German government continues to boost military spending and cover for fascists

Johannes Stern

In response to the dangerous further spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and Europe, the ruling class is not reacting with an offensive to protect public health and to eliminate the deficiencies in the health system but is mobilizing further billions for rearmament and war.

On Thursday, the Defence Ministry informed members of parliament about the so-called 25 million euro proposals, which are to be handed over to the Budget Committee by the end of the year. All armament projects with an estimated cost of more than €25 million must be discussed and implemented by this committee.

The military blog “Augen geradeaus!” (“Eyes Front!”), which has close links to the Defence Ministry, has published an initial list of the 29 (!) such planned proposals. Among them are:

* A successor to the G36 assault rifle, the Bundeswehr’s (armed forces) previous standard weapon. The first proposal for a new system, consisting of a basic weapon and accessories, is to be presented to the Budget Committee at the end of October.

* In addition to the 138 new fighter jets already launched in April, 38 Eurofighters (the latest version, Tranche 4) are to be procured. The corresponding proposal is also to be adopted in the last week of October.

* Also, there are numerous naval upgrade projects, including 31 Sea Tiger naval helicopters and the development and procurement of a so-called “naval drone.” The purchases are part of a comprehensive upgrade of the German navy. Among other things, four multi-purpose combat ships MKS180 are to be built in the next few years, at a cost of around €6 billion. These will be joined by further F125 frigates and Class 212A submarines.

* The tank units are also to be further upgraded. “The old Marder infantry fighting vehicle is to get a service life extension for its thermal imaging targeting system, and the Leopard 2 main battle tank will receive a distance-activated protection system,” reports Augen geradeaus! Also, a successor model to the Badger armoured engineering vehicle is planned, and the Boxer armoured transport vehicle will be built as a new model for joint fire support teams.

* It is also planned to increase ammunition stocks. Several proposals will address this. In the first week of September, the Budget Committee will discuss the “supplementary procurement of the RBS15 Mk3 sea/land target drone for the first and second batch of corvettes,” in mid-September the procurement of new GBU-54 guided bombs for the Eurofighter, and in October and November new ammunition for the 125 frigates, torpedoes and new tank ammunition.

* Significantly, the Special Forces Command (KSK), which is riddled with right-wing extremist terrorist structures, is also to be upgraded and will receive, among other things, “new reconnaissance and combat vehicles and medium-sized tactical support vehicles to replace the Serval.” From the outset, the WSWS has made clear that the announced restructuring of the KSK was primarily intended to make the elite right-wing extremist force more effective.

Kárpátia singer János Petras poses during the handover ceremony on a leopard battle tank supplied by Germany (Source: Facebook page of Kárpátia)

The billion-euro armament projects are aimed at expanding Germany’s ability to make war. At the beginning of the week, the frigate “Hamburg” set sail with 250 soldiers to intervene in the escalating proxy war of the regional and great powers in Libya. In spring, the grand coalition had expanded and extended numerous foreign deployments of the Bundeswehr.

A few days ago, in an interview with Die Zeit, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) demanded that it was “high time” to aggressively discuss “how Germany must position itself in the world in the future.” She said that Germany was expected to “show leadership, not only as an economic power.” It is about “collective defence, it is about international missions, it is about a strategic view of the world, and ultimately it is about the question of whether we want to actively shape the global order.”

To enforce the geostrategic and economic goals of German imperialism internationally, the German bourgeoisie is not only rearming its own military but also its allies within the European Union. It is becoming increasingly clear what militarist and fascist traditions it is resuming 75 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

According to an official report from the Defence Ministry, the handover of the first of a total of 44 German Leopard 2 battle tanks to the Hungarian army began at the end of July. The handover ceremony took place in the garrison town of Tata in the presence of Parliamentary State Secretary Thomas Silberhorn (Christian Social Union, CSU), who praised the military cooperation between Germany and the EU with the extreme right-wing Orban regime.

“Hungary is modernising its land forces and Germany is a strategic partner in this process,” said Silberhorn. The use of the same weapon systems and close cooperation in the training of tank crews increased the interoperability of the armed forces and was “an important component of the Common Security and Defence Policy,” he said. The German government would “continue to be committed to close military cooperation between the two countries and thus also to strengthen cohesion in Europe based on the values and interests of the two countries.”

