Could the Duterte Regime be COVID-19’s Next Victim?

Walden Bello

In his fifth State of the Nation (SONA) address on July 27, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte tried to live up to his old form: by turns menacing, double-talking, cursing, dripping with cynical humor, digressing, and irreverent.

Instead he came across as uninspiring, unimaginative, and perhaps overwhelmed by the realization that a formula which might have worked in the pre-COVID-19 period — where his unorthodox gangster charm worked with millions frustrated by a malfunctioning democracy — no longer connected in these times of the coronavirus.

Instead of coming across as invincible, as in previous SONAs, Duterte offered the country the rare sight of a national leader self-destructing in full public view.

Shifting Winds

The wind had shifted, and it had blown Duterte’s cover, exposing the empty core underneath that previously charming (to some) tough-guy exterior.

He faced a different audience from those in previous years, with a very large number of them possessed of eyes from which the scales had fallen. The one thing on their minds while Duterte went through his theatrics was: “Cut the BS, man. Just tell us what you’re going to do to get us out of this mess.”

The background to the SONA was an infection rate that had risen by 137 percent from mid-June to mid-July, from 33,069 to 78,412, and a death rate that had increased by 64 percent. Amazingly, Duterte had absolutely nothing to offer except praise to the military that is carrying out his failed militarized response to the pandemic. Even his handpicked audience of allies failed to clap on cue, and when they did, it was faint.

The SONA exposed this administration for what it is: an incompetent, blundering regime that relies on the deployment of coercion for everything.

Like many leaders, Duterte was blindsided by COVID-19. The difference is that many others were able to adjust and steer their countries to relative safety. Duterte, in contrast, turned to the only thing he really knows how to do, and that was to bluster and threaten and impose draconian controls.

Other countries did adopt lockdowns, but in the most successful cases, as in Thailand, lockdowns were part of a broader strategy that rested fundamentally on appealing to people to unite and work together to stop the spread of the virus. In contrast, from the very beginning, when Duterte ordered the police to shoot lockdown violators, till his most recent move, which is to employ the cops to do house-to-house searches for “non-self-isolating” COVID-19-positive people, it has been all threat, threat, threat.

Not surprisingly, he has drawn international attention as one of the two global leaders with a principally coercive approach, the other being his close friend President Xi Jinping of China. Not surprisingly, too, the Filipino people are not buying it, as testified to by the thousands who have been defying his decrees from above, many risking arrest in individual acts of protest.

Failure on Two Fronts

The Duterte approach has failed dramatically as infections continue their exponential spread and deaths keep rising.

The Philippines now has the second highest rate of infections in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, and many public health professionals actually think the actual numbers are far higher. The 1,181 recorded deaths are in contrast to 123 in Malaysia, 58 in Thailand, 6 in Myanmar, and zero in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The reality on the ground is that hospitals in Metro Manila have long run out of space for COVID-19 victims.

Even as failure has dogged the public health front, incompetence has marked the administration’s response to the economic crisis triggered by the lockdown.

Transportation, bad in the best of times, is worse in the “new normal” as factories and businesses struggle to reopen and people labor and sweat to get to work. Funds appropriated to alleviate hunger and suffering have been far from adequate. Distribution of relief goods has been chaotic, and when people have protested over their inability to access goods, the command from Malacanang, the presidential palace, has been, “Shoot those sons-of-bitches.”

In the last month, the policy drift can no longer be hidden from ordinary citizens. “The government isn’t helping at all. We have to fend for ourselves,” as one friend put it, a complaint now voiced by usually non-political housewives.

The administration’s briefings have become an exercise in trying to put the best face on a deteriorating situation, as when Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque declared victory — not over COVID-19, but over a University of the Philippines forecast that the rate of infections would be higher than it was by the end of June. Then, when questioned about police being ordered to go on a house-to-house search to apprehend “non-self-isolating” patients, Roque’s glib reply was that they intended to bring them for “a paid-for vacation in an air-conditioned facility.”

A former human rights activist who, in breathtaking Anakin Skywalker fashion, leaped over to the dark side, Roque is said to be one of the reasons the government’s credibility is sinking day by day. Roque’s serving as the chief spokesman on COVID-19 represents the “triumph of public relations over public health,” according to one of his less enamored colleagues in the administration. Another, a university professor who knows him, said, “Harry somehow manages to spontaneously evoke animosity.”

The problem is the administration is scraping bottom. There’s hardly any credible administration-associated public personality available to speak on COVID-19, since the only other official out there with some stature, Health Secretary Francisco Duque, became damaged goods when he admitted in late January that Chinese tourists could not be banned from entering the country, even after COVID-19 became a public health threat, so as not to ruin diplomatic relations with China.

Perhaps the least pessimistic assessment is provided in a bleak, comprehensive report for Kyoto University’s prestigious Center for Southeast Asian Studies by Dr Ayame Suzuki, a visiting Japanese academic who has no ax to grind against the government:

“The path the Philippine Government chose in the health crisis — hard lockdown primarily backed by coercive power — has so far has been able to prevent a devastating outbreak. However, the path seems far from sustainable: it has severely damaged the economy and increased unemployment and poverty. An exit strategy seems to be absent, and school closures continue. Worse still, the space for voice has become narrower and narrower, which hinders government from getting valuable inputs on the reconstruction effort.”

