Sweeping attacks on migrant workers in Russia amid COVID-19 pandemic

Andrea Peters

A tidal wave of anti-immigrant measures is under preparation in Russia, as the Kremlin and its nominal political opponents in other parties attempt to divert mass discontent over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and skyrocketing poverty by promoting xenophobia and Russian chauvinism.

There are currently 11 million foreign workers in Russia, of which nearly half are from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Official unemployment in the country has doubled since March and now stands at nearly 1.7 million. It is expected to reach 5 to 6 million by the end of the year. According to a recent poll by the Levada Center, 28 percent of the Russian population said they would join street protests over collapsing incomes and living standards.

Under these conditions, the federal news agency RIA Novosti reported last Friday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) is considering the creation of a vast database that contains foreign workers’ biometric information, health histories, details of their legal and “social” status, and criminal records. These laborers would be required to put the app “Migrant” onto their smartphones, which would track their movements and activities and link to the database. The entire system would assign each individual a “migrant social trust rating,” which would automatically decrease if the person refused to download the software.

In order to facilitate the rollout of “Migrant,” the government is considering a mass amnesty for undocumented workers. The aim is to induce undocumented immigrants to register with the state.

The government would simultaneously unveil a labor exchange for migrants, where workers would receive job placements in a narrow range of specific, low-wage industries. “Women could be sent to work in old-age homes or places that serve invalids, and the rest to workplaces in city infrastructure, utilities, or transportation,” a government source told RIA Novosti. Incentives will be given to employers to participate, and laborers might receive “a grocery bag of food, some basic necessities, or a cash payment.”

In short, the aim is to create a government-run caste system in the Russian labor force, with migrants funneled into the worst-paid jobs and subject to constant surveillance. RIA Novosti ’s source told the press outlet that the coronavirus pandemic has created a “force-majeure” situation, the implication being that the government now has the right to dispense with whatever minimal legal limits are in place in order to address “the possible aggravation of the migration situation.”

The Stalinist Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) is playing a central role in the campaign against immigrants. The KPRF was founded in 1993 by a section of the apparatus of the former Stalinist bureaucracy, which had destroyed the conquests of the Russian revolution of 1917 and dissolved the USSR in 1991. It now trades in Russian nationalism, right-wing chauvinism, and phony semi-opposition to Putin. The party is pushing to enact permanent federal limits on migration, targeting primarily workers that come from Central Asia.

The KPRF is also calling for raising wages for migrants, for the purpose of increasing the cost of employing them, such that native-born Russians are more competitive in the labor market. In essence, they wish to make Russian citizens—for whom the legal minimum wage is about 1200 rubles ($196) a month--the preferred low-wage labor force.

Anti-immigrant policies are also taking hold at the local level. Saint Petersburg, the country’s second largest city, just passed a measure that requires native-born Russians to be hired over migrant workers in construction, warehousing, the service sector and other industries. A businessman from the region was just fined 200,000 rubles ($2900) for hiring a foreign laborer.

Currently a petition put out by a representative of the far-right National Democratic Party, “Protecting the labor market and security for Russian citizens,” is circulating online. Blackguarding migrants as criminals, religious radicals and terrorists, it calls for mass deportation of unemployed migrants to Central Asia. The newspaper Nezavism aya Gazeta notes, “political scientists, professors of sociological sciences, regional deputies and political activists of different orientations are seen among the signatories.”

The intensified anti-immigrant policies come as Russia’s migrant workers face an economic and social catastrophe. Millions, laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are stranded in the country and unable to return home because of the closure of borders and suspension of rail and air links. The International Organization for Migration, a branch of the UN, estimates that 60 percent of Russia’s foreign laborers cannot pay their rent and 40 percent cannot buy food. The Migration Development Fund, a Russian charity organization, received 30,000 appeals for help in just one week in May.

Living in squalid, overcrowded apartments, this population has faced the spread of the coronavirus. The sick are forced into strictly monitored, at-home quarantine, where they may infect their roommates. Every time another person in a household gets ill, local authorities restart the quarantine clock for everyone in the home, such that thousands are locked in their apartments for weeks on end. ABC News carried the story of one migrant worker in Moscow, who explained that there were only a few kilos of flour and some oil left to feed the 10 people with whom she lived. They have been stuck inside for more than 20 days.

Although President Vladimir Putin announced a temporary suspension of paperwork and payments required of migrants to maintain their legal work status due to the coronavirus, workers report that employers continue to demand money from them for their so-called “labor patent”—a work license renewed by the employee each month. In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the patents cost 4,000 ($58) and 5350 rubles ($78), respectively.

Local governments are simply ignoring other aspects of the presidential decree, with courts continuing to detain migrant workers on the basis of the claim that federal statutes on migration are still in force and supersede directives issued from the Kremlin.

The crisis in Russia is spilling into migrants’ home countries, whose economies are highly dependent on the remittances sent by workers back to their families. According to the World Bank, transfers from citizens working abroad constitute 31.3 percent of Tajikistan’s and 32.9 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s gross domestic product. When the borders reopen and millions are able to return home, the Central Asian states to which they return will see a mass influx of young and impoverished returnees.

The political attack on migrants coming from all quarters of the Russian political establishment overwhelmingly targets those from Central Asia. It is sustained by a subservient media, which never fails to carry a news story about a crime allegedly committed by a migrant and almost always features photographs of individuals who appear to be Central Asian.

The campaign against people from this region is particularly grotesque and tragic because the workers from these areas were, like those in what today is the Russian Federation, all once citizens of the Soviet Union. Based on the program of internationalism, the Russian revolution sought to unite the disparate peoples of the former Russian empire on the basis of the principle of equality. This effort was brutally betrayed by Stalinism, culminating ultimately in the restoration of capitalism in a dismembered former Soviet Union, where workers of all ethnicities are exploited.

Egypt: el-Sisi approves legal framework for military dictatorship

Jean Shaoul

Prefiguring the actions of Donald Trump in the United States, Egypt’s blood-stained dictator General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi has approved amendments to emergency law granting himself and the armed forces additional powers.

