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Celebrations of today’s Pakistani elections to the National Assembly and four provincial assemblies are a political fraud, intended to lend a veneer of “democracy” to a neocolonial regime that is presiding over a society in a state of economic and political collapse.

The elections take place as Pakistan sinks deeper into financial crisis and civil war, driven by the government’s support for the Obama administration’s escalation of the Afghan war into Pakistan. Since the beginning of April, over 100 people have been killed, including several election candidates, by forces allied with the Afghan Taliban who are resisting the US-led occupation of Afghanistan.

The election will be overseen by hundreds of thousands of security personnel, including tens of thousands of army troops. In Punjab province alone, 300,000 security personnel, including 30,000 army troops, have been deployed.

Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr will submit his report on the city’s finances Monday, laying the groundwork for an escalated assault on the working class. Orr said on Thursday that the city’s financial situation is worse than expected in an effort to prepare the population for even greater cuts.

According to a report on CBS local affiliate WWJ, Orr’s report will “paint a bleak picture of the city’s finances, including over $15 billion in long-term debt and an accumulated operating deficit of $325 million.”

Orr declared the city will need to borrow approximately $157 million in short-term debt this year and record it as revenue in order to stay afloat.

Orr also again threatened to drive the city into bankruptcy. He told WWJ, “If I can accomplish what I need to accomplish without bankruptcy, I’d be elated. I can’t guarantee that in the least.” He then went on to state that, “to a large degree that's going to be dependent on the position of a lot of other stakeholders that they have in this. Some of them might prefer a court order to make them do the things they need to do.”

On Tuesday, Wall Street celebrated a new milestone. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed through the 15,000 plateau, setting yet another record in a dizzying climb that has seen the benchmark index rise by almost 15 percent since the beginning of the year.

It took just two months after recovering all of its losses from the financial crash of September 2008 for the Dow to breach the 15,000 barrier. It rose 1,000 points from the 14,000 level in just 66 days.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index also hit a new record Tuesday, having gained 199 points since January. The Nasdaq Composite index closed at its highest point since November of 2000. The manic rise in US stocks is part of a global phenomenon. The FTSE All-World equity index on Tuesday rose to its highest level since June 2008.

Two weeks after the Rana Plaza building collapse, global retail giants that source their garments in Bangladesh such as Walmart, Primark, Benetton and others are engaged in a cynical public relations exercise to distance themselves from the tragedy and preserve their image and their profits.

As of yesterday, the official death toll had reached 705, with hundreds more injured, making the collapse the worst industrial disaster in country’s history and one of the worst ever in the world. Rana Plaza is typical of the thousands of shoddily built, unsafe sweatshops in Bangladesh employing workers at $38 a month to churn out orders for some of the world’s largest corporations.