A Generational Rebellion

Not only have people realized that they’re on their own when it comes to COVID-19, but it’s finally hit them that the administration’s priorities aren’t containing the pandemic.

What people could not understand was why, even as the anti-COVID-19 campaign was floundering, Duterte was focused on passing an Anti-Terrorism Act that was clearly aimed at throttling the freedom to protest peacefully, securing the conviction of two journalists for allegedly violating the cyberspace libel law, and shuttering the ABS/CBN network, the country’s main source of television entertainment, at a time when people desperately need diversion (and when the economy could ill afford another 11,000 unemployed workers at a time of record unemployment.)

For most people, common sense dictates that national unity in the face of the pandemic is paramount, and these moves only serve to divide the country. For some, they come across as diversionary tactics, to draw people’s attention away from the failure on the COVID-19 front by painting Duterte’s critics as being more dangerous than the pandemic.

But if the wind has shifted, this is due to more than the government’s incompetence on COVID. There is a demographic shift.

Since his election in 2016, several million more youths have graduated to political maturity, and, since questioning is second nature to youth, they have begun to ask why their elders have allowed themselves to be hypnotized into erotic submission by a man that Senator Leila de Lima has characterized as a “homicidal sociopath.”

When the daughter of a legislator who is a Duterte ally tweets her support for ABS/CBN workers, contradicting her father’s shameful vote to deny the network a franchise, and the son of another member of Congress calls her a “fascist” in public for voting the same way and asks voters not to vote for her, these are not isolated, quaint incidents. They’re representative acts of a generation that has realized with horror that so many of their elders have abandoned the values on which they raised their children by backing a man who has boasted that his main qualification for office is that he has spilled a lot of blood.

A generational revolt is brewing and the president is the flashpoint.

A New Opposition?

One must, nonetheless, issue a caveat.

While COVID-19 has shattered Duterte’s invincibility, there is still some way to go before opposition to him translates into a critical mass on the ground. How fast that comes about depends greatly on the perceived character of the leadership of the growing resistance.

Will the resistance now spreading throughout the country see the emergence of young, fresh faces with new, refreshing visions for the future of the country? Or will it see the same recycled representatives of discredited elite politics that drove many to the false solution offered by Duterte in the first place?

COVID-19 is a terrible plague, one that has taken the lives of many Filipinos. But the main victim of the virus might turn out to be a regime that was well on its way to becoming a dictatorship before it came along.

Every Step the EU Takes Toward Financial Unity Sows New Seeds of Its Potential Collapse

Marshall Auerback

Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is a play featuring two characters waiting for a character, Godot, who never arrives. As such, it is a useful metaphor for the goings-on of the European Union (EU). Observers of the EU’s evolution in the capital of Brussels have witnessed a Godot-like experience of the promised arrival of the long-awaited resolution of the group’s dysfunction and economic malaise that never happens. The pattern is virtually always the same: the countries meet, they squabble, and then they emerge with a “landmark” or “historic” compromise that deals the lowest common denominator in terms of economic impact.

True to form, the EU Joint Declaration characterized the newly created €750 billion recovery fund as an “ambitious and comprehensive package combining the classical [budget] with an extraordinary recovery effort destined to tackle the effects of an unprecedented crisis in the best interest of the EU.”

That is typical Brussels-driven hyperbole. There are some important new policy developments that give a small glimmer of hope to those hoping to nudge the EU toward full-on debt mutualization: that is to say, to jointly issue a common debt instrument of a pan-European institution (as opposed to national sovereign bonds) to fight the outbreak and its effects. The pooling of liabilities of the European Union nations and linking them to the EU’s currency issuer, the European Central Bank, are an important series of precedents, and there’s also the positive benefit of providing more fiscal support to the severely indebted countries of southern Europe (although, as usual, not enough).

On the other hand, that is precisely why the wealthier northern countries resist it: they fear that such mutualization would derogate from their own pristine credit ratings, while simultaneously allowing the so-called profligate “Club Med” countries to free-ride and avoid making reforms to their own systems.

Caught in the middle of this conflict is France, a nation that, along with Germany, is the fulcrum on which the entire European project turns. It is a country with a history of global aspiration, but its economy contains many of the weaknesses of the southern periphery countries. The government of Emmanuel Macron was one of the leading actors behind the latest initiative. But at the end of a marathon negotiating session, there was virtually nothing on the table for France itself in terms of direct aid or broad concessions toward enhanced debt mutualization. This is highly problematic, as France too has extremely high debt levels and is one of the biggest economic casualties of COVID-19.

France’s current political strategy is reminiscent of its thinking during the negotiations that led to the common currency. At that time, French President François Mitterrand calculated that the creation of the euro would provide the means whereby France could mitigate the economic power of Germany. That proved to be a fatal miscalculation.

Similarly, President Macron is seeking to use today’s recovery fund as a means of nudging the EU closer to the goal of debt mutualization. The history of the European Union suggests that such Gallic aspirations are likely to be frustrated again. France may indeed be one of Europe’s “founding fathers,” but it is a hungry parent that has fallen on hard times. National pride (and perhaps fears that the markets will eventually cotton on to its vulnerabilities if the government draws too much attention to them) has precluded it from acknowledging its needs, but if those weaknesses remain unaddressed, anti-euro populism could well surge in France (as it has in Italy). At that point, the European Union will truly have an existential crisis on its hands.

