Rising popular anger over Nepali government’s response to COVID-19

Rohantha De Silva

The Nepalese government of Prime Minister Sharam Oli has mobilised the police to shut down protests and arrest demonstrators denouncing the administration’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the most recent official figures, Nepal, with a population of 28 million, has 22,2972 confirmed cases and 75 deaths. Thousands of people are currently confined in cramped makeshift quarantine facilities that lack basic sanitation facilities and have now become virus hotpots.

On July 31, youth affiliated with the “COVID-19 Nepal: Enough is Enough” Facebook group, demonstrated outside the prime minister’s residence in the capital Kathmandu.

Members of the social media group denounced government indifference to the plight of the masses and raised concerns about the rising number of suicides across the country. More than 1,200 people killed themselves during the government’s 74-day coronavirus lockdown over job cuts and the resulting loss of income.

Protesters demanded that the government health authorities increase the use of the more effective Polymerase Chain Reaction Test, instead of the Rapid Diagnostic Test.

A major reason for Nepal’s relatively small number of reported infections is the limited testing being carried out. Although the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) government previously claimed it would conduct 10,000 tests per day from July, testing remains at just 4,000 per day, one of the lowest rates in the world.

Demonstrators also demanded proper contact tracing of infected individuals and safer quarantine facilities for women and the oppressed Dalits, who have been harassed and attacked. They also called for financial transparency over the 10 billion rupees the government claims to have allocated for pandemic control.

According to the media reports, police attacked the demonstration, detaining about 50 youth, including random individuals who happened to be in the area. As Aalok Subedi told the Kathmandu Post: “I was at Big Mart [a local department store] when the police accosted me and put me in their van.”

While those detained were released later that evening, the police attack points to fears by the Stalinist NCP administration that the youth protests will become a rallying point for mass anti-government demonstrations.

“Covid-19 Nepal: Enough Is Enough!” has over 209,000 Facebook members. The mainly middle-class youth involved in the group are not affiliated with any political party, another indication of the widespread disaffection among Nepali youth with the establishment parties.

The organisation, however, is attempting to divert these youth into futile attempts to pressure the government. Dhirendra Shrestha, 29, told the media, “We are not demanding that the government step down” but telling it “that what they are doing is not enough.”

Attempting to politically hijack this movement, the Nepali Congress party has voiced its “support” for the organisation. Like the Stalinist NCP, Congress governments are equally responsible for the dangerous, rundown state of the Nepali health system.

The July 31 demonstration is one of several protests in recent months. On June 9, around 150 people staged a sit-down protest outside Oli’s residence. It was attacked by the police using water cannons and batons. Later in June, hundreds of youth took to the streets in major cities around the country.

Responding to widespread anger over the July 31 arrests, Deputy Superintendent of Police Roshan Khadka told the media that his officers would end the random detention of protesters.

These assurances are worthless.

In June, five protestors were arrested for staging a hunger strike at Patan Durbar Square in and on July 30 another group was arrested on their way to file a “Right to Information” petition with the courts. Police officers did not have warrants for those arrests and the youth were harshly treated while in custody.

The anti-government opposition is not confined to its inadequate response to COVID-19 but also to the government’s indifference to the pandemic’s devastating economic impact on millions of the country’s poverty-stricken citizens. Nepal’s economy relies almost entirely on tourism and remittances from overseas migrant workers. Revenue from these sources has all but collapsed.

Migrant workers from Nepal, including those unable to return from India and the Gulf State countries, face a dire situation. Despite repeated calls by the Nepali Supreme Court, the Stalinist NCP government has refused to provide any significant assistance to these trapped workers.

Nor has the government provided any serious financial relief to those involved in the tourist industry. The desperate situation facing urban workers, day labourers and the rural poor, as well as small entrepreneurs, including small shopkeepers and the farmers, is appalling.

Confronted with the growing mass discontent, the NCP government has resorted to whipping up chauvinism and religious sectarianism to divert attention from the escalating social crisis. On July 13, Oli claimed that Lord Ram, the mythical Hindu god, was not born in Ayodhya, as claimed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janatha Party and other Hindu extremists, but in a Nepali village. This was Indian “cultural encroachment,” Oli declared.

The inadequate and indifferent response of the Stalinist NCP administration to the coronavirus pandemic is not an accident. Like its counterparts throughout South Asia and internationally, the Nepali ruling elite is not interested in the fate of working people and rural toilers confronting the coronavirus disaster but is determined to defend the profit system and further enrich the capitalist class.

Iranian oil workers mount wave of strikes as COVID-19 rages across the country

Ulaş Ateşci

Amid a resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of workers in Iran’s southern provinces have carried out wildcat strikes in recent days in the critical oil and petrochemical sectors.

Washington’s campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran—including punishing economic sanctions, a de facto embargo on medical equipment and drugs, and military threats—has exacerbated the social and economic crisis in the country, which has also been compounded by the Islamic Republic’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to reports, at least 10,000 workers have participated in a wave of strikes at nearly 30 oil and petrochemical facilities, including the Abadan, Parsian and Qeshm refineries. Strikes have also taken place in the Lamerd petrochemical complex, and some parts of the South Pars gas field, the world’s largest gas field. Job actions have occurred in at least 11 provinces since Saturday, August 1, to protest unpaid wages and terrible working conditions.

It remains unclear if the strikes are continuing. One right-wing source, associated with pro-US opposition forces, claimed this weekend that the strike movement is continuing, even expanding. But this has not been confirmed by other Iranian or western media outlets.

The trigger that caused the growing anger to boil over was the death of a contract worker at the Mahshahr petrochemical facility on July 28 in nearly 50-degree heat. Workers at the North Azadegan oil field were reportedly the first to stop work to protest low wages on July 29.

