Morality and Immorality in Contemporary Politics

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

In the world of ideology free zone of politics, the question ‘of morality and immorality in popular and mainstream political traditions’ is becoming irrelevant. The incompetent governments, helpless states, visionless leadership, directionless politics, weak judiciaries and compliant media organisations are the net output of amoral and illiberal politics.  The moral critique of political system does not yield any electoral dividends for radical politics within democratic system. The irrespective of ideological formations, the political system is designed in such a way that exploits people and stands with the capitalists, and upholds the interests of the propertied class through corrupt means. It looks as if there is a clear bifurcation between politics and morality in praxis. The moralistic cults based on hard work, honesty, sobriety, sexual propriety, thrift, nonviolence, truth, and other Gandhian, Ambedkarite, Marxist, Mandelian, and Martin Luther King’s shared and collective values in politics are becoming obsolete and considered to be liabilities in politics.

The deepening of moral crisis in politics is an extension of utilitarian values incorporated in the society during early industrial revolution and patronised during managerialist led market revolution during 20th and 21st century. The moral dumbfounding cultural effect in politics is further accelerated by the growth of fictitious online social, economic and cultural life in the age of information technology. It ensures mass melancholy of the obsolete and immoral self-serving politics of brutal capitalism, which hides behind democracy and individual freedom. It does not guide people and society towards peace, progress and prosperity due to its immoral political landscape. The immoral politics is based on illiberal ideas and practice, which divides the society and people on moral questions. In 2012, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has published his book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics”. He has outlined moral foundations of politics based on ideals of care, fairness loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. According to Jonathan Haidt, these moral qualities are intuitive and integral to human beings. But in reality, there are collective material foundations, which helps to develop these moral qualities in human beings. These qualities are products of everyday experiences of working classes in their work place and their interactions with fellow workers that ensures these moral qualities in working population.

What are the political alternatives before the working-class masses? How to ensure morality in politics?  The answers to these questions are complex but not difficult to answer.

It is time to bring back mass politics rooted in class, dedicated to class and led by working classes. The concept of class politics is no longer confined within organised industrial zones. The trade unions used to organise these workers in their work places. The trade unions and working-class people have played a major role in wage bargain movements in the workplace to anti colonial and anti-capitalist struggles. The working classes have played a major role in democratisation of society and in enlarging individual liberty and citizenship rights. The working-class morality in politics has shaped morality both in radical and mainstream politics. The work and the workplaces used to be the source of working-class consciousness, which shaped political movements, ideologies and leadership based on working class morality.

In the age of information technology driven economic system, there is disintegration of work and workplace. The working-class people and their work places are scattered all over the places from the bedrooms of garment workers to the bathrooms of information technology workers. The work has entered into every step of worker’s life and individualised work and working culture. The workers as citizens are alienated both from their work place and fellow workers, which helped to develop depoliticised consciousness and growth of anti-politics machine. The capitalism and its political systems treat individuals as orderly objects and not as citizens and human beings with rights and liberties. Such an economic, social, political and cultural transformation in work and workplace led to growth of professionalisation of technocratic politics shaped by the ruling and non-ruling classes to uphold their own interests. It promotes culture and politics of competitive immorality based on selfish-self-interests. The authoritarian megalomaniacs are controlling the state and government in defence of their capitalist masters.

Moreover, the separation of market from producers and consumers has helped for the growth of market led democracy, which diminished citizenship rights and trying to convert citizens into self-interested and self-satisfying customers only. The customer driven politics based on self-interests has dismantled the collective foundation of politics, state and governments. Citizens are disinterested clients of a democratic state and government, where the capitalist classes rule and promote immoral politics. The moral crisis in politics is framed as crisis of state, government, secularism, multiculturalism, socialism and democracy. Such analysis hides the failures and vulnerabilities of capitalism and its immoral political projects. It promotes capitalism as only alternative and there is no other alternative to authoritarian capitalist doctrine. The moral crisis in politics has huge detrimental impacts on working class needs and desires. The moral crisis in capitalist politics is an opportunity for working classes to revitalise their political project by mobilising different sections of working classes both in their organised and unorganised forms. The collective political movements of working classes based on working class morality can revive the revolutionary politics to save democracy and individual freedom.

The universal nature of working-class experiences produces shared universal political morality and promotes politics of solidarity, cooperation and fraternity. The working-class internationalism can defeat the immoral politics of neo-imperial wars and neo colonial economic system to establish world peace based on shared prosperity. The revival of working-class politics and working-class morality can defeat the immoral alliance of reactionary religious forces, conservative and right-wing politics and illiberal market economy. The emphasis on working class morality needs to evolve with secular and scientific ethos while directing addressing everyday life issues of people, animals and environment. The working-class morality can inspire people to organise themselves as a collective struggle for political, social, cultural and economic transformation in the society. The politics based on working-class morality can only achieve the politics of transformation based on egalitarian and secular values.

USA’s Militarization of Latin America

Yanis Iqbal

Maj. Gen. Andrew Croft, the commander of 12th Air Force, wrote on 22 August: “I have seen an increasingly contested strategic space where Beijing and Moscow are aggressively investing time and resources in Latin America to support their authoritarian models of governance. The Air Force must reinforce the strength of our longstanding commitment to the Western Hemisphere. We lose ground when we are unable to commit to spending the time and resources to fly our aircraft south and train alongside our partners.”

Croft’s statement reflects the growing American hysteria against the presence of any extra-regional actors in the Latin American continent. For US policy-makers, Latin America is not an aggregation of sovereign nations but a large lump of subordinated states constituting “America’s backyard”. Consequently, this conceptualization of Latin America as a natural extension of the American empire has led to viewing the engagement of any South American country with China, Russia and Iran as a “threat” to peace and security.

