Amid war threats, Washington blocks UN resolution demanding end to sanctions

Bill Van Auken

Washington and its allies Thursday killed a United Nations resolution calling for the lifting of unilateral sanctions that are severely impeding efforts to combat the spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The resolution was drafted by Russia and co-sponsored by 28 other member states. In addition to backing the call by the World Health Organization for an internationally coordinated campaign against the deadly virus, it appealed for all countries to “refrain from raising trade barriers, imposing new export restrictions, or implementing protectionist and discriminatory measures inconsistent with the WTO [World Trade Organization] rules as well as not to apply any unilateral coercive measures undertaken without the mandate of the Security Council.”

Under rules adopted by the UN with the General Assembly not in session, approval of resolutions requires unanimous consent. Joining the US in blocking the resolution were the European Union and the United Kingdom, along with the right-wing anti-Russian governments of Ukraine and Georgia.

Following the vote late Thursday, the Russian mission to the UN issued a statement declaring, “We regret that a small group of states championing sanctions-based policy appeared unready to respond to the call of the UN Secretary-General and refused to cast aside politicized approaches and interests.”

UN Secretary General António Guterres on Wednesday issued a report on the COVID-19 pandemic which, in part, stated that “Sanctions imposed on countries should be waived to ensure access to food, essential supplies and access to COVID-19 tests and medical support. This is the time for solidarity not exclusion.”

In place of the Russian-drafted resolution, the General Assembly approved a version vetted by Washington which issued a toothless call for “solidarity,” while ignoring the issues of sanctions against oppressed countries and the trade war and protectionist measures that effectively preclude any genuine international approach to the pandemic.

The US delegation failed, however, in its attempt to get the UN to label the pandemic as the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus, a theme pushed by the Trump administration to exploit the crisis to further US imperialism’s geo-strategic confrontation with Beijing and to divert attention from the abject failure of the US government to either prepare for or mount an adequate response to the increasingly uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus throughout the US population.

Despite worldwide calls for sanctions relief, Washington has only escalated the unilateral and illegal sanctions that it has imposed upon Iran and Venezuela, so-called “maximum pressure” regimes that are tantamount to a state of war. The US imposed new sanctions against both countries last month.

Iran, with an officially reported 53,183 COVID-19 cases and 3,294 deaths—both believed to be major underestimates of the real ravages of the disease—is suffering one of the highest fatality rates in the world. “Based on our information, every 10 minutes one person dies from the coronavirus and some 50 people become infected with the virus every hour in Iran,” Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur said on Thursday.

Even before the pandemic, the country’s health care system was groaning under the impact of sweeping sanctions that have prevented the country from buying essential medicines and medical supplies on the world market, leading to the deaths of many suffering from cancer and other diseases. The Trump administration has repeatedly made the cynical claim that humanitarian supplies are exempted under its “maximum pressure” campaign, but the reality is that access has been effectively blocked with the blacklisting Iran’s central bank and the threat of third-party sanctions against anyone conducting financial transactions with the country.

Iran’s Academy of Medical Sciences released a blistering statement directed to the UN Secretary General on Thursday declaring that the UN and the WHO, “which claim to defend the rights of humanity, have taken no effective measures to lift the cruel sanctions against our dear children, women, men and patients.”

Denouncing the US for its escalating sanctions, the statement continued: “It is certain that history will judge the ineffectiveness and silence of international organizations claiming protection of international law and human rights against such crimes. These institutions have become toothless, if not complicit, and we will undoubtedly see the unraveling of our world order because of this refusal to take action against crass violations of international and humanitarian law by the U.S. regime.”

On Wednesday, Trump issued an explicit threat of military aggression against Iran, claiming, without providing a shred of evidence, that Iran “or its proxies” in Iraq were plotting a “sneak attack” on “US troops and/or assets in Iraq,” and threatening that Iran would “pay a very heavy price.”

The Pentagon has deployed Patriot missile batteries to Iraq, over the protests of the Iraqi government, whose parliament voted in January, in the wake of the US drone assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s most senior leaders, at Baghdad international airport, for a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of US troops occupying the country. Baghdad has opposed the missile deployments, seeing them as potential preparation for an all-out war that could turn war-battered Iraq itself into a battlefield yet again.

Threats against Venezuela, the target of equally punishing sanctions have been even more explicit, with Trump announcing Wednesday that US Navy warships and other assets are being deployed to the Venezuelan coast on the pretext of combating drug trafficking. The announcement followed a US Justice Department indictment of the Venezuelan president and other top officials on trumped-up drug-related charges, replete with the issuing of “Wanted” posters placing a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head.

The threat of military violence follows the imposition of yet another round of sanctions against Venezuela last month.

Thus far, Venezuela has reported only 146 confirmed cases and five deaths, but the crisis of the country’s health care system under the impact of US sanctions threatens to turn the pandemic into a death sentence against countless numbers of workers and poor.

The flailing militarist threats of the White House, a desperate bid to divert growing anger over the catastrophic failure of the US government to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus, have provoked signs of dissension within the Pentagon as the military brass faces the threat of the pandemic sweeping through military units operating in close quarters, including on ships and overseas deployments.

The magazine Foreign Policy posted an article on its website Friday reporting that “The U.S. Defense Department has pushed back sharply against President Donald Trump’s decision to send a phalanx of naval assets to interdict drug shipments in the Caribbean Sea.” It cited officials as saying that the deployment was “all politics” and came at a time in which the Pentagon was “pausing some deployments due to the impacts of COVID-19.”