The strike wave spread to the Kangan refinery and Parsian oil production complex on August 3, and to the Isfahan refinery in central Iran and Mashhad in the north east on August 4.

Workers are mainly employed as contract employees, meaning they lack a permanent job and social rights. As well as their unpaid wages and social insurance, workers are demanding decent dormitories and hygienic bathrooms.

The brave strike wave by workers in defiance of the Iranian regime is part of a broader upsurge in the class struggle internationally, against austerity, state violence and ever widening social inequality—all of which are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It marks a deepening of working class anger towards Iran’s bourgeois-clerical authorities, following the mass protests and demonstrations across the country at the end of 2017, and in November 2019.

The fact that the wildcat strikes broke out in the most critical economic sector in Iran makes them all the more significant. It was a mass strike of oil workers in January-February 1979 that broke the back of the bloody dictatorship of the US-backed Shah.

The oil sector, which has been hard hit by the global recession triggered by the pandemic, remains the lifeblood of the Iranian economy. Due to the Trump administration’s punitive sanctions—which were imposed in 2018, after the US scuttled the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, with the aim of crashing its economy and provoking “regime change”—Iran’s crude oil production has dropped to its lowest level in 40 years, and its oil storage facilities have been filled to the brim.

In early July, Reuters reported, oil production fell to 1.9 million barrels per day, nearly half that in 2018. According to the report, Iran’s “total liquid production—including crude oil, condensate and natural gas liquids—fell from 3.1 million barrels per day (bpd) in March to 3 million bpd in June.” A further fall of 100,000 barrels per day was predicted for July.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced last month that it expects Middle Eastern energy producing countries, including Iran, to lose $270 billion in oil revenue compared to last year. At the end of June, Iran’s First Vice President, Eshaq Jahangiri, said that Iran’s oil revenues had plummeted to a mere $8 billion in 2019, as compared with $100 billion in 2011 and $62 billion in 2018.

In addition, Iran’s currency, the rial, has fallen precipitously, to some 230,000 rial per one US dollar, as opposed to 35,000 to $1 in 2015. According to the IMF’s latest estimate, Iran's inflation rate has reached nearly 35 percent, and is now the fourth highest in the world.

Washington has seized on the COVID-19 pandemic to ratchet up its sanctions against Iran. This has directly contributed to mass deaths in the country, because the sanctions prevent Iran from obtaining medicines and supplies to treat coronavirus cases, cancer patients, and other deadly diseases. In early April, Washington vindictively declared its intention to use its veto power to prevent Iran from accessing a $5 billion emergency loan from the IMF to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Iranian regime’s hope that the European powers would offer an alternative to help Tehran evade US sanctions has come to naught.

Iran is the country worst affected by the pandemic in the Middle East, with more than 18,000 coronavirus deaths, according to official figures. More than 2,000 new infections and about 200 deaths are being registered every day.

While the criminal sanctions enforced by Washington and its European imperialist allies are chiefly to blame for this catastrophic state of affairs, the focus of Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime amid the pandemic has been on defending and expanding the profits and privileges of the ruling elite, just as it has been throughout its decades long conflict with the US.

Placing the financial interests of the bourgeois elite before the lives and needs of Iran’s workers and toilers, Tehran began reopening the Iranian economy in the second half of April, even as Iran was officially reporting more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases per day. Al-Monitor reported that as of July 25, 138 medical workers in the country have lost their lives fighting the pandemic.

Iranian officials are increasingly fearful that the worsening conditions and the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic will trigger a social explosion. In June, Hashem Hashemzadeh Herisi, a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, warned that “The current situation of the society is unbearable. The distance between the people and the establishment grows every day… The situation is very critical. We can’t sit by and let the establishment die.”

The energy workers’ strike wave erupted amid growing social unrest. Despite increasingly harsh government repression, there appears to be a growing willingness among workers to struggle. According to reports, there were more than 200 protests across 74 cities and 24 provinces in June.

Workers at the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company, in the oil-rich Khuzestan province, have been on strike for more than 50 days. Haft Tappeh sugar workers have repeatedly waged militant struggles over the past five years after the company was privatized. The Iranian regime has responded to the latest walkout with ruthless repression, including the imprisonment of some of the workers’ leaders. The striking workers are demanding payment of their wages and benefits, rehiring of fired workers, “expulsion and arrest of corrupt company officials,” and the cancellation of the privatization.

At the beginning of the month, around 200 workers at the Heavy Equipment Production Company descended on the company headquarters in Arak, in central Iran, to protest against delays in paying their wages, poor working conditions and the way the company is being run.

In early July, a court in Arak sentenced 42 workers from Azarab Industries to one year in prison, 74 lashes, and one month of forced labor for protesting unpaid wages and the privatization of the business. Due to a public outcry, a higher court was subsequently forced to withdraw these penalties.

Under these conditions, the executions of some of the participants in protests in Iran in December 2017 and January 2018 is aimed at intimidating the working class as it enters into struggle. Mostafa Salehi was reportedly arrested eight months after the protests and charged with the murder of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer during the demonstrations. Despite his denial of the murder challenges, his trial and conviction were concluded over the course of a mere 10 days in February 2019. One day after the verdict was released to the public last Tuesday, he was executed.

In July, three other protesters who took part in demonstrations last November came close to being executed. The decision to launch a retrial of their cases came only after a massive social media campaign against the executions, in which social media users tweeted 12 million times “do not execute” in Persian.

Clashes in Beirut as ruling elite exploits anger over blast

Jean Shaoul

Thousands of people poured into Martyrs’ Square in Beirut Saturday, for the third successive day, to vent their anger over Tuesday’s deadly port explosion, with similar protests taking place on Sunday.

