingly in favor.  

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an organization that calls itself “socialist,” while being a member of a capitalist party, Biden’s Democratic Party.  As early as April 17, Ocasio-Cortez had announced: “For 738 days, Ukraine has been fighting Putin — a battle that global democracy cannot lose. … It’s time for Congress to vote on aid for Ukraine.”  

Cori Bush, for her part, declared on April 20: “I refuse to allow the Ukrainian people to suffer, to be handed over to Putin’s murderous regime … . I voted to support the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russia’s illegal invasion.”  

In fact, what Bush and Ocasio-Cortez did was vote to support the profits of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and other Wall Street-listed weapons dealers – profits made on the backs of working people in a war between Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and capitalists in which workers on both sides have no stake! 

 [See below our articles on the opposition to war that is growing inside Ukraine and Russia. Also, for more background information and analysis, click the link to The Organizer Special Issue titled, “Essential Background Articles on Ukraine and the National Question” at https://tinyurl.com/mt9a5zky.]

Parliamentary Maneuver and Bipartisanship

In a deliberate parliamentary game, the Biden administration had arranged for the votes on war funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan to be separated. Thirty-six Democratic representatives (including Ocasio-Cortez and Bush) voted against the $26 billion in aid to Netanyahu, under pressure from the huge movement across the United States calling for an end to all U.S. aid to Israel.

But this did not jeopardize the outcome of the vote on the $61 billion for Ukraine, or the $8 billion for war preparations against China, for which Ocasio-Cortez and Bush voted in favor. For their part, some pro-Trump Republicans voted against the $61 billion for Ukraine, again without changing the final outcome of the vote. 

This “aid” to Ukraine was made possible thanks to an agreement in Congress between Democrats and Republicans. “Today’s outcome confirms another thing we’ve stressed from the beginning of this Congress. In a divided government, the only way to ever get things done is bipartisanship,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said on April 23, before thanking House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, for moving the legislation along.

Stop the U.S./NATO-Fueled War in Ukraine!

From the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Socialist Organizer has been resolutely opposed to the war waged in the interest of oligarchs and capitalists in Russia and Ukraine, as well as U.S. and European imperialism, sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukranian workers and youth.   

We call on readers of The Organizer: Join the effort to put an end to a butchery whose sole aim is the pursuit of capitalist profit. Join us to demand: “

– Money for Jobs and Social Services, Not War!” 

– “Not One Cent, Not One Weapon, Not One Person for War in Ukraine, Israel or China!” 

– “No Support for Capitalist Politicians!” 

– “Support the LCIP Campaign for Independent Working-Class Politics!”

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UKRAINE – RUSSIA

Joint Initiative by Ukrainian and Russian Activists “Against the Imperialist War of the Oligarchs and Capitalists!”

Young international activists from Russia and Ukraine, emigrants or refugees in Europe, met on the morning of Saturday April 20. At the end of their discussion, they decided to launch a “joint initiative of Ukrainian and Russian internationalist activists against war and exploitation”.

La Tribune des Travailleurs, the weekly newspaper of the French Workers Party, has published their founding declaration (in Russian and Ukrainian). It was then natural that one of them, a member of the Alliance of the Russian-speaking Left in Germany, should take the floor to report on it at the French Workers’ Party (the Parti des Travailleurs) rally in tribute to the Paris Commune (1871).

 “We, internationalist activists from Ukraine and Russia living abroad, address you. Each of us has our own political positions, our own organizations. We do not claim to be in competition with any other initiative.

“We have come together with the aim of helping to take concrete steps forward “against the imperialist war of the oligarchs and capitalists, for a fair and just peace in the interests of the working majority, in the interests of the peoples, not the mighty imperialist powers, for the fraternal union of the peoples of the former USSR and the world.

“We affirm that ‘The main enemy of the workers is in your own country.’ “Our aim:

• to support all forms of resistance to the war in both Ukraine and Russia;

• to organize solidarity with the resistance of mobilized soldiers, both Ukrainian and Russian, with draft dodgers and deserters on both sides, with the struggle of the women – wives and sisters and mothers of soldiers – for their demobilization;

• to demand respect for democratic and workers’ rights in both Ukraine and Russia, to organize campaigns for the release of political prisoners and imprisoned anti-war activists;

• to strengthen ties and solidarity with workers, youth and their organizations in all countries.

“We stand in solidarity with the Russian political prisoner, left-wing sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, who has said:

‘Fortunately, support for political prisoners is becoming a mass movement in our country. Thousands of people are writing letters to the imprisoned, collecting parcels, sending food and warm clothing to prison. We must unconditionally support all those who, without resorting to violence, defend their point of view and are persecuted for it’.