It also follows the firestorm over the outbreak of coronavirus on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the sacking of its commanding officer, Capt. Brett Crozier, for demanding that the Navy address the crisis by providing quarantine facilities for the more than 4,000 sailors aboard the ship who had been exposed to the deadly virus.

Crozier was sacked after his appeal to the Navy, which insisted, “Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset—our sailors,” was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Justifying his decision to relieve Crozier of his command, acting US Navy Secretary Thomas Modly— installed after the former secretary, Richard Spencer, was fired in connection with Trump’s pardoning of the convicted war criminal Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher—said that his plea “created the perception that the Navy is not on the job, the government is not on the job and it’s just not true.”

The captain’s plea, issued in the face of the refusal of the Navy or the Trump administration to take any action, was indeed true in relation not only to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, but to the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as a whole.

The response of his own crew was made clear by videos posted on Facebook early Friday showing several hundred sailors massing in an airplane hangar and chanting his name as he walked down a gangplank from the vessel.

An online petition posted on change.org demanding Crozier’s reinstatement gathered 150,000 signatures within barely 24 hours. Among those signing were members of his crew, Navy veterans and relatives of active-duty sailors.

One sailor wrote, “He’s my CO and I want him to know he did right by us, even if it won’t bring him back.”

Another signer stated, “The Captain’s primary job is to protect the health and well-being of his crew. Captain Crozier did this. And he was punished. In contrast, soldiers convicted of war crimes are pardoned by Trump. That is appalling and wrong. The world is upside down.”

And a third wrote, “Just because his chain of command was prepared to let the ship become a floating morgue he was not.”

Chinese Government Scholarship – Bilateral Program 2020 for International Students (Undergraduate, Masters, PhD)

Application Deadline: 15th April 2020

Eligible Countries: International

To Be Taken At (Country): China

About the Award: The Bilateral Program supports undergraduate students, graduate students, general scholars and senior scholars. Undergraduate scholarship recipients must register for Chinese-taught credit courses. Graduate and non-degree scholarship students can register for either the Chinese-taught program or the English-taught program if applicable.

Type: Undergraduate, Masters, PhD

Eligibility:  

• Applicants must be a citizen of a country other than the People’s Republic of China, and be in good health.
• The requirements for applicants’ degree and age are that applicants must:
  • be a high school graduate under the age of 25 when applying for the undergraduate programs;
  • be a bachelor’s degree holder under the age of 35 when applying for the master’s programs;
  • be a master’s degree holder under the age of 40 when applying for the doctoral programs;
  • be under the age of 45 and have a high school diploma (or higher) when applying for the general scholar programs;
  • be a master’s degree holder or an associate professor (or above) under the age of 50 when applying for the senior scholar programs.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Bilateral Program provides both full scholarships and partial scholarships.

Duration of Program:

• Undergraduate students: 4-7years
• Master’s students: 2-5 years
• Doctoral students: 3-6 years
• General scholars: up to 2 years
• Senior scholars: up to 2 years

How to Apply:

1. • Step 1 – Apply to the dispatching authorities for overseas study of your home country for CGS opportunity;

• • Step 2 – Apply to your target university for the Pre-admission Letter once recommended by the dispatching authorities as an eligible candidate (you will receive an Award Letter for CGS Candidate);

• • Step 3 – Complete the online application procedure at CGS Information Management System for International Students (Visit http://www.csc.edu.cn/studyinchina or http://www.campuschina.org and click “Application Online” to log in), submit online the completed Application Form for Chinese Government Scholarship, and print a hard copy. You should consult the dispatching authorities for overseas study of your home country for Instructions of CGS Information Management System for International Students and Agency Number;
  • Step 4 – Submit all of your application documents to the dispatching authorities of your home country before the deadline.

It is important to find out the Application documents required on the Program Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Coronavirus and the State-of-Emergency Pandemic

David Rosen

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.

– Rahm Emanuel

A silent pandemic is sweeping the nation and across the globe, the panic of the ever-expanding authoritarian state. The coronavirus medical emergency is legitimizing the ever-increasing power of a vigorous state apparatus operating at the federal, state and local levels. The great challenge is what will happen to these powers when the current Covid-19 epidemic is contained?

The U.S. has joined more than a half-dozen European countries to impose a state of emergency on its people. Within the European Community, Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Moldova and Romania have declared a state of emergency; Italy and Spain have imposed states of emergency under their respective constitutional provisions. Hungary, under Viktor Orban, is moving closer to a dictatorship. And still other countries — most notably China — have used the coronavirus epidemic to strengthen state power.

On March 13^th, Pres. Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency, invoking what is known as the Stafford Act. According to Just Security, the Act “empowers” Dept. of Homeland Security’s FEMA “to assist state and local governments in responding to the outbreak by coordinating relief efforts and through the release of a reported $50 billion in funding.” The Act was previously invoked in 2000 by Pres. Bill Clinton in response to outbreaks of West Nile Virus in New York and New Jersey. Going further, it warns, “Throughout history, public health has been used as rationale for limiting rights, legitimately and illegitimately.”

The Brennan Center reports that in addition to the Stafford Act, a president can invoke more than 100 statutory powers to declare a national emergency. It notes that Trump invoked the National Emergencies Act — 10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) — to help build the Mexican border wall. It adds, “an additional 13 statutory powers become available when a national emergency is declared by Congress.”

Trump opined in January: “Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!” He followed up, insisting: “We can call a national emergency because of the security of our country … I haven’t done it. I may do it … We can call a national emergency and build it very quickly.”  In March, he used the emergency to rationalize building the wall to halt the coronavirus.

In March, the Trump’s Justice Department upped the ante of the expanding security state when — as reported in Politico — it “quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States.”

It sought to enable the Attorney General to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.” And that this power would apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.”