On February 7, 2019, Admiral Craig S. Faller – the commander of the United States Southern Command – told the Congress that the Western Hemisphere is facing “a troubling array of challenges and threats”. These threats included alarmist assertions about the growing dominance of China, Russia and Iran and a general demonization of the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua: “China has accelerated expansion of its Belt and Road Initiative at a pace that may one day overshadow its expansion in Southeast Asia and Africa. Russia supports multiple information outlets spreading its false narrative of world events and U.S. intentions. Iran has deepened its anti-U.S. Spanish language media coverage and has exported its state support for terrorism into our hemisphere. Russia and China also support the autocratic regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, which are counter to democracy and U.S. interests. We are monitoring the latest events in Venezuela and look forward to welcoming that country back into the hemisphere’s community of democracies.”

In response to the perceived threats posed by the China-Russia-Iran nexus, the Secretary of Defense has decided to conduct an assessment of the sufficiency of resources available to the U.S. Southern Command, the U.S. Northern Command, the Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to carry out their respective missions in the Western Hemisphere. This assessment is required to include “a list of investments, programs, or partnerships in the Western Hemisphere by China, Iran, Russia, or other adversarial groups or countries that threaten the national security of the United States.”

In addition to warlike preparations, USA has also pursued a policy of increased militarization wherein it has tried to ensure “technological superiority” with regard to “anti-US actors”. In March, 2020, USA decided to send additional ships, aircraft and forces to South America and Central America in order to combat the influence of Russia and China. According to Navy Adm. Craig Faller, commander of Southern Command, “This really was born out of a recognition of the threats in the region,”. Along with the mobilization of the Southern Command, USA has substantially enlarged its security aid to Latin America: From $527,706,000 in 2019, US security aid to Latin America has increased by 10% to $581,270,000.

Chinese Footprint

The present-day US militarization of Latin America is rhetorically driven by an imperialist discourse framing the continent as a possession of the American empire which China, Russia and Iran are trying to appropriate. To take an example, R. Evan Ellis, a Latin America Research Professor at the US Army War College, told before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission that China’s engagement with Latin America “threatens the position of the United States, our security and prosperity, and the democratic values, rights, institutions and laws on which we depend.” To substantiate his statements, Ellis enunciated various strategies through which China is undermining USA’s dominance:

• “Trade with, loans to, investment in, and other forms of economic and other support to anti-US regimes, indirectly enabling their criminal activities and contributions to regional instability”.
• “Through providing an alternative to commerce, loans and investment from the West, making governments of the region less inclined to support the US on political, commercial, or security issues, or to stand up for rule of law, democracy or human rights, particularly where it might offend the PRC;”

In both these points, one can observe the imperialistic high-handedness with which Ellis is declaiming his pro-US rhetoric. While Beijing’s efforts to engage with sovereign nations and construct an alternative to the global American empire are regarded as enabling “regional instability”, no questions are asked about USA’s expansionist quest to imperialize the entire world through militaristic tactics.

In order to vilify China and smear its non-aggressive foreign policy, hawkish security experts have framed the country’s diplomatic involvement with various Latin American nations as a type of authoritarian tactic. Using this line of reasoning, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) writes: “Beijing has now officially established its own version of soft power… which emanates from its undemocratic system and rests on its ability to shape the viewpoints of others through co-optation and persuasion.” Not having any empirical evidence to prove its unconvincing statements, NED talks vaguely about the “hypnotic effects” exercised by “Chinese-style warm welcome”: “The Chinese-style warm welcome, the carefully selected tours that include visits to sites with symbolic historical and cultural significance, and ad hoc friendly discourse delivered by the Chinese hosts can have hypnotic effects on their foreign guests.” This is an indication of the extent to which America hysteria against China can reach.

In the same way as NED, the Brookings Institution has also tried to slander China’s diplomatic initiatives in Latin America to preserve the coercive dominance of USA in the continent. As per the think tank, “it would be fair to assume that China’s growing economic power and ambitions of global leadership, coupled with its inherently closed and repressive model of political control, will hurt the region’s prospects for strengthening its liberal democratic systems and respect for human rights.” While saying this, the Brooking Institution conveniently forgets that it the US, with its Western-styled liberal democracy, that has hurt the region most in the form of coups, violence and overt brutality against social movements. Most recently, a US-backed coup in Bolivia has resulted in two massacres and massive repression of social movements.

The Iranian Connection

Like China, Iran, too, experiences American hostility towards its engagement with Latin American countries. Lieutenant Andrew Kramer of the U.S. Navy terms Iranian support for the “economically backward governments” of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as efforts “to maintain pockets of instability and hostility close to U.S. borders.” Echoing this perspective, William Preston McLaughlin, a Colonel (Ret.) of U.S. Marine Corps and Magdalena Defort, an Intern Analyst at the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, argue that “Iran’s presence in Latin America is an imminent threat to peace and political stability in the Western Hemisphere because its forces interact with Latin America’s deeply rooted revolutionary ideology and various well-intentioned but flawed “liberation theology” social movements.” Here, both of the analysts are merely parroting the imperialist “Monroe Doctrine” that subverted the sovereignty of Latin American nations and tethered the people of the continent to the whims of the American empire. Through the Monroe Doctrine, USA relegated the entire Latin American continent to the status of the empire’s handmaiden and constantly used its military muscles to overpower any regional initiatives challenging the dynamics of subjugation. Now, when Iran is lending support to the anti-imperialist administrations of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, it has come under the radar of USA for ostensibly destroying peace and political stability in the Western Hemisphere. In August 2020, for instance, USA confiscated four Iranian fuel shipments that had been bound for Venezuela, making it clear that it would not tolerate anti-imperialist opposition in Latin America.