The provisions provide the legal framework for a military dictatorship in the Arab world’s most populous country, with el-Sisi at its head. They will ban—not just limit—all political opposition to the domination of the corporate, financial and military elite over economic and political life.

While presenting these measures as a means of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, having seized power in a military coup in 2013 el-Sisi is preparing to suppress seething social discontent as the global recession, closures and curfews push the country’s fragile economy into meltdown and its impoverished people into destitution.

Indifferent to the desperate conditions facing the country’s 102 million population, the government did nothing to prepare for the pandemic despite Egypt being identified in early February as one of the African countries most at risk. Travel bans and lockdown measures were only imposed after dozens of workers on a Nile cruise ship in the southern city of Luxor tested positive for the disease in mid-March.

The International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that Egypt, due to the decline in Suez Canal revenues as a result of the fall in world trade, particularly oil and natural gas, remittances and tourism, could lose $2.3-$2.6 billion a month, hitting the poor hardest. Prior to the pandemic, one in three Egyptians were living 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.”

Under conditions where the state is the single main employer, accounting for six million jobs and providing patronage for politicians’ supporters, most people work in the informal sector as daily wage earners and street peddlers, testifying to the total inability of the national bourgeoisie to develop the economy after nominal independence from the colonial powers. These workers have a stark choice: work and risk infection or stop and risk starvation.

While the government announced a $5.6 billion raft of measures—chiefly cheap loans—to support the employers, it provided little or nothing in the way of income support to the working class.

The official number of cases of COVID-19 is approaching 25,000 and the number of deaths nearly 1,000. But these figures are widely believed to be a gross underestimate, because of the lack of testing, the lag in reporting deaths attributable to the virus outside hospitals and the government’s desire to cover up the scale of the crisis and its role in the spread of the pandemic. Egypt expelled Guardian and New York Times’ reporters for questioning the data.

Egypt’s healthcare system has proved incapable of responding effectively to the crisis. The Egyptian Medical Syndicate has said that 19 doctors had died from the disease and more than 350 others were ill. It accused the Ministry of Health of negligence for its handling of COVID-19 and said it was responsible for the doctors’ deaths for failing to provide personal protective equipment and quarantine beds for frontline staff. It warned the system could “collapse.” This warning came two days after a 32-year-old doctor, unable to get a bed at a quarantine hospital, died. His death prompted doctors at Cairo’s al-Munira hospital to publish a mass resignation letter on Facebook.

Despite the rising death toll, two weeks ago the government moved to reopen the economy, restarting public transport, opening shops and businesses and allowing hotels and the hospitality sector catering to the domestic market to start operating, prompting fears of a renewed surge in cases. The flight and travel ban had closed the country’s tourism sector, which accounts for around 12 to 15 percent of GDP and brings in $1 billion of foreign currency a month and is a major employer.

In April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in its World Economic Outlook that the Middle East and North African economies could shrink by 3.3 percent in 2020. The pandemic would compound the region’s unemployment problem and worsen the already high public and external debt. Acutely aware of the social tensions, it added, “A mishandling of the outbreak could elevate distrust in local governments, sowing seeds for further social unrest and adding to regional uncertainty.”

The IMF has already approved $2.8 billion in new emergency financing for Egypt even as it is considering another loan of up to $5 billion more. It follows a $12 billion IMF package negotiated in 2016 that entailed harsh austerity measures, including cutting subsidies on fuel and electricity that particularly impacted the poor. Last month, the cabinet approved a draft law cutting public sector salaries and pension payments.

Heightened social tensions lie behind el-Sisi’s assumption of ever greater dictatorial powers, despite the fact that Egypt has been under a state of emergency for most of the past four decades except for brief intervals between 2012 and 2017.

During his seven years in 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, where they are often detained for years without trial. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), hundreds have died in custody due to medical negligence or the atrocious conditions.

Egypt ranks as one of the foremost jailers of journalists and bloggers who dare to voice criticism of the regime. Sisi has arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents, journalists and cultural figures, who have used social media platforms to air their criticisms in exile. The security services have blocked more than 500 websites, bought up shares in TV networks and censored the scripts of popular TV series.

Two Washington-based think tanks, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and the Center for International Policy (CIP), said, “Sisi's regime has engaged in a systematic pattern of gross human rights violations, from gunning down peaceful protesters in the streets to jailing tens of thousands of political opponents, including journalists, academics, and human rights defenders.”

It added, “The Sisi government has severely restricted the ability of independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to operate, all but eliminated a free and independent press, and perpetuated tensions between Muslims and Christians.”

All this has proceeded with the tacit support of successive US administrations and the major European powers. Now the new law gives the intelligence and military forces wide ranging law-enforcement powers, including arrests, investigations into crimes, the detention of “suspects” and the seizure of property without judicial oversight.

It gives el-Sisi as president the power to order the military to conduct preliminary investigations and prosecutions into offences deemed a violation of the emergency law.

Other powers include closing schools and universities, shutting down public and private-sector bodies entirely or partially, postponing payment of bills and compelling Egyptian returnees from abroad to undergo quarantine on their arrival home. Crucially, they include restricting different forms of public and private gatherings, banning the export of certain goods and turning schools and youth centres into hospitals.

Human Rights watch wrote that the amendments amounted to a “cover for new repressive powers” that “could curb rights in the name of ‘public order.’” It pointed out, “Only five of the 18 proposed amendments are clearly tied to public health developments. Making them part of the emergency law means that the authorities can enforce the measures whenever a state of emergency is declared, regardless of whether there is a public health emergency.”

Canada’s governments ignored 2006 pandemic preparedness report

Dylan Lubao

A May 15 W orld S ocialist W orld S ite article titled “The 2003 SARS epidemic: How Canada’s elite squandered the chance to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic” characterized the response of the country’s ruling class to the novel coronavirus as a “social crime.”

This point is further substantiated by perusal of a fourteen-year-old report that was commissioned by the federal and provincial governments in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak. The report both anticipated the current COVID-19 pandemic and outlined a comprehensive public health response.