Seeking to obfuscate a likely Congressional rejection, the DOJ quickly back peddled. A department spokeswoman argued that the proposals were made to “promote consistency” and would empower judges, not the executive branch. “The goal of these provisions (is) to ensure that the justice system continues to operate equitably and effectively, and to harmonize what is already being done on an ad hoc basis by courts around the country,” she wrote. “Bottom line: The proposed legislative text confers powers upon judges. It does not confer new powers upon the executive branch.” If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

***

Since the coronavirus emerged in Washington state in January, governors and mayors across the country have decried not only Trump’s inept leadership but his administration’s failures as well. Innumerable officials have raised concern over the lack of testing equipment, masks, ventilators and other needed personal protection equipment. This occurred at the same time when, according to Mother Jones, the federal “government sent nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to China” and State Department “agency announced it was prepared to spend up to $100 million to assist China as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths continued to rise there.”

The tension between governors and the president is exemplified by the contentious jousting match been Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Trump. Cuomo represents the battle underprepared local officials are waging to contain the ever-expanding virus; Trump appears at his daily press briefings as if at a campaign rally in which only information that makes him look good is presented. This tension recently came to a head when Trump proposed the following:

We might not have to do it, but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine, short-term, two weeks on New York. Probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut. This would be an enforceable quarantine. I’d rather not do it, but maybe we need it.

Cuomo quickly responded, “It’s a preposterous idea, frankly.” And added, “Why you would want to just create total pandemonium on top of a pandemic I have no idea.” He explained, “You wouldn’t at this point literally fracture the entire nation because it’s not just New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, it’s Louisiana and New Orleans. The numbers will continue to rise and every few days it’s going to be another hotspot.” Trump withdrew his proposal.

Faced with the mounting crisis, Cuomo declared a state of emergency in early March. According to some reports, the law expanded his administrative power and provided him with $40 million to fight coronavirus. It enables him

to issue edicts “necessary to cope with” potential disasters, ranging from a “disease outbreak” to a volcanic eruption. He defended his new power, saying to reporters, “You recognize the law is deficient, you recognize just suspension of a law doesn’t give you the ability to do anything affirmative,” Cuomo said rhetorically. “Fix it for this situation, but don’t fix it for the other situations?”

Cuomo’s enhanced executive authority raised the ire of some. Manhattan Assemblyman Richard Gottfried argued that no past governor has ever asked for the powers Cuomo requested during any previous public health emergencies. “The governor and health commissioner have, for decades, had extraordinarily broad executive powers.” He went on, “I’ve never heard a governor or health commissioner in any disaster or emergency say that there was something that needed to get done that couldn’t get done because of a lack of what this bill does.”

Cuomo isn’t alone among governors to invoke executive authority in an effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak. Al Jazeera provides an overview assessment of how all the states – as of March 31^st — have responded to the epidemic, including those that have invoked a state of “public health” emergency. Their executive actions include:

+ Closing public schools – e.g., Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, etc.

+ Closing public libraries, museums, parks, etc. – e.g., Alaska, Hawaii.

+ Closing of “nonessential businesses (e.g., bars, eateries, wineries, cinemas, casinos, racetracks, fitness centers, bowling alleys, private clubs, tattoo parlors, nail salons, barber shops and other public spaces — except for take-out – e.g., Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Washington, DC.

+ Imposing stay-at-home/shelter-in-place orders – e.g., California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont.

+ Have hospitals postpone elective or non-essential surgeries — e.g., Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts.

+ Restrictions on visitors to elderly care facilities, hospitals, prisons and daycare centers — e.g., Texas, Washington.

+ Quarantine restrictions — e.g., Hawaii (on tourists).

+ Delay political primaries – e.g., Indiana, Louisiana.

There are individual variations of implementation within these categories. For example, in Florida bars close at 5 pm and public beaches remain open; some states (e.g., California) imposed mandatory restraints while others (e.g., Idaho) encouraged voluntary compliance; and there are variations on restricted crowd size (e.g., 250 in Tennessee and Texas, 100 in Utah, 50 in Illinois and Kansas, 25 in Rhode Island, 10 in Iowa and Nebraska).

For all the states that imposed some form of emergency decree, there are common exemptions. They include (i) people covered (e.g., “essential workers” list doctors and nurses, police and firefighters as well as Amazon workers and UPS drivers); (ii) businesses covered (e.g., grocery store, pharmacy, doctor’s office) and (iii) activities covered (e.g., getting groceries, exercise).

Some states have yet to order the closure of major businesses, restaurants or bars, including Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming. And Texas adopted a “patchwork” of local regulations allowing cities, counties and school districts to adopt proprietary approaches to the virus.

Finally, on March 22^nd, Trump announced the National Guard would be deployed to assist in efforts to contain the virus in California, New York and Washington State.

It should also be noted that some mayors and city administrators have also declared a local state of emergency. Such actions have occurred in big cities like New York and smaller cities like Albuquerque as well as towns like Bellingham (WA) and the Minooka Village (IL).

***

The U.S. has a long way to go to before it returns to the society that existed before Covid-19. Addressing the immediate pandemic is one thing; providing a successful antibiotic something else; and still more troubling is preparing for recurring round(s) of the disease and/or the possibilities of still other viruses yet to come. Equally troubling, Trump’s cheer-leading about a great economic recovery that will arrive once the coronavirus is contained is a political fiction. As history sadly shows, the Great Depression was only truly ended with the coming of WW-II.