In theory, debt mutualization is the glue that could bind together a bunch of federated states, as Alexander Hamilton did for the United States. But in practice, such proposals in the past have been the source of ongoing tension and dysfunction, especially within the eurozone. The attempts to bridge the gap have provoked yet more division and possible future splits among the various EU member states, exacerbated by the backdrop of a catastrophic pandemic, which means that incrementalism won’t deliver the goods.

On to the details: the fund will disperse €390 billion in grants (with the remainder in the form of loans), spread among the member countries, with a net fiscal impact of roughly 0.6 percent of GNI. This is paltry in the context of a continent in which double-digit contractions of GDP are forecast by the IMF in some of Europe’s largest economies (e.g., in Italy, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom). Even countries thought to have handled the coronavirus well, such as Germany, are forecast to contract by almost 8 percent this year.

The funds will be borrowed directly by the European Commission (EC), who (per the Financial Times) will “establish a yield curve of debt issuance, with all liabilities to be repaid by the end of 2058.” As the bonds remain a liability of the EC, they consequently won’t be added to the national balance sheets of the distressed countries that will be the main recipients. These borrowings from the capital markets will be supplemented by existing national contributions to the overall EU budget. The latter provision created another stress point that was relieved by the usual expedient of providing additional budget rebates—basically cash back on their annual EU contributions—to the so-called “frugal five” (Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden) in order to enable those countries’ leaders to sell the package to the respective national parliaments (where it still must be ratified). Effectively, the wealthiest countries are being bribed with offsets to secure agreement.

In terms of the mechanics of how the money from the recovery fund is spent, the proposed usage is subject to objection by any national state for three months. This is more akin to a time-limited pause, as opposed to an outright veto. The objections can ultimately be overridden by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm that is responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation and implementing the decisions of the European Parliament.

That override feature has led to some of the rhetorical excesses used to characterize the agreement. In reality, however, the power to override opens the door to debt mutualization by a sliver, if at all. Furthermore, the history of the EU shows that objections can turn into larger gridlock and opposition, especially as the EC largely shares the austerian and neoliberal biases of the northern European bloc. Hence, the “reforms” that the EC will likely demand as a quid pro quo for receiving the emergency funding likely means more cutbacks in government social spending that will be highly deflationary (the EC has already demanded such changes from Italy in the past). Hence, the program is not a bellwether for the end of austerity economics, as some have suggested. In addition to these usual north versus south splits, another level of conflict between western and eastern Europe could be added to this volatile mix, if the Dutch or the Nordic countries make aid to Hungary and Poland conditional on ongoing respect to the rule of law (as has been reported here).

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Daily Telegraph’s international business editor, describes the recovery fund “as a one-off episode that does not lead to fiscal union or change the EU’s constitutional structure. Everything reverts to the status quo ante, which is why it is tolerated by hardliners in the German Council of Economic Experts.” Despite more emollient noises by Chancellor Angela Merkel (who will be leaving office next year), the German government on the whole remains implacably opposed to EU debt mutualization. Other countries that share Berlin’s opposition also include the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Denmark and Sweden.

Evans-Pritchard’s characterization of the agreement may be a bit extreme: The French in particular hope that the EC’s ability to override national vetoes will ultimately provide a pathway to full debt mutualization. After all, it was the Macron government that originally pushed the idea of a common European fund, even though Paris accepted time limitations on the proposed instruments, in order to head off anticipated German and Dutch opposition to the overall concept. But in a subsequent analysis of the agreement, Evans-Pritchard also highlighted the summit communique’s characterization of the recovery fund as “a temporary facility to cope with a one-off event and should not be taken as a precedent.”

So tension remains, even as debt mutualization looks marginally more possible today than it was before the agreement was secured. So while Evans-Pritchard may be right to call the package “political nitroglycerine on a long fuse,” the fact is that this program establishes a new set of behaviors and precedents for EU allocation of funds. It’s messy and potentially explosive, as all such European compromises tend to be, but such messy ambiguity almost certainly means we will witness similar conflicts in the future.

The problem is that time is running out as the continent faces economic problems of a magnitude not experienced since the end of World War II. While the exigency of the pandemic is slowly pushing the EU member states toward going further than they have gone before, the very unpredictability created by the coronavirus makes it difficult to determine what kinds of spending will provide optimal outcomes. There will likely be a good amount of failure that will provide a bounty of evidence for the frugal five austerians, who remain profoundly suspicious of anything that remotely approximates activist fiscal policy. Likewise for the euro-skeptics if the marginal amounts allocated under this program fail to alleviate economic stress.

Extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary measures and, short of war, it is hard to envisage a more damaging backdrop than a pandemic, which has single-handedly forced the shutdown of the global economy and continues to act as a brake on recovery, as each new outbreak creates the possibility of renewed shutdowns. That kind of an environment not only makes consumers more hesitant to spend money (given renewed uncertainty about collective employment, to say nothing of the risk of jobs being lost forever—and perhaps with good reason, considering the likely fall-off in air travel, restaurants, and other forms of leisure activities). Likewise, businesses are increasingly reluctant to invest in that kind of an environment.