The Defence Ministry’s report does not go into more detail regarding the “values and interests” underlying the “military cooperation” between Berlin and Budapest. But the fascist character of the handover ceremony in Tata was obvious. Official participants in the event included, among others, members of the notorious neo-Nazi rock band Kárpátia, who had even written their own song for the tank handover—commissioned by the Hungarian army.

An entry on Kárpátia’s Facebook page says that the band “was asked to write a march by tank crews in Tata in March.” The timing for the song could not have been “better, as the first Leopard 2A4 tanks” have now been delivered, “followed by 40 more Leopard 2A7 tanks in the next few years.” One was “lucky enough” to “admire these big cats, listen to them rumble, to see them get down to it...” It is no “big secret that the band has always been pro-military” and “satisfied with the development of the armed forces.”

On Facebook, the band has published numerous pictures showing members of Kárpátia in martial gear posing in front of German battle tanks. Their posts clearly show their ideological outlook. They glorify Miklos Horthy, the former Reich administrator, anti-Semite and Hitler ally, drum up support for a new and “ethnically pure” Greater Hungary. The lyrics of their songs drip with fascist and militarist ideology. According to media reports, the Hitler salute can be regularly seen at Kárpátia concerts, and singer János Petras rants against Roma and Jews.

Following the ceremony, the Hungarian government, which awarded Petras the country’s Golden Cross of Merit as early as 2013 and itself rehabilitated Horthy and Hungarian fascism, has defended its cooperation with Kárpátia. In response to an inquiry by Der Spiegel, the defence ministry in Budapest declared that the “tank march” was about “love of the homeland and respect for the soldiers. We are pleased that a work of art has been created that popularises military service and the military vocation as widely as possible.”

This is also the attitude of the German government. According to Der Spiegel, the Defence Ministry has stated that it does not want to take “a position on the internal affairs of the Hungarian armed forces.” It is becoming increasingly clear that the extreme right-wing terrorist networks in the Bundeswehr, the police and the secret services exist and can operate largely unchecked, mainly because these fascist forces enjoy the official support of the capitalist state and its political representatives.

Trump executive orders set stage for tens of millions of evictions

Jacob Crosse

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced a series of constitutionally dubious executive actions at his exclusive golf resort in New Jersey that would, among other things, slash federal unemployment benefits by at least $200 and fail to extend a partial federal moratorium on evictions.

The previous day, a comprehensive analysis by researchers at the Aspen Institute, based on data from the US Census Bureau and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, estimated that between 28,900,000 and 39,900,000 tenants in the US are at risk of eviction by the end of the year.

The authors warn that “if conditions do not change” and without “robust and swift intervention,” up to 43 percent of renter households will be at risk in the next several months. Since the start of the pandemic, 30 percent of renters have reported using government aid or other forms of assistance to pay rent, while another 30 percent expect to have to borrow cash or obtain a loan to pay September rent.

After two weeks of half-hearted negotiations and theatrics between Democratic congressional leaders and Trump administration officials, both sides adjourned Friday without reaching an agreement to extend the now-expired federal unemployment enhancement for the roughly 30 million Americans who had been receiving it. Nor did the two sides reach a deal to extend the federal partial moratorium on evictions, which, according to the Urban Institute, covered roughly 12.3 million people.

Speaking before wealthy supporters in a gilded ballroom at his private Westminster golf club, Trump claimed that his executive order on evictions “will solve that problem largely, hopefully completely.”

In fact, it will “largely” and “completely” do nothing to prevent the coming tsunami of evictions, nor those already in progress in cities such as Milwaukee, which saw 502 filings for the week of July 26, according to EvictionLab.org. The executive order is nothing but a directive to federal agencies instructing them to “consider” whether a temporary halt on evictions is necessary.

Prior to the pandemic, millions of US workers and their families were already besieged by skyrocketing rental costs coupled with a dwindling supply of affordable housing and stagnant wages. The pandemic has further exposed the terminal rot of American capitalism and left millions on the brink of homelessness.

Researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that between 2012 and 2017 the number of available units renting for $1,000 or more a month increased by five million, while the availability of low-cost units—that is, units renting for $600 a month or less—declined by 3.1 million. Units offering rents between $600 and $999 also decreased by 450,000 over that same period.

At the same time, roughly 53 million workers in the US, according to the Brookings Institution, are deemed “low-wage workers,” with a median hourly wage of $10.22. Nearly half of them, working in retail sales, food preparation, personal care, building cleaning, construction or driving, have been laid off during the pandemic or had their hours drastically reduced.