The current pandemic has exposed fundamental problems with the nation’s health-care infrastructure, and it will likely have to be rebuilt as the country recovers. The rebuilding of the U.S. economy – let alone the globalized system – will take months if not years to achieve. More troubling, the epidemic will likely only exaggerate the social crisis that Trump’s presidency sought to mask. This festering crisis includes deepening inequality, growing despair, increased suicides, mounting drug overdoses and rising levels of family abuse.

The post-Covid-19 recovery will likely be marked by high levels of unemployment or underemployment (especially among “gig” workers and “independent contractors); innumerable closing of retail outlets, restaurants and mid-market businesses; and staggering levels of evictions of renters with accompanying homelessness. More troubling, there might be a significant increase in crime, whether by scam artists, street muggings, car thefts and house break-ins. This situation might well exaggerate social tensions, leading to increased white racist attacks on “immigrants” and other people of color, among others.

Under such conditions, the new era of enhanced emergency authority required to address a pandemic could easily provide the justification for greater police and military control of civic life. And no one is better situated to push such an agenda then an insecure, aggressive and autocratic president.

Limits to the deployment of the military personnel to address civil conflicts fall broadly under what’s known as the Posse Comitatus Act. It was adopted during the early days of the Jim Crow era (1878) to enforce racial segregation in the South. Its purpose was to block federal troops from policing the South by limiting federal troops deployed on U.S. soil and prohibiting them from enforcing domestic laws. Members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are prohibited from engaging in direct law enforcement activities, including search, seizure and arrest. Troops can only be deployed during an insurrection or invasion on U.S. soil; currently, the Coast Guard is exempt from these restrictions for drug enforcement purposes. The president must secure such authority from the Congress.

The challenge facing the nation is not “merely” containing and recovering from the coronavirus but protect the nation — and its people — from the pandemic of emergency state authority.

Capitalism’s Triple Crisis

Mariana Mazzucato

Capitalism is facing at least three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a climate crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.” Until just two months ago, the news media were full of frightening images of overwhelmed firefighters, not overwhelmed health-care providers.

This triple crisis has revealed several problems with how we do capitalism, all of which must be solved at the same time that we address the immediate health emergency. Otherwise, we will simply be solving problems in one place while creating new ones elsewhere. That is what happened with the 2008 financial crisis. Policymakers flooded the world with liquidity without directing it toward good investment opportunities. As a result, the money ended up back in a financial sector that was (and remains) unfit for purpose.

The COVID-19 crisis is exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry.

Worse, governments are now extending loans to businesses at a time when private debt is already historically high. In the United States, total household debt just before the current crisis was $14.15 trillion, which is $1.5 trillion higher than it was in 2008 (in nominal terms). And lest we forget, it was high private debt that caused the global financial crisis.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, many countries have pursued austerity, as if public debt were the problem. The result has been to erode the very public-sector institutions that we need to overcome crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Since 2015, the United Kingdom has cut public-health budgets by £1 billion ($1.2 billion), increasing the burden on doctors in training (many of whom have left the National Health Service altogether), and reducing the long-term investments needed to ensure that patients are treated in safe, up-to-date, fully staffed facilities. And in the US – which has never had a properly funded public-health system – the Trump administration has been persistently trying to cut funding and capacity for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other critical institutions.

On top of these self-inflicted wounds, an overly “financialized” business sector has been siphoning value out of the economy by rewarding shareholders through stock-buyback schemes, rather than shoring up long-run growth by investing in research and development, wages, and worker training. As a result, households have been depleted of financial cushions, making it harder to afford basic goods like housing and education.

The bad news is that the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating all these problems. The good news is that we can use the current state of emergency to start building a more inclusive and sustainable economy. The point is not to delay or block government support, but to structure it properly. We must avoid the mistakes of the post-2008 era, when bailouts allowed corporations to reap even higher profits once the crisis was over, but failed to lay the foundation for a robust and inclusive recovery.

This time, rescue measures absolutely must come with conditions attached. Now that the state is back to playing a leading role, it must be cast as the hero rather than as a naive patsy. That means delivering immediate solutions, but designing them in such a way as to serve the public interest over the long term.

For example, conditionalities can be put in place for government support to businesses. Firms receiving bailouts should be asked to retain workers, and ensure that once the crisis is over they will invest in worker training and improved working conditions. Better still, as in Denmark, government should be supporting businesses to continue paying wages even when workers are not working – simultaneously helping households to retain their incomes, preventing the virus from spreading, and making it easier for businesses to resume production once the crisis is over.

Moreover, bailouts should be designed to steer larger companies to reward value creation instead of value extraction, preventing share buybacks and encouraging investment in sustainable growth and a reduced carbon footprint. Having declared last year that it will embrace a stakeholder value model, this is the Business Roundtable’s chance to back its words with action. If corporate America is still dragging its feet now, we should call its bluff.

When it comes to households, governments should look beyond loans to the possibility of debt relief, especially given current high levels of private debt. At a minimum, creditor payments should be frozen until the immediate economic crisis is resolved, and direct cash injections used for those households that are in direst need.

And the US should offer government guarantees to pay 80-100% of distressed companies’ wage bills, as the UK and many European Union and Asian countries have done.

It is also time to rethink public-private partnerships. Too often, these arrangements are less symbiotic than parasitic. The effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine could become yet another one-way relationship in which corporations reap massive profits by selling back to the public a product that was born of taxpayer-funded research. Indeed, despite US taxpayers’ significant public investment in vaccine development, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, recently conceded that newly developed COVID-19 treatments or vaccines might not be affordable to all Americans.

We desperately need entrepreneurial states that will invest more in innovation – from artificial intelligence to public health to renewables. But as this crisis reminds us, we also need states that know how to negotiate, so that the benefits of public investment return to the public.