They blamed the catastrophe on the plutocrats who have governed the country for decades, living in obscene luxury while workers face job losses, ever-deepening poverty, constant power outages and garbage piled up everywhere.

The explosion has killed at least 158 people and injured 6,000 more, with a further 100 people, mainly port workers, known to be missing. Around 300,000 people—12 percent of the city’s population—have been made homeless. The blast blew up buildings, shattered windows and set neighbourhoods ablaze. Officials have estimated losses at $10 billion to $15 billion.

Protesters in Beirut, Lebanon, August 9, 2020 (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The catastrophic blaze—apparently the result of welding work on the door of the hangar storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate—could have been prevented. It was the result of the criminal neglect and callous indifference displayed by successive governments and the ruling elite. They ignored repeated warnings about the dangers for years, especially after a similar explosion in 2015 at the Chinese port of Tianjin that killed 173 people and injured hundreds.

The billionaires and millionaires that rule Lebanon allowed the powerful chemical, impounded in 2014, to be stored without proper safety controls close to residential neighbourhoods.

The blast has wrecked Lebanon’s, Syria’s and Jordan’s main entry point for cargo, including the grain terminal and the silos that normally hold 85 percent of the country’s cereals, threatening a food crisis for tens of millions of people.

The street demonstrations may appear to be a continuation of last October’s anti-government protests against economic hardship, government corruption and the country’s sectarian political set up. These protests had subsided amid coronavirus pandemic restrictions. But the latest demonstrations were marked by the presence of the Christian and Sunni parties and ex-generals. Their leader is former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, Washington’s and Riyadh’s man in Lebanon, who was forced to resign last year in the face of mass opposition.

The Lebanese national flag was prominent, as were signs extolling October’s “Revolution.” Some set up nooses on wooden frames as a warning to the country’s rulers as the hashtag #prepare the noose took off. While some demonstrators called for a reckoning with all the plutocrats, others centred their fire exclusively on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist party. Its bloc is the largest in the country’s parliament, reflecting the dominant numerical position of Shia, who constitute 40 percent of the Lebanese population. Protesters burned an effigy of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

In the evening, angry clashes broke out with the security forces which fired tear gas and rubber bullets to stop protesters breaking through the barrier to government buildings, wounding at least 238 people. A policeman died after a fall.

Nevertheless, one group of demonstrators, led according to Al-Jazeera by retired army officers, stormed the foreign ministry, declaring it the “headquarters of the revolution.” Before being pushed out by the military, they pulled down the portrait of President Michel Aoun, who has supported Hezbollah’s role in government, suggesting they have their sights set on installing a replacement who, under Lebanese law, must be a Christian.

Others entered the energy and economy ministries, as well as the Association of Lebanese Banks.

Unable to openly call for Hariri’s return to power, these forces are urging the formation of an interim “salvation” government, “potentially headed by the military” and including bankers and other business figures, to “resolve the humanitarian and economic crisis,” and prepare the way for elections on the basis of a new electoral law—in as much as three years’ time. Their aim is to restore the direct rule of the plutocracy, in the service of imperialism, and limit or eradicate the influence of the “mobsters” in Lebanon and Syria—a euphemism for Hezbollah.

Demonstrators pledged to continue the protests, even after Prime Minister Hassan Diab called for early elections to defuse the tensions. He was installed as a “technocrat” to head the government in January after Hariri’s forced resignation.

Diab said fresh elections in two months’ time were the only way out of the country’s crisis. His announcement followed the resignation of several Christian legislators who sought to precipitate an election and that of Information Minister Manal Abdel Samad. Diab has put 19 officials, mostly unnamed, under house arrest and/or banned them from travelling, accusing them of knowing about the ammonium nitrate. They include port and customs officials, judges, and former ministers. Several officials have had their bank accounts frozen.

Aoun has set up an investigation into the blast, which will also look at whether “external interference” was a factor, to report within four days. Commentators have seized on this to pin the blame on Hezbollah, claiming that the warehouse was a Hezbollah explosives dump that prompted an air strike by Israel.

While such suspicions of an Israeli attack are understandable, given Israel’s history of targeted assassinations, cyber-attacks and other assaults on its opponents, there is no evidence to back this up. In a recent border incident with Hezbollah near the disputed area of the Shebaa Farms, Israeli forces were under unprecedented orders to miss their assailants to prevent an escalation. That indicated that Tel Aviv does not want a renewed war with Hezbollah at this stage.

Nevertheless, theories of Hezbollah’s involvement serve a definite purpose—to deflect attention away from the political factions aligned with Washington, Paris and Riyadh, all of which have denied any responsibility for the explosion of a mountain of explosives kept at the port for six years.

Playing a key role in these machinations is the representative of the former colonial power, and suppressor of the year-long “yellow vest” protests, French President Emmanuel Macron. He became the first international figure to visit the country after the blast. Under the cover of offering aid, he is seeking to organise a political coup by the ruling elite against the working class and engineer Hezbollah’s elimination as a political and military force in Lebanon and Syria.

Macron called for an international investigation into the explosion. His model is presumably the fraudulent $700 million “trial” in absentia of four low-level Hezbollah members by a special UN-backed court in the Netherlands for planting the bomb that killed former Lebanese prime minister and billionaire Rafiq Hariri and 21 others in 2005. That court is due to report its findings soon.

Co-chairing a virtual international aid conference with the UN over the weekend, Macron insisted that aid was conditional upon “radical political reform.” While claiming he would “never interfere in Lebanese politics,” he said he could apply “pressure.”

Speaking on television on his return to Paris, Macron said that if France did not play its part, “other powers may interfere, whether it be Iran, Saudi Arabia or Turkey.”