In addition to portraying Iran as a threat to global peace, both the analysts also used a shrill, scaremongering rhetoric to over-exaggerate the strength of the country. According to the analysts, “Iran has used every agency within its borders to help extend Iranian tentacles into the political, cultural, economic, and military life of Latin America.” This bears striking resemblance to the traditional war-mongering US narrative that frames Hezbollah as a menace to justify the militarizary raising funds, seeking recruits, probing for our weaknesses and challenging our defenses,”. Through these discourses, USA seeks to unleash a new war against the anti-imperialist axis of Latin America which is standing up to militaristic predatoriness of the global hegemon.

Russian Presence

Besides Iran and China, Russia is another nation perceived as a “threat” to US security. General John Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) noted in his Congressional testimony, “it has been over three decades since we last saw this type of high-profile Russian presence” in Latin America. In his command’s 2015 Posture Statement, Kelly added: “Periodically since 2008, Russia has pursued an increased presence in Latin America through propaganda, military arms and equipment sales, counterdrug agreements, and trade. Under President Putin, however, we have seen a clear return to Cold War tactics. As part of its global strategy, Russia is using power projection in an attempt to erode U.S. leadership and challenge U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere.”

John Kelly’s representation of Russia as a military threat has been repeated by the Commander of US Southern Command, Admiral Kurt W. Tidd who said in his February 2018 Posture Statement to the US Senate Armed Services Committee that: “Russia’s increased role in our hemisphere is particularly concerning, given its intelligence and cyber capabilities, intent to upend international stability and order, and discredit democratic institutions…Left unchecked, Russian access and placement could eventually transition from a regional spoiler to a critical threat to the U.S. homeland.” With the help this narrative, USA has aggressively pushed forward the agenda of greater militarism in Latin America as it strives to maintain “technological superiority” in relation to Russia and expand its already large military expenditure.

On the top of depicting Russia as a military threat, US analysts have additionally portrayed the country’s support of socialist governments in Latin America as a danger to the economically empty liberal democracies of the West. According to IBI Consultants, a National Security consulting company specializing in Latin America, Russia’s growing presence in Latin America “is now an integral part of an alliance of state and nonstate actors that have shown their hostility toward the United States in their ideology, criminalized behavior, and anti-democratic nature.” Reiterating this point, on July 9, 2019, Admiral Faller declared before the Congress that “Russia seeks to sow disunity and distrust, propping up autocratic regimes in Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, which are counter to democracy and U.S. interests.” For Faller, those nations which don’t doggedly toe America’s imperialist line automatically become “threats” to democracy and if Russia shows solidarity with these anti-imperialist nations, it, too, classifies as a threat to US interests.

As USA continues to militarize Latin America, it is increasingly becoming clear that it wants to protect its old, imperial structures from being challenged by anyone. It has been explicitly acknowledged even by pro-US analysts such as Ellis that US military assistance in Latin America “potentially serves U.S. strategic interests by helping to inoculate receiving states against radical or anti-democratic [read “socialist”] solutions which find receptivity when populations lose faith in the ability of a democratic political system and a free market economy to effectively address the corruption, inequality, injustice, and other dysfunctionalities plaguing their country [Emphasis mine].” US military assistance, therefore, is not apolitical and is ideologically tarnished with the objectives of stabilizing free market economies-bourgeoisie democracies and subverting socialist countries.

The United States Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to US national security had stated in 2019 that “anti-US autocrats [in the Western Hemisphere]will present continuing challenges to US interests, as US adversaries and strategic competitors seek greater influence in the region.” Here, “anti-US autocrats” refers to the socialist administrations of three Latin American countries: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. These three countries have been facing strong US belligerence for their anti-imperialist stance. US sanctions against Cuba have tightened during the pandemic; USA’s hybrid war against Venezuela has intensified as Trump has decided to use frozen funds to topple Nicolas Maduro and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has strengthened its regime change operations against the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Due to the support lent by China, Russia and Iran to the socialist governments of Latin America, USA has decided to eradicate these extra-regional actors from its “own” backyard and re-proclaim a complete American dominance in the region. In times like these, the international community needs to oppose the militarism of USA against new regional alliances in Latin America.

People Who Are in Denial About Coronavirus

Eric Zuesse

There are basically two different policy-approaches to the coronavirus problem: One is the passive approach, waiting for ‘herd immunity’ to develop naturally. And the other is the active approach, in which the Government does take action — not just wait while the most-vulnerable individuals die off from the disease. The “herd immunity” approach is libertarian; it assumes that “let nature take its course” is always best; it is “laissez faire.” The “take action” approach is the exact opposite — very restrictive (including strong disincentives — “punishment” — for individuals’ misbehaviors that transmit the disease and endanger other people). This is the old debate between some form of anarchy on the one side, and some form of “socialism” (legally enforced governmental policies) on the other side.

The earliest popular ideological debate regarding coronavirus-policy was between advocates of Denmark’s socialistic approach, versus neighboring Sweden’s laissez-fair approach. EuroNews headlined on March 26th “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”, and reported that “when it comes to handling the coronavirus crisis, they are on very different trajectories,” which were Denmark’s socialism, versus Sweden’s libertarianism.

At that time, there was no clear indication, yet, as to which approach would win out. For example, on April 19th, Denmark had 1,275 Covid-19 cases per million, whereas Sweden had 1,424. So: per million inhabitants, they were about the same.

Even as late as 12 May 2020, three libertarian co-authors at the prestigious U.S. neoliberal and neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations’s journal Foreign Affairs headlined, confidently, that libertarianism would win out: “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”.

But, by the time of June 29th, the data had become clear to the exact contrary, and so I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus”, and reported the subsequent increases in each of these two countries’ numbers.