A killer virus has exposed major weaknesses within Western capitalist economies. Now that governments are on a war footing, we have an opportunity to fix the system. If we don’t, we will stand no chance against the third major crisis – an increasingly uninhabitable planet – and all the smaller crises that will come with it in the years and decades ahead.

Thousands face coronavirus disaster on cruise ships as governments close their ports

Tom Casey

On Monday Holland America Line (HAL) president Orlando Ashford, referring to the nearly ten thousand cruise ship passengers still currently stranded at sea worldwide, called the current situation facing the cruise industry “a humanitarian crisis,” on the company website’s blog. His statement was directed specifically toward the case of MS Zaandam and the MS Rotterdam, which until Thursday afternoon had been stranded at sea with four reported deaths, eight individuals testing positive for COVID-19, and nearly 200 reporting flu-like symptoms.

Maasdam S-Class Cruise Ship Holland America Line (Wikipedia Commons)

According to a March 27 report by the Guardian, HAL ships the Zaandam and the Rotterdam were among “at least 10 ships around the world still stuck at sea after having been turned away from their destination ports in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The report stated that it had identified “five ships in the Americas that were unable to unload nearly 6,000 passengers. At least three other ships were having trouble off the coast of Australia, including one which sought urgent medical attention for an outbreak of respiratory illness. Two more ships were trying to get passengers to ports in Italy.”

Sailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina on March 7, the Zaandam had originally been scheduled to disembark passengers in Santiago, Chile, on March 21. On Monday, March 16, Chile, as well as several other South American countries in which the ship had been scheduled to dock, announced the closing of their borders to international travel. While stranded off the coast of South America, the ship underwent an outbreak of flulike symptoms, beginning with 13 guests and 29 crew reporting feeling ill to the ship’s medical facilities.

HAL subsequently announced that it would reroute the course of the Zaandam to head to Fort Lauderdale, Florida for March 30, with the intention of disembarking its guests. As the onboard outbreak intensified, and concerns over the lack of COVID-19 tests available on board increased, the company arranged for the Zaandam to rendezvous with its sister ship, the MS Rotterdam, off the coast of Panama, where it would receive additional supplies and support, as well as coronavirus testing kits.

Since testing began on the Zaandam, nine passengers have been confirmed to have contracted the virus and two have died.

While HAL initially announced “a plan to transfer groups of healthy Zaandam guests to the Rotterdam,” Ashford later clarified that “the intention is for these two ships to work in tandem to try to protect the health of those that are healthy, and so that we can create room and space [to] care for the ones that are sick.”

After some deliberation, with some uncertainty as to whether both ships would be allowed to cross the Panama canal, the Panamanian government eventually announced that it would facilitate the Zaandam and Rotterdam’s passage and trans-ship operations, but forbade any passengers or crew to enter the country, in order to “safeguard the health of Panamanians,” a Reuters report said. After the successful rendezvous, the two ships proceeded to Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades.

On Sunday, the US Department of Homeland Security and the United States Coast Guard released a Marine Safety Information Bulletin (MSIB) stating that “medical facilities in the Port of Miami, for example, are no longer accepting MEDEVAC [medical evacuation] patients due to limited hospital capacity and it is expected that neighboring counties will follow suit.”

The next day, Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis gave a callous and xenophobic televised statement to Fox News, in which he condemned the cruise ships seeking safe harbor in Florida. “It’d be really bad if new infections were just being airdropped in from other hotspots,” he said. “A lot of these are foreigners […] We cannot afford to have people who are not even Floridians dumped into south Florida, using up […] those valuable resources. We view this as a big, big problem.”

Although President Donald Trump asked the Florida governor to rescind his opposition to cruise ships docking in the state, stating, “I’m going to do what’s right for, not only us but for humanity,” no measures have been taken as of yet to reverse the Coast Guard’s decision.

In compliance with the MSIB, any of the ill passengers from the Zaandam will remain on the ship “for an indefinite period of time.” Following further directives as outlined by the bulletin, HAL made private hospital and transportation arrangements for the ill who have tested positive with COVID-19, and those who are in critical condition. Additionally, it was not until Thursday morning that it was announced that the ships would be allowed to dock, and healthy passengers and crew permitted to travel home via privately chartered travel arrangements organized by the company.

The response of the US Coast Guard and Governor DeSantis sparked an outpouring of popular condemnation, as evidenced by a Twitter user’s comment that was accompanied by the hashtags #letZaandamDock and #letRotterdamDock: “The way these people are being treated is appalling. Please allow them to dock so they can return home to loved ones.” Another commenter wrote, “This is immoral. My 90 year old grandfather is on that cruise, a retired GP who dedicated his life to helping others when they were ill. Why will nobody help them?” Another user stated, “Shame on Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis for actively trying to get the Zaandam cruise ship diverted away from Florida. We are Americans. We don’t turn our backs on people in need, regardless of the risks.”

The “humanitarian crisis” facing the cruise ship industry is far greater in scope than that outlined by Ashford on Monday. In addition to the approximately ten thousand cruise ship customers still stranded worldwide, there are many more ships with just their crews on board being denied entry into ports of call.

As of this Thursday, at least eight cruise ships containing no passengers, but thousands of crew members have been stranded off the coast of Sydney, Australia. On March 15, the Australian government under Liberal Party Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that these crew-occupied ships would not be allowed to release their crew in Australia.

Among these vessels, which include the Ruby Princess (Princess Cruise Line/PCL), Ovation of the Seas and Voyager of the Seas (Royal Caribbean Cruise Line/RCCL), Spirit and Splendor (Carnival Cruise Line/CCL) and the Solstice (Celebrity Cruises), there have been hundreds of reported confirmed cases of COVID-19 onboard.