All of which also complicates the task of government fiscal policy. The latter is supposed to fill in the spending gaps left open by the withdrawal of the private sector. But how can this be achieved effectively if the promotion of economic demand conflicts with the resolution of a public health emergency (that entails scaled-down activity to eradicate the presence of the coronavirus)? The task of focusing on reconstruction also becomes more problematic, as nobody can adduce fully the shape of the future post-pandemic economy, thereby complicating the task of determining how to allocate structural funding to assist in the economic transition.

Most commentary pertaining to the damage inflicted by the coronavirus has focused on Italy and Spain. And, indeed, both countries now feature governing coalitions whose attachment to the euro is lukewarm at best. Italy, in particular, has always been viewed as the greatest existential threat to the single currency union.

But while Italy’s government managed to secure a reasonable chunk of the recovery fund’s grant money (around 23 percent of the total), there is not a lot left over for France. It is, however, worth noting that France’s debt to GDP is rapidly approaching Italianate levels, and the French economy is forecast by the IMF to shrink by 12.5 percent this year.

Despite these ominous developments, the Macron administration’s longer-term goals still point to an embrace of neoliberal orthodoxy in a manner that could further contract demand and therefore elevate the country’s public debt to GDP ratio. Although the French government has deferred its planned “flagship pension reforms” for a year in order to deal with the pandemic, it insists that it still plans to follow through with them (pushing back the retirement age for many workers, as well as “reduc[ing] insurance payouts for high earners and requir[ing] people to work for longer before claiming benefits,” according to the Financial Times). The last time the government attempted changes like these, the “yellow vests” protests brought the country to a standstill.

I have long felt that France, as much as Italy, could ultimately prove the weak link that would potentially blow up the European Monetary Union, given the structural divergences in their respective economies vis-à-vis Germany. Had economics alone determined the creation of a new supranational currency, a more viable currency zone would likely have been restricted to a quasi-Deutsche Mark bloc comprising Germany, the Benelux countries, and a few of the Nordic nations. These countries shared a high degree of pre-existing economic/social/cultural convergence even before the creation of the euro.

But the creation of the euro was clearly not done on economic considerations alone. Years ago, I posited the idea that German industrialists backed the idea of a “big and broad” euro in the early 1990s so as to lock in Germany’s ongoing industrial dominance, despite the objections of the Bundesbank. They were supported by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was a Europeanist to the core. France wanted to join because it (naively) assumed that it could control Germany politically by taking a key role in the common currency, a miscalculation as grave as relying on the Maginot Line for national defense. Italy wanted to join because it was a founding member, and the neoliberals who dominated economic policy-making in Rome calculated that this would represent a good way to re-circuit the fundamentals of its economic behaviors and thereby override its long-standing political dysfunction.

These problematic calculations on all sides contributed to what remains a largely dysfunctional monetary union. For a time, it provided the illusion of prosperity and “ever closer” political union. COVID-19 has blown apart that illusion as easily as the wind knocking over a house of cards. The French have been pushing hard for debt mutualization precisely because the country now faces risks comparable to those of Italy, even though the markets have until now given Paris the benefit of the doubt (which is why French bond yield spreads relative to German bonds remain comparatively low). In the context of the pandemic, incrementalism might work for Germany and its northern European counterparts, but it is unlikely to work for France. The violent protests in 2018 of the “yellow vests” (which mirror decades of earlier incidents of civil unrest) and the corresponding rise of populist parties in France point to the unlikelihood that the French government could sustain the kind of economic punishment that has been inflicted on countries like Italy, Greece and Spain, even though many of France’s problems mirror those of the other “Club Med” nations.

The Paris-Berlin axis has long been the motor behind the entire European project. Much as France’s Henry IV once (apocryphally) declared that “Paris is worth a mass,” when the Huguenot king converted to Catholicism in order to ensure maximum political legitimacy for his rule, Germany and the frugal five therefore have to determine whether or not debt mutualization (or some other form of European integration) is a price worth paying in order to prevent total fragmentation.

Simply waiting for a mythical Godot, as Beckett highlighted, will get us nowhere.

Does The Left Stand With Uighurs?

Nick Pemberton

As the American left forces itself to reckon with its neglect of the minority underclass in its central planning of democratic socialism, a similar reckoning should be happening in relation to China and its treatment of the Muslim minority population and its increasing reach in Africa. Under the guise of economic empowerment for the upper and middle-class China has in many ways followed the United States route to economic and military power that relied upon labor exploitation, incarceration, surveillance, control of women’s reproductive rights and environmental destruction.

The racial reckoning in the United States is hard for many leftists to swallow because the left with a few exceptions wants to blame racial and gender violence on the invisible hand of stagnant hegemonic America. With an Empire in crisis and an austerity politics crippling the domestic sphere we see a crude authoritarianism under Donald Trump who attempts to retain legitimate power through corruption, misinformation and force. Along with this comes the typical hysterical anti-communist rhetoric with a reckless Cold War narrative and sanctions policy that will only further hurt the Chinese poor.

However in a letter signed by among others, Noam Chomsky, the reason for the concentration camps sounds a lot more like capitalism than communism: “China’s present signature foreign policy initiative is the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) that seeks to connect the PRC economically to the rest of the Eurasian continent through large infrastructure projects that will stimulate international trade. The western and south-western components of the BRI require the XUAR to serve as a transportation and commercial hub to trade routes and pipelines that will join China with Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and the entirety of Europe. As a result, the XUAR has become a very important strategic region for China, and the state views its indigenous populations as an obstacle to developing its vision for this future critical center of international commercial networks.”