By July 2020, 50 million workers had applied for some sort of unemployment assistance, and 20 million renters reported living in households where someone had suffered a COVID-19-related job loss. Food pantry requests in some states have increased by as much as 2,000 percent (New Jersey), while 30 million have reported not having enough to eat.

Job losses have overwhelmed working class neighborhoods. The New York Times reported that unemployment rates in the South Side of Chicago, North Las Vegas, South Los Angeles, and certain New York City boroughs, which hovered around 10 percent prior to the pandemic, have ballooned to more than 30 percent in the last four months.

Rental prices have continued to increase. Data compiled by Zumper.com, an online rental platform, found that nationally rent is up 0.7 percent on a year-to-date basis for a one-bedroom apartment, meaning the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment stands at $1,233 a month. The rent for a two-bedroom apartment increased by exactly one percent, to $1,493 a month.

In New York City, the average rent for a one bedroom unit, at $2,840, remains unaffordable for the vast majority of human beings on the planet. The World Socialist Web Site spoke to Chad, a college student and part-time cook for a private dining club in Manhattan. “When the quarantine started, we all got laid off,” he said.

Chad explained that he attempted to apply for unemployment benefits the day after he was laid off in mid-March. “The application itself—it was very difficult because you couldn’t sign on to the website,” he said. “And then, when you tried to call, they would just send you on an endless loop till they finally kicked you out, as in hang up on you.

“Press five to talk to this person, and then press eight to talk to that person. And they just kept doing that until it just kicks you out. You just have to keep trying. For weeks I didn’t get anything.”

After a month, Chad started receiving his state benefits, “200-some-odd dollars,” he said. Shortly thereafter he began to receive his federal supplement, bringing the weekly total to “about $800, which is less than what I made, but being that there was nowhere to go I could just sit in the house and save money.

“When I had the stimulus plus the extra unemployment, I saved a lot of that money,” he continued. “I went to a real minimalist lifestyle. I didn’t spend anything extra. I just paid what I needed, and I stayed current on my bills.

“For the average New Yorker, [$800 a week] is a bare minimum. If I wasn’t married, with another income in my household, I would be decimated right now.”

Without the $600 federal enhancement, “my savings are going to dwindle,” said Chad. “For the last [two] weeks, I got $200, so now covering my bills, the money that I saved up is slowly going to be depleted. When it gets below a certain amount, then I’m going to worry.”

Asked what he thought about the Democratic Party’s recent negotiations, Chad said, “I don’t think anybody’s doing anything. What I will say is that I don’t see any sense of urgency on the Democratic Party’s part. They’re good. They have free health care for life. All of them make a good amount of money. So, they’re not hungry. They have nothing to worry about.”

He continued, “These lawmakers, they don’t know the struggles of an average person. And they’re sitting there arguing over giving people pennies. What did they give us, $1,200 in April? How long does $1,200 last an average person if you’ve got to worry about rent, food, and whatever? I think it’s laughable that they’re arguing about this.

“Another thing that I thought about: You’re forcing these kids to go back to school just so you can make the average working person go back to work. We live in a society where you have to gamble with your kid’s life just to make sure that they have a life.

“For example, I jog every morning. I pass by two or three daycare [centers] on my morning jog. I’m looking at these parents dropping their kids off at daycare just so they can go to work. That’s a shame that it has to be that way. You have an administration that’s so inept that they’re willing to gamble with the average working person’s life just to keep this economy going so rich people can still sit out in quarantine. That’s exactly what’s happening now.

“I consider myself one of the fortunate ones. I’m not rich by any means, but I’ve been able to get by. But ask me a month from now, ask me two months from now how that looks. I can guarantee you it’s going to look totally different. Once these costs start adding up, they will be more than the $200 a week that I’m bringing in.

“This government in general, whether Democrat or Republican, nobody came up with a clear, concise way to deal with COVID-19. The Democrats are the ones saying, ‘Hey, it’s not us saying it.’ But I didn’t hear them propose anything that would help.

“We live in a real interesting time. We have other countries that dealt with it better, but then we have other countries that opened up but had to shut right back down, which is what we’re going to go through here. But I don’t know if we’re going to shut down. I think they’re just going to sit there and keep doing what they have been doing, pretending that it’s not happening.”

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.