Australian big business, federal government demand accelerated lifting of Melbourne lockdown

Patrick O’Connor

The federal government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, together with numerous corporate lobby groups and sections of the corporate media, has denounced the Victorian state government’s proposed “roadmap” out of coronavirus lockdown measures. The anti-lockdown campaign is aimed at accelerating the ruling elite’s homicidal reopening of the economy, with more widespread COVID-19 infections and deaths accepted as the price to be paid for the generation of higher levels of corporate profit.

On Sunday, Victoria state Labor Premier Daniel Andrews announced an extension until September 28 of only slightly modified “stage four” lockdown measures in Melbourne. These have included a night-time curfew, mandatory mask wearing, a 5-kilometre restriction on people’s movements from their homes, a maximum of one hour outdoors exercise, a ban on visiting other people’s homes except for caregiving, and restrictions on certain economic activities, including an effective suspension of the retail, hospitality, and some service industries.

These measures were put in place in response to the “second wave” spike of coronavirus infections, which reached a daily peak in Victoria of 725 cases on August 5, threatening the outright collapse of the hospital and healthcare system.

Under the announced “roadmap,” the alleviation of the “stage four” measures from September 28 is based on the state recording a daily average of between 30 and 50 new cases (the average is now 85 but is steadily declining).

Another step is scheduled for October 26, if there are fewer than five daily average cases over the previous fortnight, with the curfew ended, restrictions on people leaving their homes lifted, a possible “staged return” of face to face school teaching for all year levels, and the lifting of restrictions on construction, hospitality, retail, tourism, and some other sectors.

An additional step in the “roadmap” is scheduled for November 23, conditional on no new coronavirus cases in the state being recorded over a fortnight, involving permitting larger crowds and social gatherings as well as looser restrictions on other economic activity, including the reopening of indoor entertainment venues and pubs. The lifting of all restrictions, labelled by the government a “COVID normal” situation, is dependent on no new infections in the state for 28 days.

The federal government immediately denounced these plans, signalling an end to the bipartisan unity between the Labor and Liberal parties on pandemic policy.

In a joint statement issued on Sunday, Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and Health Minister Greg Hunt declared that Andrews’ proposals amounted to “crushing news for the people of Victoria.” Emphasising that the “roadmap” was “a Victorian government plan,” the federal government leaders complained that “the continued restrictions will have further impact on the Victorian and national economy.”

The prime minister followed up this statement with a press conference yesterday to reiterate the “crushing news” soundbite several times, and to refuse to commit any additional economic support to people affected by the extended lockdown measures. Morrison signaled his support for a corporate-led campaign against the “roadmap,” declaring that he regarded the Victorian government plan as both a “worst-case scenario” and “a starting point in terms of how this issue will be managed in the weeks and months ahead.”

In a thinly-veiled threat, he pledged to deliver “constructive feedback to the Victorian government” after “sitting down with industry [and] business.”

Corporate lobby groups and the media, led by the Murdoch and financial press, are whipping up a frenzied campaign against the Andrews government. They regard as intolerable any extension of the restrictions placed on the corporate extraction of surplus value from the working class. This is in line with the “back to work” campaign being promoted by the ruling elite internationally, accompanied by the promotion of homicidal “herd immunity” ideas.

Paul Guerra, head of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, responded to the state government’s “roadmap” by issuing the extraordinary demand that profit interests be openly prioritised ahead of public health. “Business needs to be heard,” he declared, “and that’s the part that we’ve been disappointed about, is [that] health measures have taken priority.”

The media has echoed such statements. In a characteristically lurid piece, the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper today compared the lockdown measures in Melbourne to police-state repression under Stalinist rule in Poland. The outlet’s sudden discovery of the importance of civil liberties stands in stark contrast to its record of cheerleading every piece of antidemocratic legislation adopted under the guise of the so-called war on terror.

The Australian Financial Review’s editorial today hailed various corporate figures for “rais[ing] the alarm against this public health cult of elimination [of coronavirus].”

The Victorian state government has attempted to win public support by posturing as a champion of public health. Andrews declared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” program yesterday, “politics has never mattered less to me.… Leadership is not [about] doing what’s popular, it is about doing what’s right.”

This bogus public relations “spin” belies the reality that the Labor Party represents the interests of big business and finance capital no less ruthlessly than does the Liberal Party. Only tactical differences now separate the preferred policies of the two chief political instruments of the ruling class.

Andrews has repeatedly emphasised his determination to open up the economy on behalf of the corporations as quickly as possible—but he has calculated that doing so amid mass coronavirus infections and deaths is not feasible. He has been publicly backed by some important business figures, including Australia’s wealthiest individual, Anthony Pratt of Visy Industries (personal fortune, $15 billion).

Andrews, who served as health minister (2007-2010) under the previous state Labor government before becoming premier in 2014, is acutely aware of the fragility of the chronically under-resourced and largely privatised Victorian healthcare system. Any sustained surge in coronavirus would likely trigger a catastrophic breakdown, even worse than that seen in New York and northern Italy during the initial stages of the global pandemic.