On April 22nd:

DENMARK = 1,329 (up 4%)

SWEDEN = 1,517 (up 7%)

On May 10th:

DENMARK = 1,782 (up 34%)

SWEDEN = 2,567 (up 69%)

On June 17th:

DENMARK = 2,123 (up another 19%)

SWEDEN = 5,404 ( up another 111%)

And here it is as of June 28th:

DENMARK = 2,188 (up another 3%)

SWEDEN = 5,450 (up another 1%)

And, finally, on 22 August:

DENMARK = 2,783 (up another 27%)

SWEDEN = 8,515 (up another 56%)

Furthermore, one of the leading libertarian arguments against taking action has been that supposedly the economy will perform better if there are no coronavirus-restrictions placed by the Government. However, Sweden’s unemployment-rate has been hit at least as hard by coronavirus as Denmark’s has:

Denmark’s unemployment-rate was 4.1% in March, 5.4% in April, 5.6% in May, and 5.5% in June.

Sweden’s unemployment-rate was 7.1% in March, 8.2% in April, 9% in May, and 9.8% in June.

So, on that day, August 22nd, I sent to an influential libertarian website (not as influential as Foreign Affairs, but more populist — not funded by billionaires like the CFR is), which has come to specialize on coronavirus, the following article for them to consider, since it discredits their many libertarian articles about coronavirus:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/

and the response from them three hours later was:

I appreciate you’re willingness to engage on this topic, but your choice of source is poor. The logic is bad, and whole areas of policy are ignored.

Firstly, comparing Sweden only to Denmark and Norway is absurd. Sweden imposed no lockdown, yet fared far better than many countries which did so (Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Spain and Italy). This alone is a perfectly strong argument that lockdowns are totally ineffective for their stated aims.

Secondly, it at no point talks about deaths caused by lockdowns, which is a huge factor (accounting for nearly half the excess deaths in the UK). 

Thirdly, it mentions GDP but doesn’t discuss that the economy is MORE than that. A suffering economy is not about money or finance, it is about well-being for the working class. Good wages, affordable rent and the freedom to run your own small business. All of which have been destroyed by the lockdown policy, which Sweden shows was (at best) pointless.

I promptly replied:

The Belgian policy-response was unclear, unfocused, and such a mess that nothing has even been generally reported regarding their contact-tracing (which is such a crucial aspect of effective policy-response to the virus).

None of the countries with good results have achieved them via an expectation of ‘herd immunity’. No country is anywhere near the 70%-infection-rate that produces herd-immunity. It’s a myth; it’s just a lie.

For example, though the imperialistic libertarian country United States warns travelers that the coronavirus risk is exceptionally high in Uganda (warning “Level 3,” which is their highest), Uganda is actually one of the world’s lowest coronavirus-risk countries, and they achieved it by stringent policies, which is exactly what you reject. Whereas U.S. now has 17,587 cases per million, Uganda has 47. The country that has a 374 times higher percentage of its population coronavirus-infected, warns its suckers to stay away from the country that has 1/374th of the risk.

Why is [your site] feeding into this deception of its readers, instead of exposing it to them? Have you switched to being pro-imperialistic (pro-neoconservative, which is a variety of neoliberal or “libertarian”)? All of a sudden, the neoliberal countries, such as U.S., Brazil, and India, which are or have been the world’s worst on coronavirus-performance, are the ones to emulate? Why? Or else: which countries ARE the ones to emulate on this? Say it. Prove it. The statistical data by now are certainly sufficient to do this. Why don’t you do it, instead of continue to deceive readers? Why do you deceive readers so that they would support, instead of condemn, the imperialistic U.S. Government’s alleging that Uganda is more coronavirus-dangerous than the U.S. itself is? It’s a lie, but how would your readers be able to know this?

I don’t get it. You seem stuck in your existing false beliefs. Please explain so that I will become able to understand. Right now, I don’t.

I received a reply that said I should “apologise” because “We have never expressed any support for the US or its Imperial policies in any way, shape or form,” and “the statistics speak for themselves — the virus is harmless to the vast majority of people, and in no way justifies any of the draconian or authoritarian laws being imposed opportunistically in many countries around the world (including the United States).” In other words: the U.S. under Trump isn’t being sufficiently laissez-faire about this matter. The evidence that I had cited was ignored, not discussed, by him.

Subsequently, I checked a few of the other nations that are among the best on coronavirus-performance. For example, there’s China. It has 59 coronavirus-19 cases per million population, and the U.S. has 298 times as many cases per million, but the U.S. Government rates China also in the highest-risk category, “Level 3,” for Americans to visit, on account of its supposedly higher-than-U.S. danger of becoming infected with that virus.

Then, there’s Vietnam, which the U.S. Government had tried to conquer but couldn’t. Vietnam has only 10 coronavirus cases per million inhabitants. America has 17,587 per million; so, obviously, that’s 1,759 times as many. Vietnam also is rated “Level 3” — the worst, most coronavirus-dangerous, category. The Government of Americans is warning Americans to avoid visiting Vietnam because it’s just too dangerous a coronavirus-risk for an American, whose country has 17,587 cases per million. Obviously, no intelligent person trusts a government such as this. (No more than such a person would trust the Government that had promised it was certain that WMD existed in Iraq in 2002, or that Syria had gassed people on 7 April 2018, or that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President in 2014 was a ‘democratic revolution’ instead of a U.S. coup — or on, and on, such as about “Russiagate”.)

Then, there’s Myanmar, which has only 8 cases per million inhabitants — 1 divided by 2,198 times as many cases-per-million as the U.S. does — and the U.S. Government refuses even to call that nation “Myanmar,” but instead calls it by what the British did when they had it as a colony, which is “Burma,” and the U.S. regime’s travel-advisory rating of “Burma,” for ‘Burma’s would-be now U.S. imperial masters, is likewise exactly the same as they rate Uganda: “Warning — Level 3”. The U.S. regime is telling its citizens that a country which is 2,198 times safer on the coronavirus danger than the U.S. itself is, is instead too unsafe on coronavirus for Americans to travel to. They care so much about the safety of their own citizens, as to warn them against visiting a country that’s thousands of times safer. How sincere is that? But some people still respect the lie, and the liars (serial-liars), as if they weren’t.