While accepting that centralized organization and solidarity amidst a vague ruling class communist ideology and concrete history of communist people uniting against racist Western capitalism, imperialism and the like certainly did help to create an effective and organized response to the coronavirus we still have to ask as leftists interested in not just ruling class ideology, but material underclass conditions, who was left out, and what were the labor conditions necessary to create this nation of unity and efficiency?

Re-education camps, sterilization of women, mass surveillance reliant on big tech, rapid industrialization and pollution, forced labor, market expansion and police brutality may sound familiar to some in the USA. Capitalism. Exploiting and controlling a minority population to increase wealth at the harm of the environment and further international commerce is a problem.

Now we have to recognize the ways in which China is admirable in its own solidarity with left-leaning governments

and victims of imperialism. Such allegiances have created power that counters Empire and emboldens collective leftist governments fighting back against capitalist coups and resource extraction. Indeed without building power how would China be able to lift so many in the world out of poverty? We need to end the ridiculous China-bashing that is typical of all Empires in decline. We should also recognize that in many ways China like the rest of the world does still have to abide by the rules of Western imperialism, capitalism and white supremacism dictated by the United States. This is certainly not an extensive discussion of China overall but merely a specific but significant example of a concentration camp setting that mirrors many of the human rights violations exposed by immigrant activists and Black Lives Matter here in the United States.

Communism. No one on the left wants to say they are a communist. Paradoxically no one wants to examine China because their ruling class is supposedly on our team. That’s a shame because we can be proud communists and critizise China’s ruling class precisely because we believe in the power of the people to rule their own lives. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have their own reasons for bashing China: reign of the dollar, corruption, American exceptionalism based in white supremacy, a thirst for militarism and American hegemony across the world, anti-communism based in ahistorical ideology and election talking points. Policies resulting from these including the recent sanctions must be opposed.

However, through all the noise we can trace our own reasons for opposing concentration camps of minorities, cruel policies towards migrants, physical and sexual abuse by the police state and forced labor to further the interest of the global ruling class. Black Lives Matter has exposed the police state in the United States and created solidarity across the world, including from the Chinese government. Their words ring just as hallow as ours condemning China’s human rights as both acts of partisan posturing are political games that ignore the enslavement and abuse of working people on the ground.

We would be foolish to dismiss solidarity with China’s underclass. If the left really believes in the power of communism, in the power of poor and working people owning the means of production, then we can say that the current state of affairs in global capitalism is needing a communist revolution that frees the poor minority populations across the globe from brutal market forces. The underdog isn’t the ideology of communism, it is the actualization of it.

Trump doesn’t support Muslims. He sanctions China because they are independent enough to defy American Empire. Good for them. Behind the macho posturing of Biden and Trump is crude economic bullying designed to keep the United States and our ruling class in power. While having no allegiance to this ruling class, the internationalism modeled by Chomsky includes an honest evaluation of the reasons for China’s rise and the limits in supporting an opposition to Empire that itself has hierarchal exploitation.

Chomsky is one to know that denying concentration camps is embracing simplistic prescriptions. What we need is solidarity between poor people across the globe. While admiring China’s communist affiliations in many ways we can also be honest about glaring oppressions without supporting Cold War imperialism against their people via sanctions. For we all know that the trade war and sanctions is meant to hurt first and foremost the Chinese worker not the American multinational corporation benefiting from Muslim labor. From this honest evaluation, we can trace the material conditions that created systems of oppression and both country’s people can continue protesting, often at danger to our own lives, regardless of ruling class distinctions of “national interests”.

The Bologna Massacre, the ‘Strategy of Tension’ and Operation Gladio

Brett Wilkins

On the sweltering morning of August 2, 1980, a powerful explosion blew apart the central train station in Bologna, Italy, killing 85 people and wounding 200 more. To this day, it is uncertain exactly who is behind the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Italian history. It is clear that right-wing extremists including neo-fascists, Italian secret service agents and rogue outlaw Freemasons carried out the attack. What is less clear is whether, or to what extent, the bombing was part of a clandestine, Europe-wide right-wing state terror operation.

Years of Lead

The period from the late 1960s through the 1980s was one of social and political turmoil in Italy known as the anni di piombo, or years of lead. Terrorism from both the far right and far left was commonplace during these deadly decades, in which some 12,000 attacks claimed hundreds of lives. Until Bologna, the most infamous of these was the kidnapping and murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the communist Red Brigades in 1978.

Bologna, capital of the prosperous Emilia-Romagna region in northeastern Italy, was — and remains — a hotbed of political activity. Home to the world’s oldest university, the city is known by locals as Bologna la dotta, or Bologna the Learned. It is also called Bologna la rossa, or Bologna the Red, as the city has long been a stronghold of the Communist Party. Home to some of the world’s finest food and wine and brimming with cultural treasures, the city has been described as the perfect combination of hedonism and communism.

Still, there was bloodshed in Bologna during those Years of Lead. After police shot and killed Francesco Lorusso, a 24-year-old far-left militant, on March 11, 1977, the city erupted in street clashes that lasted for days. The Italian government sent armored combat vehicles into the university quarter and other hot spots to quash what Francesco Cossiga, the interior minister, called “guerrilla warfare.”