The recommendations contained in the report were essentially ignored by every level of government across the country.

Titled “The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan for the Health Sector,” the 550-page report was a significant undertaking, developed through the collaboration of governments at the federal, provincial or territorial, and local level.

It recalled the devastating impact of pandemics and reiterated the necessity for preparedness, collaboration across provincial borders and governmental jurisdictions, and a rapid response to the country’s initial cases of pandemic influenza.

Of particular note is that the report was coauthored by Theresa Tam, the country’s current Chief Public Health Officer. As late as January 29 of this year, Tam downplayed the risk to Canadians of the novel coronavirus as “much, much lower than that of many countries.”

Tam made these remarks a month after the federal government and doctors across the country were notified of a novel virus outbreak in a Wuhan marketplace that would become the source of the pandemic. Four days earlier, on January 25, Canada had recorded its first case of COVID-19.

What is even more striking is how accurately the 2006 report predicted the development of the outbreak in Canada.

Under a section titled “Background,” the report made the prediction that a strain of pandemic influenza would likely originate in Asia, and that it would probably arrive in Canada within three months. The report went on to estimate that the peak in infections would occur two to four months after the arrival of the virus, with the peak in mortality occurring one month afterward.

Ominously, the report also forecast that over 70 percent of the population would contract the virus. A “mild to moderate” outbreak would see 15 to 35 percent of the population fall clinically ill (5.6 to 13 million people), with a staggering 10,000 to 60,000 deaths. The COVID-19 death toll in Canada, currently at 7,395, is steadily approaching the lower limit of this projection.

Notwithstanding the report’s focus on the influenza virus, as distinct from the novel 2019 coronavirus (designated SARS-CoV-2), its projections retain their validity because of the similar pathological features of the two viruses, including the way they are transmitted and disease symptoms.

The public health measures advocated by the report in its “Preparedness” section were, therefore, no less compelling.

They stressed the need for rapid “collection, collation and analysis of detailed epidemiological, laboratory, and clinical data” on a new pandemic virus. This required the preparation of a robust research and testing capacity in the country’s medical laboratories. Instead, due to years of cuts to health care funding, Canada’s testing capacity remains extremely low even as the pandemic enters its sixth month.

In addition, a 2004 consultation by the World Health Organization cited in the report insisted that the containment of a novel pandemic virus would require “aggressive public health care measures,” including the use of “antiviral drugs, contact tracing, quarantine and exit screening.”

The report tacitly acknowledged the ramshackle state of public health care in Canada. It described the country’s health care institutions as “running at maximal or near maximal bed capacity,” and warned that a pandemic could “exceed the capacity of the current health care setting to cope.”

The images in 2020 of health care professionals working with inadequate or nonexistent personal protective equipment, and having to solicit donations of surgical masks from the general population, serve as a tragic confirmation that these warnings were ignored by all levels of government and all major political parties in the 14 years after the report was published.

The three pillars of testing, contact tracing, and quarantine formed the bulk of the report’s plan to combat a pandemic prior to the development of a vaccine. A group of data tables specified the recommended public health measures to be implemented at each stage of the pandemic’s evolution.

For example, even in a scenario where a foreign virus had only hatched sporadic infections within Canada, the report recommended an approach only undertaken by a few countries to halt the spread of COVID-19, notably South Korea.

It specified the “collection and dissemination of epidemiological and clinical data for cases occurring in Canada,” followed by a need to “isolate cases,” and “quarantine or activity restriction [sic] of contacts.”

Without lending political support to the capitalist government of South Korea, it is clear that its early and aggressive containment of the COVID-19 outbreak by means of mass testing and contact tracing allowed it to emerge from the first wave of its pandemic with less than 300 deaths.

Just as it was ignored for over a decade by federal, provincial, and municipal governments in Canada, the report has also been essentially overlooked in the corporate media’s coverage of the pandemic. To call attention to this “pandemic playbook” would be to indict Canada’s big-business governments, past and present, for willfully rejecting its rational public health directives.

Governments across the country, from that of Trudeau and his Liberals in Ottawa to the hard-right Ford Conservatives in Ontario and Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec regime, are instead frantically scrambling to reopen all workplaces and public institutions. They are doing so in opposition to warnings of medical experts that a premature rollback of restrictions could lead to the infection of millions and thousands more deaths.

At the same time, a concerted effort is underway to place the blame for the upswing in infections on ordinary working-class people. Stories of large crowds ignoring social distancing guidelines have recently been given blanket coverage in the corporate press, ignoring the fact that figures like Ford exaggerated the mid-April dip in new COVID-19 cases to bolster his government’s back-to-work push.

Nevertheless, the 2006 report remains an important document for illustrating how Canada, or any country, could have effectively managed the current pandemic from a health perspective. It would be a valuable resource in any future worker-led tribunal into the Canadian ruling elite’s criminal handling of the current crisis.

Canadian farm and industrial worksites become new coronavirus hotspots

Carl Bronski

The reckless back-to-work drive across Canada, greenlighted by the federal Liberal government and spearheaded by the hard-right provincial governments of Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, is already producing new outbreaks of the potentially deadly coronavirus. The precipitous re-opening of manufacturing operations, warehouses and retail centers without any consideration for the health and safety of workers, combined with the seasonal increase in agricultural activity, have turned many worksites across Ontario into COVID-19 hotspots.

In Norfolk County, near the shores of Lake Erie, 125 migrant workers out of a 216-strong workforce at Scotlynn Farms have tested positive for COVID-19. At the time of this writing, seven have been hospitalized, with two in intensive care. The workers, who mostly hail from Mexico, passed the 14-day quarantine period after arriving in the country and worked another 11 days in the fields before symptoms began to be recorded last week.

More than one hundred of the workers who tested positive are still asymptomatic (i.e., display no symptoms but are nonetheless capable of spreading the contagion). Public health authorities, fearing more extensive community spread, are now testing clerks at a Port Dover grocery store where the workers shopped.