“We also stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian internationalists of Kharkiv, who have declared: “The glorification of war as an opportunity to strengthen the nation and purify it of all kinds of undesirable elements, which is going on in Ukraine as much as in the Russian Federation, was already the policy of the belligerent states during the First World War.

As the current war differs little from that one, it may also end in the same way. To the new Tsars Vladimir, we wish a repeat of 1917!’ Down with war and exploitation! Long live international solidarity!” n

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Record Global Military Spending in 2023, And Biden Adds US$95 Billion for War

Record broken in 2023! According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, April 22), global military spending rose by 6.8% to US$2.4 trillion.  

Never before have such sums been devoted to military budgets! Billions are plundered from public services, benefiting the major companies in the arms industry (a market dominated by U.S. companies).  

The U.S. military budget alone was $916 billion. In reality, more than $1 trillion, including military spending that is not accounted for in the “defense” budget. And that’s not about to decrease in 2024!

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Ukrainian military guarding border in search of recruits to be sent to the frontlines

UKRAINE

A Full-Scale “Conscript Hunt” in Towns and Villages

Volodymyr Zelensky enacted several laws that considerably expanded the conditions for war recruitment/mobilization. One lowers the minimum age for soldiers sent to the front from 27 to 25. Another abolishes a whole series of medical exemptions and creates a database to combat draft dodgers.

Other bills are due to be voted on by the Rada (Parliament) at the end of April. Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press (April 4), “the new laws … could add around 50,000 soldiers to the army”, i.e., “one tenth of the 500,000 additional soldiers that Mr. Zelensky said he wanted to mobilize in December”.

These considerable objectives speak volumes about the level of human losses in the Ukrainian army. Even before these laws were enacted, the TTsKs (military recruitment centers) deployed their recruiting sergeants in all public places, in search of men of fighting age. In the town of Rivne (in northwestern Ukraine), a Ukrainian activist said in early March:

“The situation I’m about to describe to you I know first-hand, not from social networks. It’s a real ‘conscript hunt’ taking place in Rivne, as in the whole of Ukraine. The reason is simple: TTsK employees have targets to meet, issued by the territorial centers, and so on. If the objectives are not met, the TTsK staff may be sent to the fighting units. That’s why it’s so hectic: nobody wants to end up in Bakhmout [one of the towns where the fighting is intense – editor’s note].

“But since the beginning of 2024, there have been numerous cases of armed resistance against the recruiting sergeants. For example, in January, a peasant from Rovno, in defense of his brother whom the TTsK wanted to take on board, attacked the officers with a scythe. He was thrown into prison and his brother left to fight in the Donetsk region. 

Even more significant: in the village of Radyvilov, having located two TTsK recruiters via social networks, a group of locals managed to immobilize them, confiscated their weapons and took them to the village of Nemyrivka, where they beat them severely. The assailants and the weapons are still being sought.

“These are not isolated cases, in this region as elsewhere. General mobilization is provoking active resistance in society. This is all the more significant as this radical opposition began in the western regions*.”

– With our correspondents / IWC Newsletter Issue no. 259

* Regions where nationalist sentiments are traditionally stronger than in the East.

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RUSSIA

“Joining Forces to Help Political Prisoners…”

(letter from prison by Boris Kagarlitsky)

Putin’s regime is multiplying convictions, prison sentences, and repressive measures. In addition to liberal opposition figures and any citizen who publicly expresses his or her rejection of the war in Ukraine, repression is hitting working-class and socialist organizations and activists harder every day.

For example, the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) and most of its leaders have just been branded “agents of foreigners”, a characterization that entails police surveillance and often precedes arrest. In a letter he was able to smuggle out of prison on April 4, sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for “being an apologist of terrorism” for opposing the war in Ukraine, notes that “socialists, communists, anarchists, and also simple left-wing democrats who are not members of any party, are increasingly falling victim to the repressive machine”.

He adds that, “fortunately, support for political prisoners is also becoming a mass movement. Thousands of people are writing letters to arrested activists, collecting money, sending food and warm clothing to prisoners … . By joining forces to help political prisoners, we are helping to strengthen this movement and establish coordination between individuals and groups … .

“And in the current conditions in Russia, where political action is extremely difficult, helping those who have been thrown into prison because they share our ideas becomes not only a humanist activity, but also a major political act, solidarity put into practice.”

To contribute to the fight for the release of imprisoned labor activists, the editorial staff of La Tribune des Travailleurs and two groups of Russian political émigrés have jointly published a brochure dedicated to this cause.

– With our correspondents / IWC Newsletter Issue no. 259

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