On June 27, 1980, Itavia Flight 870, a DC-9 passenger jet en route from Bologna to Palermo in Sicily, crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, killing all 81 passengers and crew on board. Like the Bologna station bombing, the cause and the culprit behind the disaster remain shrouded in much mystery. At the time, Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga said the plane was accidentally shot down by French fighter jets engaged in a dogfight with Libyan warplanes over the Mediterranean Sea. However, a 1994 report concluded that a terrorist bomb had brought down the plane. This solved nothing, for in 2013 Italy’s top criminal court affirmed the stray missile theory. Regardless of who is responsible for the Ustica massacre, the tragedy weighed heavily on Bologna’s public consciousness during the summer of 1980, the nadir of the Years of Lead.

Ticking Time Bomb

It was sun, sand and sea, not death and destruction, that were on the minds of many of the thousands of travelers who packed into Bologna’s main train station, the Stazione di Bologna Centrale, on that hot morning of August 2, 1980. Summer holidays were just beginning and many of the travelers that day were students on their way to the Adriatic seashore. As the temperature soared, the air-conditioned second-class waiting room quickly filled to capacity. No one noticed the suitcase someone slipped into the crowded room, right up against a load-bearing wall to maximize death and destruction. No one knew that packed inside were 23 kilograms (50 pounds) of military-grade explosives timed to go off at 10:25 am.

Tonino Braccia was a 19-year-old policeman waiting for a train to Rome, where he was to attend his cousin’s wedding. “It was a really beautiful day, he recalled. “Scorching hot.” Braccia said he was “feeling really good” that morning, as his commander had granted him three days’ special leave to travel to the capital. “I was smoking a cigarette and I went into the waiting room but there wasn’t anywhere to sit, it was completely full,” he told the BBC. “So I leaned against the door and looked outside.”

Bloodbath

Malcolm Quantrill, a 44-year-old university professor from London, had just reached the ticket window in the booking hall when he suddenly saw a flash of yellow light. “I did not hear any explosion, just the crash of masonry falling and the sound of breaking glass as the ticket window disintegrated,” he said.

Braccia doesn’t remember the explosion either. “I have tried and tried to remember the moment of the explosion but I really can’t remember anything, even the noise,” he said. “Probably because I was too near it — just two meters away.” The next thing he remembers is waking up under a train as water from a firefighters’ hose dripped down on his face. Most of his clothes had been blown off.

“I heard people screaming and shouting,” recalled Braccia. “There were people running. An acrid smell. My mouth tasted bitter and horrible. There was smelly dust everywhere. Everything was yellow. Blood was pouring out of my mouth, my eyes, my ears, my nose.” He would lose one of his eyes, as well as the use of one of his arms. He is also partially deaf. The young policeman would spend two weeks in an induced coma and undergo 24 operations over the coming years.

Giuseppe Rosa, a bus driver parked outside the station, will never forget the blast. Rosa said he “heard an enormous bang” and then “part of the roof lifted into the air and fell down on itself.” A massive, gaping hole had been blown in the center of the station, the twisted steel girders a testament to the sheer power of the bomb. Rubble was strewn about. From the chaos Quantrill, the British professor, emerged, shocked and disoriented. “There was blood all over me. Everyone was running, shouting and screaming.”

Amid the smoldering debris, weeping rescue workers collected blasted bodies and bits of bodies. Bologna residents joined travelers in offering first aid to injured victims and in digging dead and wounded people from the rubble. Buses, taxis and private cars rushed victims to hospital.

The bombing of Bologna Centrale — the strage di Bologna to Italians — remains the most devastating terrorist attack in Italian history. In the history of modern terror attacks up to that time, only the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants led by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin killed more people. The final death toll in Bologna was 85, with 200 others injured. The youngest to die that day was a 3-year-old girl. The oldest victim was 86 years old.

Strategy of Tension

At first, Italian government and police officials attributed to blast to an accidental explosion, perhaps of an old boiler. Authorities soon received calls from people on both the far right and far left claiming responsibility for the attack. However, it was soon apparent that this was no communist plot. Rather, it was the result of not-so-secret collusion between state officials, fascist terrorists and agents provocateurs, the notorious strategia della tensione, or Strategy of Tension. This unholy alliance of shadowy right-wing forces including corrupt politicians, secret service officers, fascist militants, clergymen and rogue Freemasons would stop at nothing to keep communists from power.

The Strategy of Tension, under which violence and chaos were encouraged rather than suppressed, was ultimately meant to terrorize Italians into voting for the oligarchic Christian Democrats instead of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The policy was backed by the United States, which had a decades-long history of meddling in Italian politics. The Central Intelligence Agency funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-communist parties to influence the outcome of numerous Italian elections beginning in the late 1940s. The CIA also engaged in forgery and other disinformation in a bid to discredit the popular PCI.

The Bologna massacre happened just three hours before a court in the city started the trial of a group of right-wing terrorists, including the notorious fascist Mario Tuti, for the August 4, 1974 bombing of the Italicus Express train from Rome to Brenner, an attack that killed 12 innocent people. Investigators quickly zeroed in on militant fascists, attributing the Bologna bombing to the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR), a neo-fascist terrorist group led by 21-year-old Francesca Mambro and her future husband Valerio Fioravanti, who was 22 at the time. The Bologna prosecutor issued 28 arrest warrants for members of NAR and Terza Posizione, another far-right group.