The migrant workers, consigned to cramped, poorly-ventilated bunkhouses, live in ideal conditions for the spread of the virus. With the highly time-sensitive asparagus crop requiring immediate harvest, Scotlynn Group CEO Scott Biddle has put out a call for local labour, promising a $10 per hour wage increase over the wages of the foreign workers. This move, which amounts to bribing unemployed local workers to risk their health and even their lives, has outraged the migrant workers and their advocates, who point out that they have laboured in the fields in substandard conditions for years at or near the minimum wage.

The outbreak in Norfolk County is only one of a number of hotspots in the southern Ontario agricultural sector. Near St. Thomas, south of London, 20 new cases were recorded last week at an Ontario Plants Propagation greenhouse operation. Another 40 cases have occurred at Greenhill Produce, near Chatham. Twenty people throughout Windsor-Essex tested positive over the weekend, most of them temporary foreign farm workers. On Saturday, an unnamed 30-year-old Mexican worker in the county died from COVID-19.

About 20,000 migrant workers arrive each spring in Ontario for the growing season. A recent US study showed that the average life expectancy of a career migrant farm labourer in that country was an appalling 49 years of age. Chris Ramsaroop, organizer for Justice for Migrant Farm Workers—responding to the contagion amongst foreign temporary field-hands in Canada—cited a lack of personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer, overcrowded and unsanitary housing conditions, and the failure to separate infected workers from their colleagues as standard procedures in an industry that continues to exploit its workforce to the hilt.

The rise in infections has not been confined to agricultural areas. A CBC News report last week noted that in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), which accounted for 76 percent of all new COVID-19 cases in Ontario in the month of May, enclosed industrial sites are threatening to become the next virus hotspots.

In Peel region, which encompasses the cities of Brampton and Mississauga just west of Toronto, public health authorities announced that they are tracking “several large workplace clusters” linked to manufacturing plants, warehouses, and delivery companies. Since March, 450 workplace infections have been recorded. About 200 cases originated in just thirteen Peel workplaces. The region’s Chief Medical Officer stated last week that “dozens more” workplaces are now suffering outbreaks.

In Toronto, two recent clusters have been identified at large grocery stores.

In York Region, just north of Toronto, authorities have identified 45 workplaces that have recorded two or more infections. At the Honda auto assembly plant in Alliston, three workers have tested positive. That plant re-opened on May 11. The company has yet to provide full information on whether at least two of the infected workers attended the plant after it re-started production.

In the Detroit Three assembly plants in Ontario, where the Unifor union has worked closely with the major automakers to send autoworkers back into unsafe plants where they interact in close contact at entrance gates and on the shop floor, the ruling elite is also accepting that large numbers of workers and their families will get infected. Kristen Dziczek, vice president for industry, economy and labour at the Centre for Automotive Research, a key industry think-tank that assisted the Big Three in reopening their facilities in Canada, Mexico and the United States, bluntly told CBC, “I think we’re going to see hotspots keep popping up and that’s going to be one of the disruption factors in auto production.”

Ontario meatpacking plants continue to experience COVID-19 infections. A Conestoga processing operation north of Kitchener had at least 90 cases by the end of May. In Brampton, Maple Lodge Farms poultry processors reported 25 cases and one death on May 4. The first case of infection had been confirmed on April 15. However, the company did not publicly announce the presence of the virus in the plant for three more weeks. It was later discovered that workers there had filed safety complaints with the Ontario Labour Relations Board without any response.

The widespread outbreaks of COVID-19 in workplaces across a broad range of economic sectors underscore the criminal indifference shown towards the health and lives of working people by the right-wing Ford provincial government and the entire ruling elite. Ford granted vast exemptions from lockdown restrictions to mines and manufacturing facilities that were clearly not essential services, accelerated the back-to-work drive as case numbers continued to increase sharply, and failed to provide medical staff with adequate personal protective equipment. At the federal level, the Trudeau Liberals focused all their efforts on organizing a bailout for the financial oligarchy and big business worth hundreds of billions of dollars, while placing workers and the health system on rations.

The back-to-work drive by governments across Canada is being implemented in flagrant disregard of repeated World Health Organization warnings that mass testing and contact tracing capabilities need to be developed and health care systems significantly strengthened before any relaxation of restrictions on normal economic and social life. Even now, some five months after the declaration of a global pandemic, workers in industry after industry report shortages of personal protective equipment, crowded workplaces, increasing line-speeds and unsanitary company washrooms and cafeterias.

The rate of testing in Ontario remains low, although it has recently picked up slowly. Medical experts have also noted that the province’s contact-tracing capabilities are woefully inadequate. Global experience has shown that increased testing without 24-hour contact-tracing turnarounds will do little to arrest the spread of the virus. In regions with higher rates of virus transmission, it is still taking several days for positive cases to even be questioned about their contacts and then several more days for the contacts to be traced, let alone tested.

Brazilian youth join international wave of protests against police violence

Tomas Castanheira

Responding to the massive demonstrations around the United States and the world, thousands of people took to the streets in Brazilian capitals protesting against police violence, racism and the government of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.

On Sunday, hundreds of people participated in a demonstration in downtown Rio de Janeiro denouncing the deadly police operations in the favelas, which left 177 dead in April alone. The protest took as its symbol João Pedro Mattos, a 14-year-old black youth brutally murdered by the police in May. Although the protest was peaceful, the military police attacked the demonstrators, shooting them with rubber bullets and stun grenades. The TV station Globo filmed a policeman pointing a rifle at a defenseless demonstrator raising his hands in the air.

The same day, another demonstration took place in São Paulo, called by organized soccer fans who define themselves as “anti-fascists” and “in defense of democracy.” The protest was attended by more than a thousand people and made references to the murder of George Floyd. In a place nearby, there was a small group of fascist supporters of Bolsonaro, who have been demonstrating every weekend in support of a military intervention and the end of social distancing measures against the coronavirus.

Youth protest in Curitiba against racism and police violence, Monday, June 1. (Credit: Twitter)

The extreme right-wing militants provoked the demonstrators while being escorted by the military police, who then suppressed the protest with pepper spray, rubber bullets and a “rain of [tear gas and stun] grenades,” according to representatives of the Human Rights Commission of the OAB (Brazilian Bar Association). Six people were arrested.