In the absence of a revolutionary leadership advancing a perspective for unifying the working class, there are real dangers that the legitimate anger of workers, youth and middle-class layers engulfed by the ever-widening crisis will be channelled behind yet another bunch of kleptocrats, this time possibly headed by military generals.

The demands of Lebanese workers and youth, like those of workers who have risen in revolt across the region, in Europe, the US and elsewhere, have nothing in common with those of their political leaders. Their demands cannot be achieved other than through a unified struggle with their class brothers and sisters internationally for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism throughout the Middle East and around the world.

US hits five million COVID-19 cases as testing declines and schools reopen

Benjamin Mateus

It has taken just over two weeks for the United States to record an additional one million cases of COVID-19. On August 6, the nation reached the grim milestone of five million cases.

As of this writing, there have been 5,187,611 cases and 165,500 deaths. There are 2,367,820 active cases and over 50,000 people hospitalized for treatment of COVID-19. After a low point in the positivity rate of 4.5 percent in mid-June, it has risen to 8 percent, where it has remained for several weeks despite claims of more testing by the Trump administration.

Globally, there are now 20 million cases of COVID-19 and the death toll is 732,000. The United States, comprising 4.25 percent of the global population, accounts for 26 percent of all cases and 22.6 percent of all fatalities. On a per-capita basis, only Brazil, Peru and Colombia have more daily cases than the US (with approximately 163 infections per million people).

Elementary school students in Godley, Texas, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Alarmingly, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine is now projecting that America’s death toll will reach 295,011 by December 1. The institute estimates that another 135,000 people will succumb in the next 113 days (1,195 deaths per day). These estimates are based on the assumption that mask usage will be inconsistent and that half of the school districts in each state will opt for online rather than in-person instruction.

IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray acknowledged that should the public adopt near-universal mask usage, estimated additional deaths by that date would drop by 49 percent, to reach a lower total of 228,271. If mandates were eased, the death toll could rise to over 391,000. The present estimate of community mobility, using cell phone data, is at 25 percent below pre-pandemic norms. At the peak of the nationwide restrictions, mobility had declined to 55 percent below pre-pandemic patterns.

The IHME has consistently been overly conservative in predicting the number of infections and deaths from the pandemic, and, by all accounts, the transition to fall and winter seasons can have a significant impact on the dynamics of community transmission.

Given the continuing rise in the rate of new infections and deaths and the lack of any nationally, let alone internationally, coordinated plan to scale up testing, contact tracing, quarantining and treatment, the drive to reopen the schools in the US assumes a homicidal and criminal character.

Global map of per capita COVID-19 cases

Several early school openings—Indiana, Mississippi and Louisiana—have been marked by confirmed COVID-19 cases on day one, necessitating closure or quarantining of students and teachers. Experience has already exposed the falsity of claims that schools can be safely reopened for in-person instruction. What, in fact, is being prepared is an explosive increase in infections and deaths.

This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by Florida, with over 530,000 COVID-19 cases statewide and 8,500 new cases on Saturday. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran told the Hillsborough County School Board that it “needs to follow the law, it’s that simple,” after the board issued a statement that the district did not meet the requirements for safely offering in-classroom instruction when schools resume. In the meantime, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has pushed hard for the schools to reopen, instructed health directors across Florida to refuse to give school boards recommendations or risk assessments.

On August 5, three rural school districts in Texas were the first to head back to the classroom. With some Dallas-area districts poised to begin the first day of fall sessions, state officials were debating if data on COVID-19 infections at public schools should be collected. “This question on data collection is still under active deliberation by the agency, and we expect to have an update in coming weeks on what, if any, data will be required, and how it will be recorded,” said Texas Education Association spokesperson, Frank Ward.

Several school reopenings in Europe and Asia that proceeded with little incident have been cited as examples of the low risk of transmission among school-aged children. However, these nations have a per capita transmission rate significantly lower than the US, along with a much more capable surveillance system to track and trace new infections.

Comparison of new tests vs new cases in the US

It is worth mentioning that the outbreak in an Israeli school in May of two known COVID-19 cases led to 153 students and 25 staff testing positive, including 87 close contacts outside the school. At the time, the number of daily cases nationwide had for many days been below 30.

Studies of children are limited because they are less likely to be tested, given their better outcomes. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 200,000 COVID-19 cases have occurred in children under the age of 18. They account for less than 1 percent of COVID-19 deaths. There have been 342 cases of a Kawasaki Disease-like syndrome, medically known as Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children. Six have died.

Yet recent findings have brought to the forefront of the school opening debate the fact that children are susceptible to becoming infected and have the ability to transmit the virus. In a study published  for the Georgia Department of Health, Dr. Christine M. Szablewski noted that over half of the children between ages 6 and 10 tested positive at an overnight day camp. She concluded, “This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports, might play an important role in transmission.”

The porous nature of communities and the extensive interactions that occur between counties and states place all geographic sectors at risk of new outbreaks. Dr. Tina Hartert of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine told the Wall Street Journal, “[O]ur schools are little mini-microcosms of our cities that they’re in—what’s happening in cities is what’s going to happen in schools. Until there is definitive data one way or the other, we have reason to believe from decades of data from other respiratory viruses that children are very good transmitters. There isn’t a lot of reason to believe that that wouldn’t be the case with this virus.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new report this week noting that more than 97,000 children tested positive for the coronavirus in just the last two weeks of July.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, one in four workers is at high risk of severe illness if he or she becomes infected. Among teachers, some 1.47 million (24 percent) have a condition that will place them at higher risk for serious illness. Additionally, millions of seniors live in homes with school-aged children.