Perhaps people who are in denial about coronavirus are simply in denial about reality — the broader, global, reality.

On coronavirus-19 — this pandemic — the best data regarding the international reality is this, which is the constantly up-to-date listings of all countries and their respective numbers. To see the rankings there of all countries on the crucial outcome-variable of “Tot Cases/1M pop” just click onto that column’s heading and countries will be ranked that way. Same for the other crucial outcome-variable “Deaths/1M pop,” and for the far less-crucial process-variables (such as “Tests/1M pop”). Two successive clicks onto the given column-heading will reverse the ordering of the countries regarding that variable. You’ll be seeing there the existing rankings, as of that given moment. To see the trends within any given country, just click onto the name of that country, and then scroll down to the charts “Daily New Cases” and “Daily New Deaths” (tracking both of the crucial outcome-variables)

However, people who are in denial about coronavirus-reality avoid those numbers like the plague. Perhaps they do that because, to their libertarian ideology, these numbers are “the plague.”

Signs of emerging crisis in economy and financial system

Nick Beams

As Wall Street continues to surge to record highs—Apple has doubled its market capitalization from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in just two years and the S&P 500 index has surged 50 percent since the mid-March crash—there are clear indications of a crisis building up both in the real economy and the financial system.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that while the market was at a record high, “corporate distress” in the US had never been worse with “large corporate bankruptcy filings” running at a record pace and set to exceed levels reached in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

As of August 17, a record 45 companies, each with assets of more than $1 billion, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, compared with 38 in the same period in 2009 and more than double the figure of 19 in the comparable period last year.

It reported that in total 157 companies with assets of more than $50 million have filed for bankruptcy with a lot more expected to follow.

Ben Schlafman, the chief operating officer at New Generation Research, which tracks bankruptcy filings, told the newspaper: “We are in the first innings of this bankruptcy cycle. It will spread far across industries as we get deeper into the crisis.

“It pains me to say it, but bankruptcy is a growth industry in America.”

The Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, said cutting off the $600 per week federal unemployment benefit will push tens of millions into poverty or close to it.

“They won’t have the money to buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services. As a result the entire economy will suffer. Small businesses will continue to suffer the most because they are already precarious.”

Goldman Sachs has said it expects that of the 22 million workers cut from payrolls in the first wave of the pandemic almost a quarter will be permanently axed. In a research note published on Friday and reported on Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs said that while there was a return to work from temporary layoffs, “other patterns suggest that rehiring prospects for temporarily laid-off workers started to deteriorate in July” and some 2 million workers could remain unemployed well into next year.

Reporting on the situation in Britain, the Financial Times said that accounting, law and investment banking firms were “preparing for a fresh wave of distress in the autumn” when government loan schemes to run out.

Leading insolvency barrister Mark Phillips said: “There are a series of crises looming. The full wave of insolvencies hasn’t even started yet.”

Financial and accounting firms have been involved in efforts to aid companies in restructuring their debt and raise capital to avoid a collapse.

“But the winding down of state support schemes is expected to trigger a large number of insolvency proceedings, as many of these companies run out of cash,” the FT said.

In the major industrial centres of Europe there are fears that after what was described as bounce back from the sharp economic contraction in the spring, the recovery is now starting to slow.

There was a 22.5 percent rise in industrial production across the euro zone in May and June, but this was not enough to compensate for the 28 percent fall in the first two months of the pandemic. Germany’s central bank has reported that euro zone manufacturers are still only operating at 72 percent capacity in July compared to their long-term average of 80 percent.

The car-making industry, which forms a vital component of the German economy, has been hard hit, with predictions that global car sales will fall to 69 million this year compared to 88 million in 2019. The head of Audi has said he does not expect the levels of car production to return to their pre-crisis levels at least until 2022 or 2023.

But even these predictions could be knocked awry in the face of what is clearly a resurgence of the pandemic. In the US, it continues to rage out of control while in Europe there are sharp rises in the number of infections due to the return to work drive of governments amid the push to reopen schools.

Last Friday alone, Spain reported 8000 new COVID-19 infections, with the infection rate rising across the region. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s main public health organisation said infections had risen sharply in all of the country’s 16 regions in seven days, describing the situation as “alarming.”

Infections have surged again in South Korea, one of the world’s major industrial and manufacturing centres with an additional 397 cases reported on Sunday, the highest number since the beginning of March.

“Cases are rising in 17 cities and provinces across the nation, and we are now at the verge of a massive nationwide outbreak,” the head of the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Jung Eun-kyeong, told a news briefing on Sunday.

Amid this wave of disease and economic devastation, markets have continued to rise. But there are growing fears that the conditions are building up for a major financial crisis. The market rise has driven the surge in technology stocks, which form a large component of the S&P 500 index and, above all, the supply of cheap money from the Fed.

One indication of the effect of the intervention by the Fed, which has pumped around $3 trillion into the financial system, is the lowering of the yield on US Treasury bonds as a result of the central bank’s purchases of government debt.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, a benchmark for both US and global financial markets, is now around 0.6 percent, a full percentage point below its level in February. With the yield on government debt now bringing a negative return when inflation is taken into account, this has fueled a turn to the stock market, gold and corporate debt. This search for a positive return has sparked what has been termed an “everything rally.”

But the rise of the market rests on very shaky foundations as evidenced last week when the minutes of the Fed’s July meeting were published, sending a tremor through Wall Street.

Contrary to many expectations in the market, they showed that the Fed had still not determined into “forward guidance” policy, that is, firm guarantees that there will be no tightening of monetary policy into the indefinite future, including a commitment to purchase bonds to set a cap on bond yields.

With the US government to issue more bonds to finance its debt, this measure is regarded in some quarters as necessary to insure that the increased supply of bonds does not lead to a fall in their price and a consequent rise in interest rates.