Right-wing governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) welcomed the brutal action of the police, and said it was used to “protect” the demonstrators, preventing a possible conflict. He declared that his government will ban demonstrations in the same place and on the same day and said that the police will control more harshly those who attend future protests, i.e., will prevent them from happening.

After the protests in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, more than a thousand young people marched in Curitiba, capital of Paraná, on Monday night. The police brutally attacked the demonstrators and arrested eight people. Videos show policemen sweeping the streets of the city, throwing bombs and firing rubber bullets at the demonstrators. Police officers were also recorded attacking groups of demonstrators with batons, after they had already been dispersed.

In addition to street demonstrations, videos of Floyd's murder and images of protests and police violence in the US were widely shared on Brazilian social media. Hundreds of thousands felt immediate identification with the social conditions in the United States and with the political response against police violence that is growing internationally.

Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world and its contradictions are being intensified by the response of the ruling class to the coronavirus pandemic. The country already has more than 500,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, a figure exceeded only by that of the United States. With the death toll having surpassed 30,000, the governments in every state, driven by Bolsonaro and a campaign by the media, are promoting the homicidal reopening of all economic activities.

Besides the danger of death from the virus, Brazilian workers are seriously threatened by misery and hunger. Unemployment, already staggering before the beginning of the pandemic, has grown with the cutting of more than five million jobs over the past few months. Among those who are still employed, wage cuts and contract suspensions already affect more than eight million.

The generalized economic despair is being answered by the Brazilian bourgeoisie with the intensification of state violence against workers, especially the most impoverished sections. The state of Rio de Janeiro, after registering last year a 92 percent increase in murders committed by the police, surpassed this rate during the pandemic. Compared to the same period last year, April and early May witnessed a 28 percent increase in the number of police raids on favelas, and a 58 percent rise in the deaths provoked by them.

The terror deliberately spread by the police in the favelas and outskirts of Brazilian cities, many of them majority black, only prepares the generalized employment of violence against the working class and its social opposition to capitalism.

The fascist Bolsonaro—just like US President Donald Trump—is seeking a political base among the police and military for a move toward an openly dictatorial regime. In February of this year, political figures of the Bolsonaro administration led a military police strike in Ceará and spoke on stages to the mutinous cops arguing that “for the first time we have a president who knows what it is to be a military police officer.”

A report by Portal Democratize website reveals that one of the individuals responsible for the repression of the demonstration in São Paulo Sunday is a military police colonel who works for the Center for High Studies in Security of the Military Police and is a fanatical pro-Bolsonaro militant.

Bolsonaro is reinforcing his appeal to the military every weekend in the fascist demonstrations in front of the government palace in Brasilia, in which he is making increasingly ostentatious appearances. Last Sunday the president flew over the demonstration in an official helicopter and then paraded among the demonstrators mounted on a police horse.

Among the organizers of the demonstration in Brasilia is a fascist group directly promoted by government officials, “Brazil's 300.” The day before, they had staged a march against the Supreme Court, carrying torches as in the fascist demonstrations of the American Ku Klux Klan.

Bolsonaro's defense of a police state regime is openly and insistently based on the danger of an uprising of the working class against the capitalist order in Brazil. He has justified his proposals to intensify the domestic use of the army against the population based upon the danger of a massive working class uprising, such as what occurred in Chile at the end of 2019, characterized by him as “terrorist acts.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, he again warned that, “what happened in Chile will be nothing compared to what may happen in Brazil.” And more recently, at a ministerial meeting on April 22, publicized by court order, he claimed that current social conditions are a “fertile ground” for uprisings that threaten the established political order.

The right-wing shift of the ruling class all around the globe, and especially in the United States, is perceived by Bolsonaro as the main point of support for his authoritarian project. On Sunday, as his palace advisors discussed the possibility of deploying the National Guard to repress the initial demonstrations in São Paulo, Bolsonaro retweeted Donald Trump's post that threatened to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization.

The growing hostility, especially among the youth, to the advance of authoritarianism and the formation of state-financed fascist groups is an important political development.

However, the development of a genuine struggle against fascism and for democratic rights is only possible through a massive political movement of the working class advancing an internationalist and socialist program.

No step forward is possible under the leadership of the bourgeoisie and the pseudo-left parties, who are trying to dominate this movement and whose task is to channel the social opposition behind the bourgeois state. In alliance with the official media, they seek to falsify the nature of the protests that are taking place in the United States and the world, classifying them as a racial movement.

By hiding the multiracial composition of the protests, they are attempting to conceal their own petty-bourgeois class interests, limiting their objectives to the pursuit of state reforms. By establishing that the essence of police violence is “structural racism,” a crime of which all whites are guilty, these reactionary political forces want to silence the working class and push the idea that placing more blacks in positions of power in the state and corporate hierarchy is enough to resolve society's contradictions.

The Workers Party (PT), one of the chief advocates of this right-wing policy, is promoting the candidacy for mayor of Salvador, capital of Bahia, a military police major, alleging that the fact of she is black and a woman makes her a natural representative of “popular interests.”

What these political forces a fear the most, just as Bolsonaro and other bourgeois politicians, is increasing militancy within the working class. Workers in call centers, meat processing plants, hospitals and delivery services have staged independent strikes against exploitation and unsafe working conditions promoted by the capitalists. It is to this revolutionary social force that the youth coming into struggle today must turn.

Protesters defy Trump’s threats, expand nationwide movement against police killings

Jacob Crosse

The Trump administration and state governors are continuing to deploy tens of thousands of police and troops against peaceful demonstrations in over 200 cities in the US.

Curfews, mass arrests and police terror have not quelled the powerful movement of youth and workers of all races and ethnicities in response to the May 25 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. If anything, Trump’s fascist tirade from the Rose Garden on Monday, in which he asserted dictatorial powers and threatened to illegally deploy the military to crush the protests, has stiffened the resolve and heightened the anger of the hundreds of thousands marching in cities across the country.