Terror on Trial

Trials began in March 1987. Prosecutors asserted the terrorists were hoping to spark a revolt that would end with Italy returning to fascist dictatorship, under which it had been ruled as recently as 35 years earlier. Among the defendants were fascist financier Licio Gelli, who once served as a liaison between Rome and Nazi Germany and who was grand master of the banned P2 Masonic Lodge, Pietro Musumeci, a former army general and deputy director of military secret service who was a leading member of P2 and two former professional footballers. It was a veritable Who’s Who of the Italian far right.

In July 1988, four people — Mambro, Fioravanti, Massimiliano Fachini and Sergio Picciafuoco — were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Two others were acquitted. However, the four murder convictions were overturned on appeal in 1992. A new trial began the following year; all of the defendants were again sentenced to life behind bars, except for Fachini, who was acquitted. Lesser sentences for crimes including forming an armed gang, subversive association, obstruction and defamation were also handed down to many of the defendants.

Mambro, who was paroled in 2013, maintains her innocence to this day, although she and Fioravanti have accepted moral responsibility for NAR terror attacks. Speaking about the Bologna bombing in a 1997 interview, she said she “remembers the day perfectly.”

“I heard about it on the news and I thought, ‘what kind of people could do a thing like that?’” Mambro said. “So wanton. So indiscriminate. I wanted to cry.”

Operation Gladio?

In 1984, convicted fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified to Italian investigators that he had been recruited for a 1972 car bombing in Peteano as part of Operation Gladio — Latin for “sword” —  which was launched by the Italian secret service in the 1950s as a stay-behind guerrilla resistance operation in the event of a Soviet invasion or communist takeover of NATO countries. “There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, to organize a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army,” Vinciguerra testified. “Lacking a Soviet military invasion, which might not happen, [they] took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.”

Vinciguerra’s testimony is corroborated by other prominent Italian officials. Gen. Vito Miceli, former head of military intelligence, testified that “the incriminated organization… was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO.” Former defense minister Paulo Taviani told a magistrate that during his time in office, “the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by CIA agents,” while Giandelio Maletti, a former secret service general, said “the CIA gave its tacit approval to a series of bombings in Italy in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power.” Former secret service chief Gen. Gerardo Serravalle said that as Gladio evolved into a terrorist operation, “representatives of the CIA were always present” at meetings, although the Americans did not have voting rights. Serravalle also said that Gladio agents trained a British military base. A parliamentary terrorism committee also revealed that the US funded a training base for “stay behind” operators in Germany.

Although the CIA denied involvement in Gladio, one of the agency’s former directors, William Colby, detailed in his memoir how the CIA was involved in stay-behind operations in Scandinavian countries. Declassified CIA documents also prove that the US helped set up German stay-behind networks, which involved former Nazis including two SS colonels, Hans Rues and Walter Kopp, who the agency described as an “unreconstructed Nazi.”

Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly acknowledged the existence of Gladio in 1990. The Christian Democrat said that 127 weapons caches had been dismantled and claimed that Gladio was not involved in any of the bombings during the Years of Lead. Andreotti also said that in 1964 Italy’s military had joined the Allied Clandestine Committee, which was created seven years earlier by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and was in charge of directing Gladio operations. That same year the European Parliament condemned NATO and the US for their role in Gladio terrorism and for “jeopardizing the democratic structures” of European nations.

Agonizing Uncertainty

While it cannot be said with any great certainty that the Bologna bombing was a Gladio operation, the attacks certainly bears the hallmarks of Operation Gladio. Explosives experts determined that the blast was caused by “retrieved military explosives” of the same sort used in the 1972 Peteano car bombing. On the 20th anniversary of the bombing, Andreotti gave an interview in which he said that there were forces in what would today be called the “deep state” who would stop at nothing to defeat communism. “In the Italian secret services, and in parallel apparatus, there was a conviction that they were involved in a Holy War, that they had been given a sacred mission,” the former prime minister said. “And that anything that passed as anti-communist was legitimate and praiseworthy.”

Forty years later, the terror trail of August 2, 1980 refuses to go cold. In January 2020, Gilberto Cavallini, a 67-year-old former NAR member, was convicted of providing logistical support for the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. Many of those accused or convicted in connection with the massacre maintain their innocence, and Bologna and the world are no closer to knowing for sure who is behind the attack.

For some victims, the uncertainty is agonizing. “I can’t accept that they took my life away from me,” said Braccia, the former policeman. “I had such a zest for life and they destroyed it. We don’t know the truth, and that is the difficulty. We want the truth. Who really did this?”

There is a clock on the wall outside the main entrance to Bologna Centrale. It is permanently stopped at 10:25. Like the unrepaired blast crater and memorial wall in the station hall, it is an eternal reminder of the horrors of that infernal August morning 40 years ago, and of questions that may never be fully answered.

The Consequences of Inequality Can Be Fatal

Richard Wolff

Capitalism, as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows, relentlessly worsens wealth and income inequalities. That inherent tendency is only occasionally stopped or reversed when masses of people rise up against it. That happened, for example, in western Europe and the U.S. during the 1930s Great Depression. It prompted social democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States. So far in capitalism’s history, however, stoppages or reversals around the world proved temporary. The last half-century witnessed a neoliberal reaction that rolled back both European social democracy and the New Deal. Capitalism has always managed to resume its tendential movement toward greater inequality.