Commenting on the massive disconnect between the underlying economy and the stock market, an article in Bloomberg noted that “any number of looming threats could bring the historic rally in US equities to a screeching halt.” They could include conflict over the re-opening of schools, the November election, the conflicts with China or the effects of US monetary policy.

Then there is the issue of the massive increase in corporate debt—more than $1.6 trillion over the past few months. Such is the extent of the debt mountain that Bloomberg reported that an analysis conducted by its intelligence unit revealed that the average below investment-grade firm (or junk-rated company) had debt levels relative to earnings so high in the middle of the year that they would have triggered warnings from bank regulators had they occurred a few years ago.

However, it noted, regulators had dropped those warnings which a few years ago had applied only to a few but which today “could apply to many more.”

Gold has also been part of the “everything rally”—a rise sparked by the search for profit as its price reaches record heights and underlying uncertainty about the stability of the global monetary system as trillions of dollars are created at the press of a computer button by central banks.

While it has been on the rise, the gold price is highly volatile and so sudden downward movement is another factor that could trigger a collapse of the global financial house of cards.

US health care workers infected with COVID-19 pressured to return to work

Alex Johnson

Nurses, doctors and other medical workers in the US who have contracted COVID-19 are increasingly being pressured to return to their hospitals prematurely in violation of public health standards. The failure of health care facilities and employers to provide adequate paid leave—or, in many cases, any paid leave at all—has left health care staff with the cruel “choice” of risking hunger and homelessness for themselves and their families by forfeiting their paychecks or becoming transmitters of the coronavirus in their workplaces.

This homicidal policy is being pursued despite the already existing widespread loss of life and disastrously high infection rates for hospital staff. Health care personnel in many states now account for as many as 20 percent of known coronavirus cases. A joint research project of Kaiser Health News and the Guardian discovered that 167 health care employees have died of COVID-19 while treating infected patients.

Kaiser Health News and Guardian researchers have admitted that the actual number of health care worker deaths due to COVID-19 is likely far higher than 167. A total of 922 health care worker deaths in the course of the pandemic are now being investigated, having been identified as the likely result of coronavirus infection. Internationally, more than 2,000 health care workers across 74 countries have died from the virus, according to a recent “In Memoriam” list released by Medscape.

For the most part, the grievances of health care staff over unsafe conditions have either been ignored or dismissed outright by hospital executives more concerned with cutting costs and increasing profits than protecting the lives of staff members. Dozens of complaints from hospital workers were submitted to the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) this past spring, many of them reporting infected employees being ordered to return to work.

Included is a respiratory clinic in North Carolina where COVID-positive employees were told they would be fired if they stayed home, and a veterans hospital in Massachusetts where ill employees were returning to work because they were not receiving compensation.

Although the bipartisan CARES Act bailout of Wall Street enacted in March included minimal paid time off for workers affected by the pandemic, health care workers have been given virtually no legal protection against unsafe conditions in their workplaces. Emergency responders and health care providers are exempted from the provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Anyone who works in a medical facility, from a doctor’s office or nursing home to a pharmacy or medical school, may be excluded by employers from receiving paid sick leave and/or expanded family and medical leave.

Department of Labor officials and other policy makers claim the exemption is necessary to avoid depleting the work force on the frontlines of the pandemic under conditions where large numbers of staff working in overcrowded hospitals have been exposed to COVID-19 patients. This has provoked outrage among health care workers, who point out that on top of being given inadequate personal protective equipment, being forced to work while sick places them and their patients at even higher risk of contracting the virus.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study in early June concluded that approximately 69.4 million workers, four in 10 of the working population, are potentially ineligible for emergency paid sick leave benefits. An estimated one in four of those workers is in the health care industry.

The law also automatically excludes 9.5 million health care workers employed by a private employer with 500 or more employees, while an additional 8.1 million health care workers are subject to the exemption at the whim of their employer. This amounts to about 17.7 million health care workers who are not guaranteed access to federal emergency paid sick leave benefits, even if forced to quarantine because of testing positive for COVID-19.

Moreover, some 15 percent of workers at health care and other social assistance firms are denied any paid sick leave by their employers. Lack of available paid leave has been the main factor discouraging workers with symptoms of COVID-19 from staying home and preventing mass exposure among colleagues and patients.

This exemption has been felt the most among the lowest paid and most exploited sections of the health care work force. About a quarter (24 percent) of the health care workforce who are excluded or subject to exemption are part-time workers. Many of them are highly unlikely to receive any paid leave benefits from their employer beyond sick leave. Additionally, 18 percent of them are low-wage, and therefore have very little saved for emergencies, making it nearly impossible to claw out of a financial hole caused by being deprived of work.

There are pervasive staff shortages at health care facilities. In nursing homes, which remain key hotspots for the spread of COVID-19, low staffing is cited as a culprit in the prevalence of COVID-19 outbreaks. A study released by two University of Chicago researchers who examined various characteristics of facilities with confirmed COVID-19 cases showed that staffing shortages were increasingly linked to nursing home outbreaks.

Another research study published by the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network found that of three primary issues factored into a facility’s five-star CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) rating—including health inspection, quality measures and staffing—only staffing coverage served as a reliable predictor of the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks.

In eight states, nursing homes with high ratings for nurse staffing had fewer COVID-19 cases than nursing homes with low ratings for staffing. The eight states that were investigated—California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—have all been devastated by the pandemic.

Staffing cuts at major hospital chains have produced significant eruptions of working class resistance and militancy. At California’s HCA Healthcare conglomerate, nearly 1,000 nurses and support staff struck in late June to protest years of cuts and concessions imposed by management and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Similar struggles have taken place in other states against billion-dollar hospital chains, including 720 registered nurses in Illinois who went on strike in early July to oppose AMITA Health’s abysmal staffing levels.