While the Morrison government has made tremendously hypocritical gestures toward its intention to fulfill “maritime obligations to protect the welfare of seafarers,” it is singlehandedly responsible for the disaster faced by thousands of ship employees.

While the national Australian Border Force (ABF) has given minimal support to ships for crew members only in critical health conditions, the Australian federal government has denied the repatriation of thousands of workers, many of whom face rapidly deteriorating circumstances on board. After the ABF mistakenly allowed nearly 2,700 potentially infected passengers to disembark from the Ruby Princess in Sydney Harbor on March 19th, the federal government responded by shifting the responsibility for docking vessels onto local governments.

There are several other crew-only ships around the world that have reported confirmed cases of COVID-19 on board, including the Celebrity Eclipse and Infinity, Anthem, Navigator, Oasis, and Symphony of the Seas (RCCL), as well as the Coral Princess (PCL), to name a few. An Indonesian crew member aboard the Marella Dream died on March 27 with symptoms that were consistent with that of COVID-19 but was unable to be tested for the virus. It is highly likely that additional tens of thousands of stranded ship workers stand to be endangered by the shipboard spread of the Coronavirus, as well as by the inability of national and local governments to adequately address the crisis.

Reporting to Cruise Law News, a crew advocacy group, an anonymous crew member on the Ruby Princess stated, “Crew are terrified. No solid information, only pep talks broadcast by Hotel Director. [Senior Captain of Fleet] made an angry announcement as crew were not following isolation [protocol], saying no port would allow ship to dock in present condition and it would be months before crew would see their families. […] No idea how many actually have Covid but MANY have symptoms including lack of taste and smell.”

Other cruise ship workers report horrifying conditions aboard stranded vessels, including quarantine in rooms with no sunlight or windows as well as inadequate air flow and internet access, minimal information from the officers, insufficient disease testing, isolation and containment measures, as well as gag orders and pressures not to speak to anyone about the conditions they face on board. There is little doubt that as governments worldwide, and particularly in the United States, fail to address the catastrophe facing the cruise ship industry, thousands more ship workers and passengers will become ill and potentially lose their lives.

El-Sisi uses coronavirus pandemic to tighten grip on Egypt

Jean Shaoul

General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who seized power in a bloody coup in 2013, is clamping down ever more severely as the coronavirus pandemic pushes Egypt’s fragile economy into meltdown and its impoverished people into destitution.

President of Egypt Abdel Fatah el-Sisi (en.kremlin.ru)

Earlier, the government extended the state of emergency, in existence since April 2017, for the eleventh time, allowing el-Sisi to continue ruling by decree.

Egypt did nothing to prepare for the onset of the virus, despite being identified in early February, along with Algeria and South Africa, as one of the African countries most at risk. As of April 2, the official number of cases in Egypt had risen to 779, while the death toll had risen to 52, including at least one doctor.

These figures are bogus. On March 23, the tightly controlled media announced that two senior members of the Egyptian armed forces, Major General Shafea Abdel Halim Dawoud and Major General Khaled Shaltout, had died, supposedly “while taking part in efforts to contain the outbreak.” A third high ranking officer, Mahmoud Shahin, had also tested positive, indicating the rampant spread of the virus.

El-Sisi had been absent from public view, making his first television appearance on March 21 after two weeks of self-isolation to deny that the true infection rate was much higher than official figures. A University of Toronto study in mid-March estimated the number of cases in Egypt at 19,310.

There is little news about Egypt in the media of the imperialist powers, which have backed the blood-soaked dictatorship. Egypt expelled Guardian freelance journalist Ruth Michaelson for reporting the Toronto study and reprimanded Declan Walsh, the New York Times’ Cairo bureau chief, for tweeting about it. The authorities said that anyone found spreading “rumours” about the prevalence of coronavirus would face imprisonment and fines. Egypt ranks as one of the world’s foremost jailers of journalists, along with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China.

Since coming to power, el-Sisi has thrown 60,000 political activists, critics, including secular and Muslim Brotherhood politicians, journalists, and human rights defenders, into Egypt’s notoriously overcrowded and squalid prisons. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds have died in custody due to medical negligence or the atrocious conditions.

On March 24, the government imposed a two-week, nationwide, 11-hour night-time curfew, and ordered shops and malls selling non-essential goods to close after 5pm and at the weekend. Those caught breaking the curfew face a fine of up to $254 or jail. Under conditions where one in three Egyptians lives on less than $1.40 a day and, according to the World Bank, “some 60 percent of Egypt’s population is either poor or vulnerable,” such closures condemn tens of millions of families to destitution. Evening street markets are a way of life in Egypt, where people supplement their meagre earnings by selling a few goods or possessions.

These restrictions are of limited value without testing suspected cases, tracking their contacts and treating the severely ill, which the regime has neither the capacity nor willingness to undertake.

The virus is likely to spread rapidly through Egypt’s densely packed cities, especially Cairo, home to 21 million people living cheek by jowl in tiny spaces. Even under normal conditions, there is a shortage of hospitals to care for the country’s 102 million population and a severe shortage of protective equipment for medical staff.

The government has deployed the army to disinfect the streets, patrol neighbourhoods and enforce the lockdown. Its central task is to ensure there are no mass protests against el-Sisi. Security forces stormed the house of a doctor in the port city of Alexandria, because he criticised on his Facebook page the government’s failure to provide personal protective equipment.