By all accounts, the United States has been flying blind through this pandemic despite White House boasts about the vast number of tests conducted thus far. Of great concern is the fact that the number of daily COVID-19 tests in the US has dropped significantly in recent weeks. On July 24, when new cases peaked at 75,204, the number of tests performed that day reached a single-day high of 926,876. Since then, the number has plummeted, with only 665,029 tests on August 8. The US reported 53,923 new cases that day.

Even the Washington Post felt obliged to comment on August 6: “The number of new coronavirus cases recorded nationwide each day is dropping after peaking at more than 75,000—but the declines are muddied by issues with testing and data-gathering in big states.”

President Trump has repeatedly complained that supposedly too aggressive testing was pushing up statistics on infections, and falsely attributed the explosive rise in confirmed cases to increased testing. In the context of the drive to reopen the schools, part of the murderous campaign to force workers back to work, there is every reason to believe that the government, working on behalf of the corporate elite, is engaged in a criminal effort to conceal the true impact of the pandemic.

Trump's illegal power grab and the specter of American Bonapartism

Andre Damon

On Saturday, US President Donald Trump announced a series of measures ostensibly targeting the cutoff of federal unemployment benefits that mark a new stage in his effort to abolish all constitutional restraints on the power of the president.

Trump announced a deferral of the federal payroll tax, which would defund Social Security, and the extension of federal unemployment benefits at a much lower level.

Congress allowed federal extended unemployment benefits to expire more than two weeks ago, plunging the 16 million unemployed workers in the US and their families into poverty. The expiration of federal jobless aid of $600 a week means that the weekly payments have fallen to the level of state benefits, which can be less than $300.

Trump’s measures constitute an illegal imposition on the powers of Congress, as spelled out in the Constitution, which declares that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… and provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.”

Trump’s usurpation of the congressional prerogative to tax and spend is the latest act in a series of unconstitutional actions. In February of last year, Trump declared a State of Emergency to misappropriate Pentagon funds, in defiance of Congress, to build up his apparatus of repression on the Southern border.

In June, amid mass protests against police violence, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military throughout the country. When sections of the military resisted this attempted coup, fearing it was not adequately prepared and would create a social explosion, Trump instead dispatched federal border agents to Portland, Oregon, where they beat demonstrators and snatched protesters into unmarked vehicles.

In announcing the new measures, Trump presented himself as the arbiter of a logjam in Congress. “Political games that harm American lives are unacceptable, especially during a global pandemic, and therefore I am taking action to provide financial security to Americans,” Trump said. Asked if he was “trying to set a new precedent that the president can go around Congress,” Trump replied, “Congress has obstructed… people from getting desperately needed money.”

Trump’s actions have the character of Bonapartism. The term is derived from the historical example of the famous French general who ruled France for 15 years as a dictator. In its modern usage, it denotes a political situation that arises in a period acute social tension, when the traditional norms of bourgeois democracy become dysfunctional. The executive of the capitalist state—in the US, the president—exploits the impasse to augment its power.

The Bonapartist appears to rise above classes or the contending political factions through which bourgeois politics, in accordance with constitutional provisions, normally proceeds. Relying increasingly on the repressive forces of the state—the military, the police, intelligence agencies and, if necessary, paramilitary forces—the president asserts himself as the super-arbiter of conflict between factions and classes. In fact, however, he speaks for definite class interests.

Writing about the phenomenon of Bonapartist dictatorships in Europe that came to power prior to the rise of fascism, Trotsky wrote:

Raising itself politically above the classes, Bonapartism, like its predecessor Caesarism, for that matter, represents in the social sense, always and at all epochs, the government of the strongest and firmest part of the exploiters; consequently, present-day Bonapartism can be nothing else than the government of finance capital which directs, inspires, and corrupts the summits of the bureaucracy, the police, the officers’ caste, and the press.

Trump has not yet created a dictatorship. The real estate and casino con artist—without military conquests to brag of—has limited credentials to posture as a modern-day Bonaparte. But all his actions are directed toward creating such a dictatorship.

Trump’s power grab is facilitated by the mendacious and two-faced character of his opposition in the Democratic Party. The Democrats present themselves as sympathetic to the plight of unemployed workers, while in reality representing the interests of a corporate and financial oligarchy which materially benefits from cutting unemployment benefits—the same interests for whom Trump speaks.

On the one hand, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said that she is seeking a full extension of the federal unemployment benefits. On the other hand, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer last month introduced a bill that would cut extended unemployment benefits “by $100 when the rate fell below 11 percent [in a given state], and by another $100 each time the rate dropped by another percentage point,” according to the New York Times. Given that the official US unemployment rate is already at 10.2 percent, Schumer’s proposal would mean a cut in jobless benefits for the vast majority of unemployed workers in the US.

The New York Times, the main newspaper associated with the Democratic Party, called Schumer’s bill “a smarter way to provide workers with necessary and timely aid.”

The Washington Post, the other major US newspaper aligned with the Democratic Party, called for a “renewal of unemployment benefits at an elevated rate without disincentives to work.” The term “disincentive” is a backhanded euphemism for cutting unemployment benefits, which supposedly discourage workers from returning to workplaces.

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post last month, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, both under Obama, declared that “extending the $600 weekly unemployment insurance benefit enacted at the start of the shutdown does not make sense now.”

The basic reality is that the Democrats, Congressional Republicans and Trump, despite the different political roles that they play, support the same fundamental, bipartisan policy of the ruling class in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid-March, when the pandemic threatened to cause a major financial crisis for over-indebted US banks and corporations, the Democrats and Republicans united nearly unanimously to pass the so-called CARES Act, which sanctioned the multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street and the rich. When it came to handing money to the rich, the “gridlock” in Washington suddenly disappeared.