Trump accompanied his repudiation of the US Constitution on Monday with the mobilization of hundreds of military police to spearhead an unprovoked attack on peaceful demonstrators well ahead of the 7:00 pm curfew declared by Washington DC’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser.

The demonstrations are expanding internationally. Protests and marches have been held in London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Dublin, Auckland, Sydney, Tehran, Halifax, Idlib (Syria) and many more cities.

In Houston, over 60,000 joined George Floyd’s family in a march against police murder. Drums played as tens of thousands, some on horseback, moved through downtown Houston. The march ended in front of City Hall with protesters holding signs reading, “I Can’t Breathe” and “No justice, no peace.”

In New York City, beginning at 2:00 p.m., thousands marched across the Manhattan Bridge towards Manhattan in an attempt to meet up with another group of marchers. At the Manhattan end of the bridge, protesters encountered a wall of police, forcing them to remain on the bridge. For two hours, protesters waited for the police to let them pass before deciding to turn around. Upon reaching the other side, the group came face-to-face with another wall of cops. For two hours the police refused to let anyone off the bridge. As word spread on social media of the cops’ thuggish tactics, the police were forced to relent and let the marchers pass.

In southern California, over 20,000 workers and youth braved scorching temperatures to march throughout Los Angeles and Hollywood. These peaceful demonstrations were juxtaposed with the sight of heavily armed National Guard troops and Humvees deployed all along the famous boulevard to safeguard private property.

Demonstrating the widespread opposition to police violence, which takes place in every working-class community, protests have sprung up in rural towns such as Glasgow, Kentucky. This town of 14,000 people in south central Kentucky, in which 86 percent of residents identify as “white,” turned out 400 protesters on Tuesday afternoon.

Despite the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the protests, governors, mayors and local officials have imposed curfews on over 60 million people living in 200 cities in 27 states. This includes a countywide 6:00 pm curfew for Los Angeles and an 8:00 pm curfew in New York City. The entire state of Arizona in under a curfew.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, imposed an 11:00 pm curfew on Monday which led to over 700 arrests. Not satisfied with this level of police repression, Trump demanded in a tweet that Cuomo “CALL UP THE NATIONAL GUARD” before “lowlifes and losers ... rip the place apart.”

Taking Trump’s message to heart, in an extraordinary press conference on Tuesday, Cuomo characterized the New York Police Department’s response to the protests as a “disgrace.” He warned Mayor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, that there is an “option ... to displace the mayor ... bring in the National Guard.”

In an earlier press conference on Tuesday, de Blasio slammed his fist on the table as he decried “vicious attacks on police officers.” While dozens of social media videos have depicted NYPD thugs bashing, beating, gassing and attempting to run over protesters in the last 96 hours, de Blasio embraced the police and said, “anyone who attacks a police officer attacks all of us.” At the press conference he announced an extension of the curfew through the weekend.

While de Blasio had plenty of words for “violent outsiders,” he did not mention the vicious beating New York police delivered to 32-year-old hospital worker Rayne Valentine after his shift ended Saturday night at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn.

In an interview with the Daily Beast, Valentine described walking home from work when he came upon a group of officers chasing a young person. Valentine began to record the encounter as officers swarmed the individual. The police then turned to him, warned him to “get back” and began assaulting him.

The beating forced Valentine to undergo two CT scans and receive 7 staples to close a gaping head wound. Valentine recalled yelling to the officers beating him as he lay on the ground, “I’m just trying to go home.” One of the cops responded, “Well, you picked the wrong time to do that.”

As of this writing, governors in 28 states and the District of Columbia have activated thousands of National Guard soldiers. In addition to the 45,000 Guard troops already activated in the previous months in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 20,400 Guard soldiers have been deployed against the protests, with thousands more on standby.

While the bulk of this force is in Minnesota, nearly 2,000 have been activated in California. Currently, 1,200 soldiers are deployed in Los Angeles, 100 in Long Beach and 530 in Sacramento.

On Tuesday, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, activated 250 Guard troops and deployed them to Chicago. At a press conference, Pritzker assured his ruling class constituents that “We’ll continue to deploy as needed.” Bluntly stating the chief concern of the ruling class, Pritzker promised that “we are doing—and we will do—everything we can to protect private property.”

In Washington DC, soldiers have been deployed around national monuments. Three massive A4 tanker trucks, able to transport 2,500 gallons of fuel, rolled through city streets in preparation for the arrival of the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) out of Tennessee. Ordered to deploy on Tuesday, the 1,000 soldiers are expected to arrive in the capital by Saturday. ACR units are known as “hunter-killer” units.

From the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers from the 278th will be occupying the capitol in Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Featuring explosive reactive armor, a 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun, TOW anti-tank missiles and a M240 machine gun, the Bradley’s battlefield purpose is to destroy light armor and scout out enemy tank positions in order to draw them out for the larger M1A1 battle tanks.

There is a glaring contrast between the response of the Trump administration and the ruling class to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and their response to the mass protests. In the case of COVID-19, nothing was done for weeks as the White House, senators and congressmen sought to downplay the threat, while they prepared a multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street. The malign neglect of the ruling class has resulted in tens of thousands of preventable deaths, with more to come.

In the case of the protests, within hours thousands of police were mobilized and then quickly supplemented by state troopers and the National Guard.

This massive repression against the demonstrations includes the targeting of journalists and photographers. According to data provided by Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, there have been 211 “press freedom violations,” including over 33 arrests, 148 assaults (118 by police) and 30 instances of equipment or newsroom damage.

In the Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, police still have no answers as to why officers abetted a group of 70 fascist thugs, armed with baseball bats, sledgehammers and axes. The roving band was given free rein to violate curfew in order to harass and beat protesters, including local television producer Jon Ehrens of WHYY.

Ehrens was taken to the hospital Monday evening after he and his girlfriend were attacked by the group for recording them as they assaulted a protester. Even though the police precinct is on the street where the assault happened, and multiple cops were less than a block away, no one has been charged or arrested in connection with the assault.

Africa Fact-Checking Awards 2020 for African Journalists

Application Deadline: 22nd July 2020 midnight GMT.