The Batel campaign is calling for the release of more than 1,000 imprisoned doctors and health-care professionals to help wage the fight against the spread of the coronavirus. "Egypt cannot be suffering from a shortage of medical personnel, while there are more than 1,000 doctors and health-care workers in prisons," the campaign said, posting the names of more than 100 doctors arrested by the authorities.

Alongside the plummet in tourism, remittances from six million Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf States are in jeopardy due to the fall in oil prices, plunging demand and pandemic-related closures. For example, Kuwait, where 800,000 Egyptians work, is repatriating 17,000 Egyptian teachers as schools have closed until August.

It leaves Egypt’s already shaky economy staring into the abyss, amid years of inflation, particularly following the 50 percent devaluation and economic measures demanded by the IMF in return for a bailout. Foreign direct investment fell from US$7.7 billion in 2017-18 to $5.9 billion in 2018-19, a drop of $1.8 billion, while foreign debt rose by $16.1 billion, reaching $108.7 billion at the end of June 2019, a 17.3 percent increase on June 2018.

Three weeks ago, el-Sisi announced that he was setting aside $6.3 billion as an “emergency economic rescue package”—mostly tax cuts for business, tax holidays for the tourism sector and lower energy costs for factories. He tossed a few crumbs—$143 million—at the doctors, whose starting salary is around $159 per month, forcing thousands to emigrate. This sop amounts to a post-tax annual increase of $15 to $25, with no increase in the $1.20 infectious disease allowance.

On March 16, the central bank cut interest rates by three percentage points and provided a $1.27 billion line of credit to listed companies to shore up Egypt’s stock market, which had fallen by 40 percent in the month since the first case was reported mid-February. The banks have since been ordered to limit withdrawals by individuals and businesses to control hoarding, inflation and stockpiling.

Egypt’s second richest man, Naguib Sawiris, speaking on the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath channel, demanded that the government order people back to work once the curfew ends on April 8 to prevent economic collapse. “We need a revolutionary decision, regardless of the consequences… Even if people get sick, they will recover. It only kills 1 percent of patients, who are mostly elderly people.” He threatened to commit suicide if the curfew was extended.

El-Sisi’s response to the coronavirus is in keeping with his role as an enforcer for Egyptian big business, which includes the military. During his nearly seven years in office, he has presided over brutal austerity, while promoting privatization, deregulation and the lifting of government subsidies and integrating Egypt ever more deeply into Washington's alliance with the Sunni petro-states and Israel against Iran.

The Egyptian working class can only build the necessary movement against the banks, corporations and world imperialism by forging a new revolutionary leadership, uniting the impoverished peasantry behind it, and unifying their struggle with that of workers throughout the Middle East and internationally.

It means waging an implacable struggle against the pseudo-left forces that seek to subordinate the struggle of the Egyptian working class and peasantry to one or another section of Egypt’s venal capitalist ruling class. The Revolutionary Socialists (RS) have a shameless record of backing one bourgeois faction after another, from the military junta that followed Mubarak’s ouster, to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and then to Sisi and his coup, which the RS hailed as a “second revolution.” In its latest statement on the pandemic, the RS states, “And we should strive for real change through revolution but can begrudgingly settle for radical reform for the time being” [emphasis added]. The statement concludes with the pathetic declaration, “As responsible citizens of the world, we should expose the current flaws of the system and demand change.”

General Motors imposes wage cuts and layoffs on Brazilian workers with aid of unions

Tomas Castanheira

On Monday, March 30, General Motors announced layoffs starting on April 13 at all of its plants in Brazil, affecting more than 15,000 workers. Under a deal worked out with the unions, the workers will see their net wages cut by between 10 and 25 percent, along with the suspension of benefits.

Union president Cidão do Sindicato (center) with the governor of São Paulo and GM executives at inauguration of a new complex in São Caetano do Sul

For GM, the agreement could slash payroll expenses by more than 60 percent. Besides promoting a direct cut in salaries, the company will use the layoffs regime provided under Brazilian law, which gives it the opportunity to stop making half of jobless payments. The other half is deducted from the Workers’ Support Fund (FAT), as an advance on unemployment benefits, i.e., it is paid for by the workers themselves.

The measure will also have a decisive impact on the thousands of workers at GM’s suppliers. At the Gravataí Assembly Plant, in Rio Grande do Sul, where GM directly hires 3,000 workers, there are another 3,000 working for third-party auto parts suppliers.

The unions have celebrated this deal as a way to save jobs. However, it provides no guarantee of job stability for the workers. On the contrary. In recent years, these layoff agreements at GM, as at other companies, have always been followed by mass permanent job cuts.

Before making its public announcement, GM had already been meeting with the unions to draw up the strategy for approving this attack. As attested to by the president of the Metalworkers Union of São Caetano, Aparecido Inácio da Silva, in an interview published last Thursday: “I am talking—and it hasn’t started today—with the company to reach the best path from April 13 on.”

The union, led by the reactionary Força Sindical, which officially represents around 7,800 GM workers in São Caetano do Sul, in the state of São Paulo, by the next day announced that it had just “concluded the layoff agreement with the management of General Motors.”

After announcing that it had reached the agreement, the union said that it would consult the workers through an application that would be made available on its website. This application was never posted on the site, but Cidão do Sindicato (as Aparecido Inácio da Silva is known) declared to Estado de São Paulo on Monday that the online voting was already coming to an end, with “majority acceptance.”

The Metalworkers Union of Gravataí (Sinmgra), directed by Força Sindical, announced the result of the vote even before it was held! In an interview with Jornal do Comércio, the president of Sinmgra, Valcir Ascari, had already taken for granted that the 3,000 workers at Montadora de Gravataí would agree with the union.