Once the massive corporate bailout was passed, the US ruling class immediately adopted the mantra that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” demanding that workers get back on the job.

Both the federal government and the states quickly abandoned even the most minimal efforts to contain the pandemic, with more than half of governors reopening businesses in defiance of the CDC’s own guidelines, including the Democratic governors of Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Colorado.

The premature reopening of businesses has fueled a massive resurgence of the pandemic, with more than 1,000 people dying every day.

The cutting of unemployment benefits is critical in forcing workers back on the job through a form of economic conscription, aimed at driving down labor costs and boosting the profits of major corporations by sacrificing the lives of workers and their family members.

It is entirely possible that Democratic and Republican members of Congress will come to an agreement on a plan to extend unemployment benefits, using Trump’s proposal as a baseline to reach a deal that cuts benefits, which they all agree is necessary. This, however, will resolve nothing.

Capitalism is incompatible with the needs of society, as it is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. Any resolution on a progressive basis to the catastrophe of the spreading pandemic and the social catastrophe engulfing the United States depends upon the independent intervention of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary and socialist program.

Is Indian Big data collection for Israel’s Covid-19 Rapid Test kits development ethical?

Prem Anand Murugan

In India recently, there is all the hype in mainstream media about a probable 30 second rapid COVID-19 detection system by collaboration of DRDO with the Israeli military R&D.

Reportedly, there are four developments that are planned to be tested:

• Online voice test along with Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Breath analyser based on Terahertz waves along with AI
• Isothermal test using Saliva samples and
• Polyamino acid test

Of these two tests can be justify the claims of rapid diagnosis, they are online voice test and breath analyser along with AI. They are proposed to be giving results in 30 seconds and 60 seconds respectively. The isothermal tests by Kirdod and polyamino acid test kit by rapid diagnostics are already known and used technology and takes in 45 minutes to about an hour to produce results. The isothermal tests are RT-LAMP PCR technique. This does not require the RT PCR machines in laboratory to process rather processed on spot with simple equipment. Similarly, the poly amino acids test is also a point of care tests. Apart from the portability and significant reduction in time compared to the conventional RT-PCR method still the standardisation and accuracy with be mains concerns. Kirdod adds that it will be processing the results of the isothermal tests (RT-LAMP) using AI instead of a doctor and thereby reducing the output time. The polyamino acid test is not a new concept and used in the detection of various disease diagnosis. So the actually claimed rapid tests that detect Covid-19 are as follows:

Online Voice test combined with AI.

This technology for detecting COVID-19 using recorded voice samples was developed by Vocalis Health, an American-Israeli start-up. They propose there is particular voice fingerprint (vocal biomarkers) which can be detected when a person is affected by Covid-19. Vocalis Health was setup under $9 million dollar funding as a merger between Verbal and Healthymize on December 2019. Vocalis health was primarily focussed on diagnosing voice affecting diseases such as cardiac and respiratory diseases. Now it is has shifted the focus in Covid-19 diagnosis. There is no biological evidence behind this approach except for one study very recently. It showed diagnosis of 5 people using previously recorded interviews and it concludes saying the need for large amounts of such data. The concept intended to be used by Vocalis is to collect as many samples as possible and then by analysing big data patterns for vocal biomarkers using AI based platform. This concept is still in prototype stage and would require big data for the proof of concept to be established. Thereby the company Vocalis can use this for diagnosis in future. For the data to have any significance the concept requires large sample numbers. India with high number of Covid-19 infected people give a good ground for the company and the military to collect samples.

 Breathanalyser based on Terahertz waves along with AI

Another proposed rapid Covid-19 test to be experimented on people in India is a breath analyser. It uses terahertz (THz) waves for the detection of the virus. This technology was developed by the company TERA Group with the help of Israel Ministry of Defense R&D. The concept here relies on use of Ultra high Frequency waves (THz) to detect the virus. The THz waves are a part of electromagnetic spectrum that is placed between Microwave and infrared wave spectrum.  This technology is very young and in mostly development stage and requires a large number of patients to validate it. With the rapid push of this technology, there are also bio security concerns regarding the use of THz waves in diagnostics. Upon exposure, these waves can cause various side effects and may probably produce health hazards. Some mice studies on its skin showed the THz waves can cause inflammation responses and also interfering with wound healing. Even low level THz waves can cause variations at molecular level shown to cause DNA damages, gene expression changes and protein changes. Although the level of THz waves used in diagnosis devices might be less, still the safety of THz wave based diagnosis is still not proved.

As said by the Israeli health minister, the plan by Israeli R&D is to collect tens of thousands of samples within a span of 10 days for analysis using AI. We are not sure what about how the consent will be obtained from such huge number of patients and normal people as control group. With no transparency from Indian government officials, most Indians might not even understand for what their data being used for in the name of Covid-19 testing. This raises huge ethical concerns on privacy issues, how the samples will be used and for what purpose will they be used. The Israeli government was even recently accused for breaching the privacy of Israeli people in the name of surveillance for Covid-19. We also see the involvement of start-up companies who aspire to bring the technology mainstream not only for Covid-19 diagnosis but also for other diseases too for which they would need large amount of data too. The primary question that should be asked is, are the samples of Indians being collected as a part of large scale experimentation without any information data privacy and compromised biosafety? This is also being done based on no substantial amount biological evidences till date. We know that the data obtained from people in this day and age has become a commodity. Hence this might only benefit the companies involved in collecting the big data on health of people with the help of governments.

The Likud Conspiracy: Israel in the Throes of a Major Political Crisis

Ramzy Baroud

Protests against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have raged on for weeks, turning violent sometimes. Israelis are furious at their government’s mediocre response to the coronavirus pandemic, especially as COVID-19 disease is experiencing a massive surge throughout the country.