All of these struggles have been sold out by the unions, which have done everything in their power to isolate strikes and protests where they could not prevent them from taking place. They have stood by and allowed the health care corporations to pay strikebreakers. At the same time, they have limited strikes to pre-determined lengths so as to let health care staff blow off steam while they worked out concessionary contracts with management behind the backs of the workers.

Health care workers can secure adequate staffing and paid leave only through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees independent of the corrupt trade unions. Staff at clinics, hospitals and other medical facilities must unite their struggles in preparation for a nationwide general strike to fight for the containment and eradication of the pandemic and ensure that the economic needs of workers are met.

Lukashenko threatens military crackdown in Belarus as US initiates discussions with opposition leader

Clara Weiss

Amid ongoing strikes and protests, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, who claims to have won the August 9 presidential elections with 80 percent of the votes, has threatened an all-out military crackdown on protesters.

On Sunday, mass protests again took place in several cities. In Minsk, protests were said to be about as large as the Sunday before, when an estimated 100,000 protesters were out in the streets. In Grodno, a city in the west of the country, about 20,000 people demonstrated against Lukashenko, demanding that he resign. The Grodno region, along with Minsk, has been the main center of the strike movement that has swept the country for two weeks now.

Protesters called for new elections, and many chanted slogans in support of striking miners in Soligorsk and tractor factory workers in Minsk. There was a heavy police and military presence during the protest in Minsk, with soldiers surrounding World War II monuments in the city center. The Ministry of Defense had earlier published a statement “strictly warning” that “In case of disruption of the order and peace in these places—you will have to deal not with the police but with the Army.” The Ministry of Defense also denounced protesters as “fascists.”

Protests in Minsk on August 16

After the protest ended, extraordinary scenes showed Lukashenko flying over the empty streets of Minsk, saying “they’ve dispersed like rats.” He descended from the helicopter at the presidential residence with an automatic rifle in hand, and was cheered by heavily armed security personnel.

The mass rallies and strikes were triggered by the initial brutal response by the regime to protests against the election results on August 9 and 10. Over 7,000 people were arrested in the first week of the demonstrations, and 80 people are still unaccounted for. There have been reports of torture and the rape of prisoners with objects, leaving women unable to bear children. As mass protests and strikes continued to grow, the regime initially toned down its use of violence against the protesters. However, now it has decided to go into a full-blown confrontation against demonstrators, and especially striking workers.

On Monday, the leader of a strike committee in Soligorsk, where thousands of potash miners have been on strike since August 11, was arrested. Two members of the opposition’s Coordination Council, including Olga Kovalkova, the representative of opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, were also arrested on Monday morning by police while they were trying to talk to striking workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory.

Above all, the regime has escalated its crackdown on striking workers, who have been threatened with layoffs, and have been paid no wages. On Monday, Lukashenko declared that all state-owned enterprises where strikes are taking place should shut down, and then decide whom they want to hire again.

Lukashenko had earlier also threatened to bring in miners from the Ukrainian Donbass to replace striking miners in Soligorsk. There were reports of Russian workers being driven into Belarus to replace striking workers. While no concrete new numbers of strikes and striking workers have been reported in the press, the website belzabastovka.org indicates that there are still 150 strikes going on in the country.

The German financial newspaper Handelsblatt noted yesterday that the Belarusian economy is on the brink of collapse because of the strike movement. The state-owned companies where workers are on strike, according to the Handelsblatt, accounted for $10 billion out of a GDP of less than $60 billion. Lukashenko’s economic adviser stated that “billions of dollars” had already been lost to the strikes. The Belarusian ruble, the Handelsblatt noted, has been “in free fall” since the beginning of the protests.

There is no question that enormous social and economic discontent, along with opposition to the authoritarian regime in Belarus, are major driving factors behind the ongoing protests and strikes. Workers in Belarus enjoy close to no labor rights. Companies can fire their entire workforces with just seven-days notice, and the vast majority of labor contracts are temporary. The average monthly wage in 2019 was just $500.

This brutal repression and exploitation of the working class has been enabled not only by the state-sanctioned unions, which have implemented a brutal regime of surveillance and terror in workplaces. The so called “independent” unions, which now posture as defenders of the rights of workers, in fact supported the restoration of capitalism, which has created the conditions for the Lukashenko regime to emerge. They now support the pro-EU opposition and have ties to various international union organizations, including the AFL-CIO, which functions as an arm of US imperialism both at home and abroad.

The crackdown by the Lukashenko regime on the strike movement is being facilitated by the right-wing politics of the opposition and the unions. Leading opposition figures are associated with the restoration of capitalism in Belarus and the destruction of the USSR. No less than the Lukashenko regime, they are opponents of the social and democratic rights of the working class, and are, above all, concerned with bringing the strike movement to an end.

While declaring no desire to break ties with Russia, the opposition under Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is oriented toward closer cooperation with the EU and NATO. Several opposition leaders are notorious Belarusian nationalists who seek to end the status of Russian as an official language in the country.

Last week, an extraordinary EU summit called upon the Lukashenko regime to initiate negotiations with the opposition’s Coordination Council. The EU is not recognizing the August 9 elections. This weekend, US Under Secretary of State Stephen Biegun initiated Washington’s first direct discussions with Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania.

Tikhanovskaya later declared that she was “grateful to the US for their support for the Belarusian people.” According to the Russian Gazeta.Ru, this meeting was the first official contact between the State Department and the opposition leader since the mass protests in Belarus began. Biegun is now traveling on to Moscow and Kiev to discuss the crisis in Belarus with the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

Last Thursday, another opposition leader, Valery Tsepkalo, had stated that he was trying to get the West to recognize Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as the “president” of Belarus. He pointed to Venezuela, where the Trump administration has unsuccessfully been trying to topple the government of Nicolás Maduro through right-wing forces around Juan Guaidó, and said, “such a precedent has been created and it’s, in principle, possible to do the same thing [in Belarus].”