The online vote, held on Wednesday, was a complete scam. The workers had only from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to vote, and during that period the site was offline. The union instructed the workers to “update the page until they get a connection” and deleted comments protesting the holding of the vote under these conditions.

Production line of the Chevrolet Onix

The unions make little effort to hide their role as another layer of GM management, working to guarantee the company’s profits. As Cidão do Sindicato said: “We respect and defend the rights of the workers, worried about their health, but we have to see the issue of production, no one can afford compromises if there is no income.”

The Metalworkers Union of Joinville, in Santa Catarina, where GM has an engine plant, had not made a statement about the layoffs. However, the positions taken by the union, which is affiliated to the CUT, the union federation led by the Workers Party, leaves no room for doubt about the interests it represents.

The president of the union and director of the National Metalworkers Confederation, Rodolfo de Ramos, has repeatedly defended the attempts of the state’s extreme right-wing governor, Carlos Moisés, to make workers return to their jobs. Ramos regretted that the largest company in which his union operates restarted production on Monday with only 30 percent of the workforce, when 50 percent could already have returned. According to him, the union is “at the disposal of the companies ... to guarantee income, employment and the continuity of the productive process and the effective resumption of the economy.”

With the support of the CUT union, the government of Santa Catarina advances the same line as Brazil’s fascist President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected to the Brazilian presidency as the candidate of the Christian Social Party, of which Moisés is also a member. This policy of promoting mass infection of the workers by COVID-19 was confronted by a wildcat strike of meat-processing workers in the south of the state, on February 19.

Workers on the night shift at the Forquilhinha plant of JBS, the Brazilian-based meat processing conglomerate, left work in the middle of the shift, and those who arrived for the morning shift refused to enter and protested outside the company. The workers denounced the extremely unsafe conditions, with some 600 workers crammed in on top of each other in a closed shed. The demonstration was repressed by the state Military Police, who attacked the workers with pepper spray and arrested the press secretary of the SINTIACR union, who had arrived on the scene.

Aerial view of GM plant in São Caetano

The Brazilian working class needs to confront the demand by the capitalists that they choose between returning to work and infecting themselves and their families with the deadly new coronavirus, or that they sink into poverty, including starvation, as Bolsonaro has threatened.

Companies in different sectors, from services to industry, are promoting mass layoffs and pay cuts for workers in the midst of the pandemic. Bus companies will leave some 70,000 workers without wages in April, and layoffs are spreading in the garages. In several cities across the country, bus drivers and ticket collectors have staged protests. The last one took place on March 31 in the state of Pernambuco, where more than 100 workers received a notice of dismissal and suspension of wages as soon as they arrived at work.

The workers cannot face this wave of attacks by seeking support from the pro-corporate unions like the CUT and Força Sindical. But the so-called opposition unions are no alternative. Workers at the General Motors plant in São José dos Campos have a long experience of defeats presided over by the Metalworkers’ Union affiliated to the CSP-Conlutas federation, led by the Morenoites of PSTU.

Since 2010, two thirds of the 12,000 GM workers in São José dos Campos have been fired. In 2012 and 2015, the union defended the layoff programs proposed by the company as workers’ victories, protecting their jobs. These same “protected” workers were subsequently fired. In the name of a policy of competition for investments against other units of the company in Brazil and around the world, the union in 2019 defended the reduction of wages and benefits of the São José dos Campos workers.

The PSTU-led union, postured as an opponent of GM’s new proposal for layoffs with reductions in wages and criticized the other unions for having accepted it. It stated that this “weakens the struggle, because it is better that everyone sticks together.” Union officials then met with the company on Wednesday to present alternative proposals.

In a live transmission on Facebook, the union’s vice president Renato Almeid told the workers that the union made a counterproposal that layoffs be carried out based on “the model that we have previously agreed to with the company.” He admitted that in this agreement, “which we have already reached with GM and which we are reaching [right now] with other companies in the region, the worker already has some kind of loss. And we are making this concession to get through this moment.”

This new lowering of workers’ conditions, which is the inevitable result of these negotiations, will be justified by the union because of its isolation, i.e., although they tried to get a “better” deal, they were forced to make concessions after the other unions had already capitulated.

In fact, it is impossible for GM workers in São José dos Campos to achieve conquests isolated from their colleagues in the other plants. But this isolation is not a “natural order” of things; it is a product of the very structure of the unions, which divides the workers and incites competition among them.

Even at a time when assemblies and voting are taking place online, no union—including that of São José dos Campos—will propose that they take place in a unified fashion.

Hundreds of workers from São José dos Campos wrote on Facebook that they are against any form of layoff: “We’ve already given up many rights to GM, lowered our salaries, accepted the layoffs ... lowered our profit sharing, and so on. And it [GM] only promised investment and a lot of things and in the end it didn’t give us anything; we can’t lose more than we are losing,” said one of them.

To take forward their demands, workers must definitively break with the reactionary structure of the unions and appeal directly to their co-workers in the other plants, forming rank-and-file committees in each workplace. Social media and the internet can be used as powerful tools in this struggle.

In the locations where the concessions agreements have been approved, through rigged or non-existent votes presided over by the trade unions, workers should reject these decisions and demand new ballots under their direct control.

These rank-and-file committees will permit the Brazilian workers to unify their struggles internationally, drawing up a global strategy of opposition to the globally coordinated attacks by the transnational corporations. This must include the demands that the massive wealth of the corporations and the ruling oligarchy be expropriated and placed at the disposal of society to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and that industries be retooled to produce desperately needed medical equipment and vital necessities.

The appeal by General Motors workers in Silao, Mexico for unity with their colleagues striking in the US and Canada, should be joined by GM workers in Brazil.