Netanyahu warned protesters, thousands of whom have been rallying outside his residence in Jerusalem, against “anarchy (and) violence”. Scenes of utter chaos and violent arrests have been a daily occurrence in a country that is already in the throes of a political crisis, largely, if not exclusively, linked to the Prime Minister himself.

Desperate to create any distractions from his many woes at home, Netanyahu has been pushing for a confrontation with the Lebanese resistance group, Hezbollah. But that, too, has failed, as Israeli media has denied earlier claims that a violent confrontation was reported at the Israel/Lebanon border.

Hezbollah insists that it would be the group, not Netanyahu, that will determine the time and place for its response to Israel’s recent killing of Hezbollah’s influential member, Ali Kamel Mohsen.

Mohsen was killed in an Israeli aerial raid targeting the vicinity of the Damascus International Airport, likely another desperate attempt by Netanyahu to deflect attention from his troubled coalition government and his corruption trial to an issue that often unifies most Israelis.

The turmoil in Israel is not just about an obstinate, divisive leader who is manipulating public opinion, the media and the various political groups to remain in power and to avoid legal accountability for his corruption.

The Disunited Coalition 

Israel is suffering a crisis of political legitimacy, one that goes beyond the embattled Netanyahu, and his coalition with the head of the Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) centrist party, Benny Gantz.

The political marriage between Netanyahu’s Likud and Gantz’s Kahol Lavan last April was fundamentally odd and unexpected. The announcement that Gantz – who endured three general elections in less than a year to finally oust Netanyahu – was uniting with his archenemy has devastated the anti-Netanyahu political camp, forcing Gantz’s partners, Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya’alon, to abandon him.

But the new coalition government between the right and center became dysfunctional immediately after it was formed. Israel’s political marriage of convenience is likely to end in an ugly divorce.

The war between Netanyahu and his main coalition partner is now manifest in every aspect of Israel’s political life:  in the Knesset (parliament), in media headlines and on the streets.

When the new government assumed its duties after one of the most tumultuous years in Israel’s political history, the mood, at least immediately, was somewhat calm; both Netanyahu and Gantz seemed united in their desire to illegally annex nearly a third of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Israel’s rightwing camp was delighted; the center tagged along.

However, the international response to the annexation scheme forced Netanyahu to rethink his July 1 deadline. Now that annexation has been postponed indefinitely, Netanyahu is being denied a major political card that could have helped him replenish his fading popularity among Israelis, at a time when he desperately needs it.

On July 19, Netanyahu’s corruption trial resumed. Although the Prime Minister did not attend the opening session personally, his image – that of a strong commanding figure – was tarnished, nonetheless.

Gantz, who already agreed to the annexation plan, was too clever to fully associate himself with the risky political endeavor. That task was left to Netanyahu who knew the risks affiliated with a failed political scheme, but with no option except to follow through with it.

Awaiting the right opportunity to pounce on his beleaguered ‘partner’, Gantz found his chance in a report published by the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz.

The Budget Conspiracy 

On July 22, Haaretz reported that, “Netanyahu decided to not pass the budget for 2020 and to call a general election to take place on November 18,” to avoid the possibility of being forced to “handing over the keys to Defense Minister and Kahol Lavan Chairman, Benny Gantz” so that he, Netanyahu, may “attend legal proceedings” related to his corruption trial.

According to this claim, Netanyahu only agreed to swap the Prime Minister seat with Gantz come November 2021 just to buy time and to avoid a fourth election that would leave him vulnerable to an electoral defeat and to a corruption trial without a political safety net.

Despite the risk of yet another election, Netanyahu is keen to wrestle the Justice Ministry from Kahol Lavan’s hands, because whoever controls the Justice Ministry controls Netanyahu’s fate in Israeli courts. Leaving Gantz with such a powerful card is neither an option for the Likud nor for Netanyahu.

Hence, the Likud is insisting that the budget agreement can only last for one year, while Kahol Lavan is adamant that it must cover a period of two years. The Likud conspiracy, as revealed in Israeli media, suggests that the Likud Finance Minister, Israel Katz, plans to use the next budget negotiations as the reason to dismantle the right-center coalition and demand another election, thus denying Gantz his chance to serve his term as a prime minister, per the unity government agreement.

Crisis of a Fake Democracy

However, the crisis is larger than the dispute between Netanyahu and Gantz. While Israel has long prided itself on being “the only democracy in the Middle East”, the truth is that Israeli ‘democracy’ was, from the start, fraudulent, in that it catered to Israeli Jews and discriminated against everyone else.

In recent years, however, institutionalized racism and apartheid in Israel were no longer masked by clever political discourses.  Netanyahu, in particular, has led the charge of making Israel the right-wing, chauvinistic, racist haven that it is today.

The fact that Netanyahu recently became Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, elected repeatedly by Israel’s Jewish citizens, indicates that the Israeli leader is but a reflection of the larger ailments that have afflicted Israeli society as a whole.

Reducing the discussion to Netanyahu’s many failures might be convenient, but the demonstrable truth is that corrupt leaders can only exist in corrupt and unhealthy political systems. Israel is now the perfect example of that truism.

Union prepares sellout of Renault strike in Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

The 18-day-old strike at Renault in São José dos Pinhais, Paraná, against the dismissal of 747 worker is facing the threat of being sold out in a deal between the union and the company.

The struggle, involving thousands of workers and their families in assemblies, picket lines and street protests, is under threat of being shut down with an agreement that validates the slashing of jobs.

On Wednesday, a decision by the Labor Justice of Paraná declared the layoffs at Renault illegal for being decided outside of a negotiation with the Metalworkers Union of Great Curitiba (SMC), and ordered the immediate rehiring of those fired.