Amid ongoing negotiations with the EU and the US, the opposition has been thrown into a profound crisis by the escalating strikes and protests. Even as she is calling for new elections and insisting on negotiations with the Lukashenko regime, and after weeks in which the opposition declared her the winner of the last election, Tikhanovskaya herself declared this weekend that neither she nor her husband, a jailed opposition blogger, would run in a new presidential election. The opposition has yet to nominate a presidential candidate.

In response to the ever more open backing by the EU and NATO for the opposition, the Kremlin has moved closer to supporting Lukashenko, and especially his repression of the strike movement. The Kremlin has refused so far to enter into negotiations with the opposition’s Coordination Council and has denounced the interference of “foreign powers” in the Belarus crisis.

The strike movement in Belarus has demonstrated the enormous social and political power of the working class. However, workers are faced with an extraordinarily dangerous situation. A way forward can only be found through a complete break with all factions of the capitalist class and the trade unions, and a turn to socialist and internationalist politics on the basis of the lessons of the struggle by the Trotskyist movement against Stalinism.

Despite COVID-19, French billionaires have tripled their wealth since 2010

Kumaran Ira

While the COVID-19 pandemic threatens millions of lives worldwide, the super-rich are profiting from the pandemic to boost their fortunes, as governments shower the corporate and financial elite with billions of euros in bailouts. This is the case not only in the United States, but internationally.

French financial magazine Challenges has published its yearly ranking of the 500 largest fortunes in France. According to the 2020 edition, the collective wealth of France’s 500 wealthiest families has exploded despite the pandemic: “Despite the economic crisis caused by the confinement, the 500 greatest fortunes has not collapsed.”

It continued, “In 2020, the collective wealth of the 500 top fortunes in the ranking was €731 billion, compared to €211 billion in 2010.” This is approximately 30 percent of France’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to 10 percent in 2010. While there has been a threefold increase in their wealth over the last decade, there has been a ten-fold increase since 1996. France has 95 billionaires today, compared to 40 a decade ago.

The disgusting self-enrichment of the financial aristocracy exposes the French government’s claims it has no money for social spending and to stop mass sackings being prepared amid the pandemic. The accumulation of such obscene fortunes is due to the policies of successive governments since the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the 2008 Wall Street crash. They are implementing austerity policies designed to destroy social rights established after the Liberation from the Nazi occupation, to further enrich the wealthy.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, French officials have refused to significantly boost health spending and even mocked COVID-19 as a “little flu.” The state thus not only endangered health workers, who were denied necessary supplies and even face masks. The pandemic has caused over 30,000 deaths in France and 810,000 worldwide. At the same time, European governments were pouring over €2 trillion in bailouts into the banks and major corporations, further enriching this corrupt financial aristocracy.

Among the billionaires, Bernard Arnault, the head of the LVMH luxury fashion conglomerate, is still the wealthiest individual in France and across Europe. For the first time, his wealth has gone above €100 billion (a 13 percent increase since 2019). He is the third-wealthiest man in the world after Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). From 2008 to 2019, Arnault increased his fortune from €18 billion to €100 billion.

The Arnault family, which initially ran a regional construction firm in northern France, built its fortune by manipulating state subsidies to restructure and shut down textile plants. It finally acquired LVMH in the 1980s, leaving in its wake a trail of shuttered factories and devastated cities. Northern France has since become an electoral base of the neo-fascist National Front.

The five largest fortunes in France are based primarily on luxury, fashion and cosmetics. After France’s wealthiest man, there are the Dumas family that owns the Hermès luxury group (€55 billion), the Wertheimer brothers who own the Chanel luxury group (€53 billion), and Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who owns much of L’Oréal (€51 billion). Fifth place goes to François Pinault and his family, which owns the Kering luxury conglomerate (€32 billion).

In sixth and seventh place, one finds big retail and defense contractors: Gérard Mulliez for the Auchan supermarket chain, and Laurent, Olivier, Marie-Hélène and Thierry Dassault of the Dassault military and aerospace empire (€23.5 billion).

These billionaires have profited massively from tax cuts and state subsidies handed to them over a period of decades. The fact that France’s five largest fortunes rely on luxury underscores how the ruling class builds its fortunes on social inequality and neglects industry and production.

Such concentration of wealth at the top of society is an unprecedented phenomenon, which the pandemic has not stopped. According to the Guardian, “more than three-quarters of the world’s wealthiest people have already reported a substantial increase in their family fortune this year.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his fortune skyrocket by $75 billion this year to reach the record figure of $189 billion.

Even before the drastic impact of COVID-19, a substantial proportion of the world’s population lived in poverty. In its report published last October, European statistics agency Eurostat wrote that “in 2018, 109.2 million people, that is 21.7 percent of the population in the European Union (EU) was living at risk of poverty or social exclusion.”

The French National Statistics Institute (INSEE) reported at that time that in France 14.7 percent of the population—that is over 9 million people—were living under the poverty line. In 2019, the number of beneficiaries of minimum welfare payments (RSA) increased, with 1.84 million households receiving this benefit. A couple has to live on €847 monthly with this benefit, and an individual €567 per month.

In October 2019, sociologist Louis Maurin told the daily Le Parisien: “We are in a sort of stagnation, with already very weak growth, which always leaves behind a portion of the population that is already economically weakened. Public policy is not directed towards the poorest individuals. By spending €7 billion, we would lift 5 million people out of poverty, whereas in reality we are giving €30 billion in tax handouts to the wealthy. Our employment policy is not coherent, either. Without accusing anyone of anything, our job-creation policy has no ambition.”

Now, the super-rich are seeing their fortunes subsidized by bailouts including a €1.25 trillion European Central Bank “quantitative easing” plan, and hundreds of billions spent in national and EU bailouts across Europe. This only further underscores the completely parasitic character of their wealth. Like the feudal aristocracy before the 1789 French revolution, they live by plundering the public purse and demanding with limitless arrogance that the state impoverish the people.