Eligible Countries: African countries

To be taken at (country): Kenya

About the Award: The awards continue to grow. In 2019, we received a total of 153 entries from more than 20 countries – from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal to Egypt, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In the inaugural year, 2014, we received entries from about 40 journalists across 10 countries.
Across the globe, the Covid-19 pandemic has ushered a flood of dangerous false information. The World Health Organization says the outbreak has been accompanied by the so-called infodemic: “an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it”.
The pandemic has raised the stakes even higher in the fight against misinformation, requiring that the media play an even more active role in sifting the facts from the fiction.
“With health-related decisions sometimes being a matter of life or death, good fact-checking journalism is vital – now more than ever. The quality of information disseminated in public can determine the life outcomes of many and so it is the responsibility of the media to refrain from being conduits of misinformation,” says Noko Makgato, executive director at Africa Check.
“Each year we are seeing growing interest in fact-checking as evidenced by the number of organisations that have emerged focusing their efforts on debunking harmful claims in different parts of the continent. This, we believe, strengthens the quality of public debate and, hopefully, improves the quality of life across the continent.”
As a result of the growing interest in fact-checking on the continent, Africa Check is expecting an increase in the quantity and quality of entries in 2020.
This year’s categories include:

• Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist
• Fact-Check of the Year by a Student Journalist
• One runner-up in each of the two categories above 

Type: contest

Eligibility:

• Best fact-checking report by a working journalist

To be eligible, the entry must be an original piece of fact-checking journalism first published or broadcast on any date from 1 August 2019 to 22 July 2020, by a media- or independent fact-checking organisation based in Africa. The work may be published in print or online, broadcast on the radio or television or published in a blog. Reports published by Africa Check are not eligible for the competition.

• Best fact-checking report by a student journalist

To be eligible, the candidate must have attended a journalism school in Africa at some period between 1 August 2019 and 22 July 2020 and be younger than 35. The entry must be an original piece of fact-checking journalism, produced as course work or first published or broadcast on any date from 1 August 2019 to 22 July 2020, in a blog, student publication or by a media- or independent fact-checking organisation based in Africa. The work may be published in print or online, broadcast on the radio or television or published in a blog. Reports published by Africa Check are not eligible for the competition.
Candidates can only enter for the awards in one category per year, but can submit more than one report if they choose.
Selection Criteria: The entries will be judged on the following four criteria:

• The significance for wider society of the claim investigated
• How the claim was tested against the available evidence
• How well the piece presented the evidence for and against the claim
• The impact that the publication had on public debate on the topic.

Number of Awardees: Four (4)

Value of Award: The winner of the award for best fact-checking report by a working journalist will get a prize of $3,000, while the runner-up will be awarded $1,500. The winner of the award for best fact-checking report by a student journalist will get a prize of $2,000, and the runner-up $1,000.

How to Apply: Interested participants should:

Enter the awards

Visit Award Webpage for details

“The World Cannot Breathe!” Squashed By The U.S.-A Country Built On Genocide And Slavery

Andre Vltchek

More than two centuries of lies are now getting exposed. Bizarre tales about freedom and democracy are collapsing like houses of cards.

One man’s death triggers an avalanche of rage in those who for years, decades and centuries, have been humiliated, ruined, and exterminated.

It always happens just like this throughout the history of humankind – one single death, one single “last drop”, an occurrence that triggers an entire chain of events, and suddenly nothing is the same, anymore. Nothing can be the same. What seemed to be unimaginable just yesterday, becomes “the new normal” literally overnight.

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For more than two centuries, the country which calls itself the pinnacle of freedom, has been in fact the absolute opposite of that; the epicenter of brutality and terror.

From its birth, in order to ‘clear the space’ for its brutal, ruthless European settlers, it systematically liquidated the local population of the continent, during what could easily be described as one of the more outrageous genocides in the human history.

When whites wanted land, they took it. In North America, or anywhere in the world. In what is now the United States of America, millions of “natives” were murdered, infected with deadly diseases on purpose, or exterminated in various different ways. The great majority of the original and rightful owners of the land, vanished. The rest were locked up in “reservations”.

Simultaneously, the “Land Of The Free” thrived on slavery. European colonialist powers literally hunted down human beings all over the African continent, stuffing them, like animals, into ships, in order to satisfy demand for free labor on the plantations of North and South America. European colonialist, hand in hand, cooperated, in committing crimes, in all parts of the world.

What really is the United States? Is anyone asking, searching for its roots? What about this; a simple, honest answer: The United States is essentially the beefy offspring of European colonialist culture, of its exceptionalism, racism and barbarity.

Again, simple facts: huge parts of the United States were constructed on slavery. Slaves were humiliated, raped, tortured, murdered. Oh, what a monstrous way to write the first chapters of the country’s history!

The United States, a country of liberty and freedom? For whom? Seriously! For Christian whites?

How twisted the narrative is! No wonder our humanity has become so perverse, so immoral, so lost and confused, after being shaped by a narrative which has been fabricated by a country that exterminated the great majority of its own native sons and daughters, while getting insanely rich thanks to unimaginable theft, mass-murder, slavery and later – the semi-slavery of the savage corporate dictatorship!

The endemic, institutionalized brutality at home eventually spilled over to all parts of the planet. Now, for many decades, the United Stated has treated the entire world as full of its personal multitude of slaves. What does it offer to all of us: constant wars, occupations, punitive expeditions, coups, regular assassinations of progressive leaders, as well as thorough corporate plunder. Hundreds of millions of people have been sacrificed on the grotesque U.S. altar of “freedom” and “democracy”.

Freedom and democracy, really?

Or perhaps just genocide, slavery, fear and the violation of all those wonderful and natural human dreams, and of human dignity?

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Then one single death of a man whose neck got crushed by the knee of a ruthless cop. And the country has exploded. Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy fighters and activists are now flooding the streets of Minneapolis, Washington D.C., New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.

The death of Mr. George Floyd is a symbol, really, as black people get murdered in the most despicable way, almost every day. From January 2015 to date, for instance, 1,250 African-American citizens have been shot and killed by the police, in our democratic U.S.A.