Among the consequences of a system with such a tendency, many are awful. We are living through one now as the COVID-19 pandemic, inadequately contained by the U.S. system, savages Americans of middle and lower incomes and wealth markedly more than the rich. The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from crowded cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many of the poor are homeless. Tasteless advice to “shelter at home” is, for them, absurd. Low-income people are often crowded into the kinds of dense housing and dense working conditions that facilitate infection. Poor residents of low-cost nursing homes die disproportionally, as do prison inmates (mostly poor). Pandemic capitalism distributes death in inverse proportion to wealth and income.

Social distancing has destroyed especially low-wage service sector jobs. Rarely did top executives lose their positions, and when they did, they found others. The result is a widened gap between high salaries for some and low or no wages for many. Unemployment invites employers to lower wages for the still employed because they can. Pandemic capitalism has provoked a massive increase in money-creation by central banks. That money fuels rising stock markets and thereby enriches the rich who own most shares. The coincidence of rising stock markets and mass unemployment plus falling wages only adds momentum to worsening inequality.

Unequal economic distributions (of income and wealth) finance unequal political outcomes. Whenever a small minority enjoys concentrated wealth within a society committed to universal suffrage, the rich quickly understand their vulnerability. The non-wealthy majority can use universal suffrage to prevail politically. The majority’s political power could then undo the results of the economy including its unequal distribution of income and wealth. The rich corrupt politics with their money to prevent exactly that outcome. Capitalists spend part of their wealth to preserve (and enlarge) all of their wealth.

The rich and those eager to join them in the U.S. dominate within both Republican and Democratic parties. The rich provide most of the donations that sustain candidates and parties, the funding for armies of lobbyists “advising” legislators, the bribes, and many issue-oriented public campaigns. The laws and regulations that flow from Washington, states, and cities reflect the needs and desires of the rich far more than those of the rest of us. The peculiar structure of U.S. property taxes offers an example. In the U.S., property is divided into two kinds: tangible and intangible. Tangible property includes land, buildings, business inventories, automobiles, etc. Intangible property is mostly stocks and bonds. Rich people hold most of their wealth in the form of intangible property. It is thus remarkable that in the U.S., only tangible property is subject to property tax. Intangible property is not subject to any property tax.

The kinds of property (tangible) that many people own get taxed, but the kinds of property (intangible) mostly owned by the richest minority do not get taxed. If you own a house rented to tenants, you pay a property tax to the municipality where the house is located. You also pay an income tax on the received rents to the federal government and likely also the state government where you live. You are thus taxed twice: once on the value of the property you own and once on the income you derive from that property. If you sell a $100,000 house and then buy $100,000 worth of shares, you will owe no property taxes to any level of government in the United States. You will only owe income tax on dividends paid to you on the shares you own. The form of property you own determines whether you pay property tax or not.

This property tax system is excellent for those rich enough to buy significant amounts of shares. The rich used their wealth to get tax laws written that way for them. The rest of us pay more in taxes because the rich pay less. Because the rich save money—since their intangible property is not taxed—they have that much more to buy the politicians who secure such a tax system for them. And that tax system worsens inequality of wealth and income.

Unequal economic distributions finance unequal cultural outcomes. For example, the goal of a unifying, democratizing public school system has always been subverted by economic inequality. In general (with few exceptions), the better schools cost more to attend. The tutors needed to help struggling students are affordable for the rich but less so for everyone else. The children of the wealthy get the private schools, books, quiet rooms, computers, educational trips, extra art and music lessons, and virtually everything else needed for higher educational achievement.

Unequal economic distributions finance unequal “natural” outcomes. The U.S. now displays two differently priced foods. Rich people can afford “organic” while the rest of us worry but still buy “conventional” food for budget reasons. Countless studies indicate the dangers of herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, food processing methods, and additives. Nonetheless, the two-price food system delivers the better, safer food more to the rich than to everyone else. Likewise, the rich buy the safer automobiles, more safely equip their homes, and clean and filter the water they drink and the air they breathe. No wonder the rich live years longer on average than other people. Inequality is often fatal, not just during pandemics.

In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle worried about and discussed the threat to community, to social cohesion, posed by inequalities of wealth and income. They criticized markets as institutions because, in their view, markets facilitated and aggravated income and wealth inequalities. But modern capitalism sanctifies markets and has thus conveniently forgotten Plato’s and Aristotle’s cautions and warnings about markets and inequality.

The thousands of years since Plato and Aristotle have seen countless critiques, reforms, and revolutions directed against wealth and income inequalities. They have rarely succeeded and have even more rarely persisted. Pessimists have responded, as the Bible does, with the notion that “the poor shall always be with us.” We rather ask the question: Why did so many heroic efforts at equality fail?

The answer concerns the economic system, and how it organizes the people who work to produce and distribute the goods and services societies depend on. If its economic organization splits participants into a small rich minority and a large non-rich majority, the former will likely be determined to reproduce that organization over time. Slavery (master versus slave) did; feudalism (lord versus serf) did; and capitalism (employer versus employee) does. Inequality in the economy is a root cause contributing to society-wide inequalities.

We might then infer that an alternative economic system based on a democratically organized community producing goods and services—not split into a dominant minority and a subordinate majority—might finally end social inequality.