The Brazilian trade union federations and pseudo-left parties supporting them celebrated this decision as a victory for the workers at Renault. So did the SMC, as it rushed to set up a new round of negotiations with the company in order to get an “agreement between the parties, no matter what the agreement is,” in the words of the union’s president Sérgio Butka.

“We have a meeting scheduled [for Friday] to … discuss a middle ground, which is important for the company, important for the workers, important for Paraná,” said Butka. “Let’s go back to the negotiations table, let’s discuss the PDV (Voluntary Resignation Plan), let’s discuss the PLR (Participation in Profits and Results), let’s discuss competitiveness.”

The conditions that the union says it is negotiating are not a “middle ground,” but the company’s terms presented in a sweetened form that can be sold to the workers as some kind of “victory.” Their aim is to to break the resistance that has grown over the last 18 days.

In a video recorded on a picket line last Friday, the workers demonstrated their willingness to confront even violent police repression to defend their strike.

“The police are right over there. They are just waiting to beat up the workers, all of us injured workers,” says the worker who was filming. “We’re going to keep recording to see when they’re going to advance towards the workers... It’s not the union that’s blocking the gate, it’s the workers.”

One of the main sources of the workers’ anger is the conditions under which the layoffs took place, targeting employees removed from job due to illness or injuries suffered at work.

The wife of one of the fired workers, who is part of a group of wives who actively support the strike, told the World Socialist Web Site that the workers feel they have been worn out and discarded by Renault.

“[My husband] has injuries on both knees, both shoulders, his right ankle, right elbow and two spinal injuries,” she said. “He has always been healthy, and suffered all these injuries working there. Now he has to take medicine even to sleep.

“The feeling is that the company has taken advantage of the fragile moment of this pandemic to perform this cruelty. But the population understood this as wrong and the workers’ vote was 100 percent in favor of the strike.”

Many of those fired were off the job because of suspicions that they were infected with COVID-19. “It’s very sad because several were at home awaiting results, so the COVID positives may be greater than we know,” she said.

She added that despite the infections among its workers, the factory continued to operate normally until the strike broke out. “Because of the large number of people, the contagion is inevitable. Several sectors [in the plant] have suspicious cases. The workers are afraid for their families at home, but they have to go to work and end up exposing themselves.”

Without being able to bypass the immense opposition that has arisen, from not only from those fired, but also their more than 7,000 colleagues, the union is trying to divert it to serve the company’s interests.

“You are on strike because of the way the 747 left the factory, without any respect, without any care for human rights,v the union’s spokesperson declared on its Wednesday’s live stream. “Of course, it is a prerogative of the company that hires us to terminate our contract, as long as it is done in a humane way. There is a way that it can be done.”

The jobs that Renault is seeking to destroy are jobs that won’t come back. Regardless of the bonuses that are offered to each dismissed worker, they are going to be added to the army of unemployed, in which half of Brazilians are already enlisted, and which is growing rapidly around the globe.

Clearly exposing the foundations of the SMC’s policy, a union official declared at a rally at the factory gate on Thursday: vWe need Renault. Renault is a great company, a great brand and we want Renault in Brazil... We are not against capital, we are not against the businessmen.”

The open obsession of the Metalworkers Union of the Great Curitiba is to guarantee the “productivity” and “competitiveness” of the companies for which it operates. Such interests not only fail to correspond with those of the working class, they are actively hostile to them.

Over the last ten years, Renault has broken sales records in Brazil, jumping from a national market share of 4.8 percent in 2010 to over 10 percent in 2019. These achievements, which the SMC calls their own, were obtained, on the one hand, through super-exploitation on the production lines, expressed in the large number of injured workers. On the other hand, they are owed to the substantial state incentives granted to Renault by the Competitive Paraná program, which diverts public money from services needed by the working class to the coffers of billionaire shareholders.

For Renault to continue, says the SMC to the workers, it needs more: new governmental incentives and new concessions from them, the slashing of jobs or alternatives that the company can use before simply dismissing.”

The crisis facing Renault workers today reflects the transformation of the nature of trade unions over the past decades, connected to the globalization of the capitalist productive process.

The revolutionary development of information and transport technologies has allowed companies like Renault-Nissan to establish themselves as transnational corporations, operating through interconnected global supply chains, exploiting the workforce across national borders.

Under these conditions, trade unions have ceased to defend even the minimum interests of the working class. In the globalized economy, the nationalist trade unions fight to attract the transnational corporations to their countries or regions, offering more competitive conditions, that is, cheaper labor.

Workers must draw the necessary conclusions and adopt a program that corresponds to the objective conditions.

The attacks on workers in Paraná are only a part of a global plan of Renault-Nissan to destroy jobs in every country in which they operate. After receiving a 5 billion euro bailout from the French government, Renault announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs worldwide, 4,600 of them in France. And Nissan declared its intention to cut 20,000 jobs.

Unlike the unions, the working class is not divided by national interests. Against the global restructuring plans of the transnational corporations, workers need to advance an international strategy of struggle. They must join their colleagues in other countries to fight for the maintenance of all jobs, decent wages and safe working conditions during the pandemic.

Renault workers in Brazil have been harassed by supposedly “international unions,” such as Industrial and the United Auto Workers (UAW), feigning international support for their struggle. These organizations, which are fleeing the explosive revolts of the working class thousands of miles away, have direct links with European and American imperialist states.

The global unification of the working class will not happen through these organizations; on the contrary. They are in Brazil only as police agents of transnational capital, seeking to contain the explosion of international class struggle.

Workers need to create new politically independent organizations, rank-and-file factory committees. Through them, they will be able to appeal directly to their international colleagues, making extensive use of social media and the internet.