In the “Country of Freedom”, 2.3 million human beings are rotting away alive in the increasingly privatized prisons. The U.S. prisoner rate is the highest in the world. Holding people behind bars is big business. Minorities form a disproportionately high percentage of the detainees.

*

And that is not all. Actually, the entire world has already become one huge prison. Look around: the whole planet is now being monitored, policed in that very special and thorough U.S. way; policed, brutalized, and if it dares to protest – pitilessly chastised.

Essential terms are all being twisted. The country abusing its own people, as well as the entire world, is defined by its own corporate mass media and propaganda system, as “free” and “democratic”. Those nations that are defending their own people against the brutal diktat of the empire, are insulted, called ‘regimes’ and ‘dictatorships’.

I have already described this madness in my 800-page book, “Exposing Lies of the Empire”, after witnessing some of the deadliest trends being spread by the United States in some 160 countries.

The murder of George Floyd unleashed resistance; it opened many eyes. In the United States, and everywhere else. Mr. Floyd, African-Americans, Native Americans and other oppressed people in the United States are brothers and sisters of those billions of men and women who are to this day, colonized, brutalized and murdered by the Empire, all over the world.

Let this be the beginning of a new wave of the global liberation struggle!

Now more and more people can finally see what few of us have been repeating for years: The entire world has its neck squashed by the U.S. boot. The entire world “cannot breathe”! And the entire world has to fight for its right to be able to breathe!

China diminishes itself

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The rise of China is not only a hope for the Asian people but also inspires working class people all over the world. It instils hopes that there is an alternative to predatory capitalism of the west. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played a major role in transforming China as a major world power while uplifting many Chinese from poverty, hunger and homelessness. The Chinese state capitalism or socialism with Chinese character under the leadership of CCP has managed its economy, politics and culture in a progressive manner. The Chinese achievements are potential alternatives to western capitalism. However, there are many issues that is confronting China today that limits the working-class politics. There is falling ideological appeal of the CCP among Chinese youth due to its top down approach. There is growing disillusionment among the CCP members because of the growing gap between theory and ideological practice among the top leadership within the CCP hierarchy. There is huge growth of economic inequality among Chinese population. The growing gap between rich and poor shows the failures of the CCP in developing egalitarian economic policies. The gap between rural and urban China is another concern that CCP ignores in practice. Many of these problems are self-inflicted by the arrogance and dominance of the CCP. It is making the same blunders that USSR made and collapsed. These self-inflicted harms are avoidable for the sake of China, Chinese people in particular and working-class people across the globe.

The internal issues of discontent in Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan and fear among the Uighur Muslims reflect democratic distrusts between Chinese government, party and people living within China. It demands democratisation politics and decentralisation governance within the democratic traditions of communist ideology. The CCP led Chinese government has failed to overcome the trust deficit within different regions and provinces in China. The trust deficit of China is accelerated by its aggressive postures in its neighbourhood foreign policy.  China and India are two civilizational postcolonial states. These two countries share more than 3,440km (2,100 miles) long border and have overlapping claims. These two nuclear armed countries can solve their border disputes with debates, discussions and diplomacy. The military confrontation between two diminishes their role both in regional and global forums. It sends wrong signals to regional and world peace. Both the countries need to focus on their own economic development and cooperate with each other for human welfare. China, Nepal and Pakistan are all weather friends. This is how neighbours should be in relationships but there is distrust of Beijing in Kathmandu and Islamabad. Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka and east Asian countries are also good friends with China but scepticisms are growing in these countries because of the highhandedness of Beijing. There is local resistance against Chinese investment and Chinese takeover of their natural and strategic resources. Similar trends are visible in African continent against neo-colonial modes of Chinese investments. The Chinese aggressive postures diminish the good will for China in different regions.

The ruling elites need to understand that these issues are serious liabilities in long run. The sustainability of CCP and the rise of China depends on the good will it generates among people within its effective foreign policy praxis in dealing with neighbours and other friendly nations. The CCP can solve all these issues with a clear, coherent and democratic approach by developing uninterrupted trust between China and other neighbouring countries. It can solve its internal disputes and discontents with an open, honest, progressive and democratic manner. It needs political resolve that can further strengthen China within and outside its territory. But the Chinese aggressive behaviours diminish China and all its potentials. China is making the same mistakes as Soviet Russia has made, which led to its disintegration. It was a major loss to the working-class people of the world. Similarly, the failures of China will further weaken the working-class politics in the world.  In this context, the CCP led China need to take responsibility and initiative for peace and development and transform itself within changing requirements of time.

The organisational, ideological and structural transformation of the CCP, Chinese state and government depends on various factors. These factors are local, regional, national and international.  The understandings of these factors are central to the initiation of reform processes. The CCP’s dominance and monopoly over Chinese politics and state needs serious reflection by which CCP can accommodate different political, cultural, social and intellectual voices within and outside China.  The China is no more solely an agrarian economy. There are different sectors emerged in China during the post 1985 reform period. The Chinese party state need to develop capabilities to engage with different professional classes and negotiate with their requirements.  It would be political suicide to ignore the new class formations in China. The CCP, Chinese state and government can manage all these challenges and uncertainties if it engages with it in an open and democratic manner. The Chinese communists have nothing to hide but need to reform the way it functions.

China is a part of the global capitalist production and distribution networks. China is using these networks for its own national interests. But the national interests should not be the only criteria for a communist party state to determine its future course of actions in geopolitics. The national interests are not free from the interests of Chinese people and their Asian neighbours.  If the CCP looks at its national interest only, it would be very difficult to sustain the Chinese model of economic growth and development. There is growing local resistance movements against special economic zones, industrial and technological parks due to the perilous working conditions and precarity of Chinese workers. In this way, China faces these uphill tasks and challenges during these uncertain times. The Chinese story can survive if Chinese ruling classes can transform themselves by reflecting on their aggressive, neoliberal governance within the country, and poor public relations management, and bullying behaviour with neighbouring and friendly countries.