“When it comes to public health infrastructure and resources per head of population, Victoria is much worse off than any other state in Australia,” leading infectious disease expert Raina MacIntyre of the University of New South Wales’ Kirby Institute explained on the ABC. “Victoria is just a shell of a system, it’s just been decimated, and that’s fine in the good times, you can get by on a minimal model, but when there’s a pandemic all those weaknesses are exposed.”

The state Labor government is culpable for the coronavirus disaster that has hit Victoria. In April, Andrews joined every other state premier and the prime minister in rejecting a strategy aimed at eliminating coronavirus infections, instead agreeing to permit a supposedly “safe” level of continued COVID-19 infection, on the explicit basis of preventing businesses from incurring excessive costs. The premature lifting in May of the lockdown measures imposed during the “first wave” triggered an entirely predictable resurgence of coronavirus cases.

Andrews and the state Labor government are conscious of provoking working class opposition in the event that another rushed reopening of the economy leads to spikes in infections across different industries and workplaces. Social tensions are escalating as unemployment is rising to depression-level rates.

Amid the crisis, and the eruption of internecine fighting within the political establishment, the critical task confronting the working class is to develop an independent struggle in defence of its interests. Workers, both employed and unemployed, should form rank and file workplace and community safety committees, organising resistance, including strike measures, against unsafe conditions. This requires a political struggle against both the federal Liberal-National government and the state Labor government in Victoria, and the development of the fight for a workers’ government and socialist policies that will ensure the economic, social, and healthcare safety of all working people.

Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer slashes 2,500 jobs

Tomas Castanheira

Last Thursday, the aircraft manufacturer Embraer announced the dismissal of 2,500 workers in Brazil, including 900 direct layoffs and another 1,600 through voluntary dismissal programs. The workers in São José dos Campos, the main center of the company in Brazil, went on strike the same day.

The cut corresponds to 12.5 percent of the 20,000 workers employed by Embraer globally. In Brazil, where the transnational corporation is headquartered, it employs 16,000.

The attack on Brazilian workers is part of an international wave of mass layoffs that has had a profound impact on the aviation sector. Other large companies in the industry have made massive job cuts in proportions similar to those carried out by Embraer.

The US-based Boeing, which in May of this year canceled a deal to buy a substantial part of Embraer, announced in April plans to cut 10 percent of its approximately 160,000 employees, mostly in the United States. In recent weeks, it has stated that the layoffs will be larger than previously announced. Airbus announced a restructuring plan involving the slashing of 15,000 jobs globally, 5,000 of them in France, 5,100 in Germany, and 1,700 in the UK.

Bolsonaro at the delivery of the KC-390 airplane to the Brazilian Air Force, 2019. (Credit: FAB)

Massive layoffs are also being prepared by the airlines. American Airlines, the largest company in the industry, has announced that it will lay off “at least” 40,000 workers, more than half of whom have already entered buyout programs. Lufthansa, based in Germany, announced the slashing of 22,000 jobs. In Brazil, Latam workers recently protested against some 3,000 layoffs.

The companies were impacted by the air travel stoppage as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), in a report released in June, estimated an $84 billion loss to the global air transport industry by 2020, declaring it the “worst year in aviation history.”

In its official statement on the layoffs, Embraer claims to have had, in the first half of 2020, a 75 percent decrease in its delivery of aircrafts and a 2.95 billion reais (about US$560 million) loss, which it attributes in part to the failure of its negotiations with Boeing. It cited a “lack of expectation of the recovery of the air transport sector in the short and medium term.”

The jobs massacre being carried out globally against the working class stands in stark contrast to the multi-billion-dollar state rescue packages for these companies, guaranteeing the income of a parasitic financial oligarchy.

In the US alone, the CARES act has allocated US$50 billion to the airline industry. In France, €15 billion was directed to the rescue of Air France and Airbus. In Brazil, Embraer received a R$3 billion (about US$570 million) loan from a consortium of banks coordinated by the National Bank for Economic Development (BNDES).

Capitalist interests are being guaranteed internationally not only by bourgeois governments, but by corporatist trade unions that play a central role in pushing through the mass layoff plans.

In France, the union led by the Workers Force (FO) has supported the job cuts at Airbus by opposing only “forced layoffs,” demanding that they be carried out through buyout plans. Above all, it demanded the funneling of state resources to the company, arguing that it has a better chance of recovering than its competitors, particularly Boeing.

The same essential line is being promoted by the São José dos Campos Metalworkers Union (SMSJC) in response of the layoffs at Embraer. The SMSJC has been controlled for decades by the Morenoites of the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), which has presided over a protracted decline in the conditions faced by the workers it purports to represent, which, besides at Embraer, includes General Motors and other large companies.

While promoting a strike to relieve the pressure from Embraer workers’ anger, the PSTU union is preparing the ground to accept the layoffs. The union leader at Embraer, Herbert Claros, criticized the company for not having previously negotiated the layoffs with the union, comparing it to a car sale, in which “you don’t impose your price.”

Claros stated: “Embraer workers know that in the last three negotiations on the buyouts the company has forced through and presented only its own proposals. The union tried to implement at least one clause: to guarantee the stability of those who didn’t adhere to the buyouts. ... Don’t we make deals with other companies? The main example is General Motors, where the union recently reached an agreement on layoffs, on buyouts.”

Giving a pseudo-radical cover to this corporatist policy and trying to divert a confrontation of the workers against the profit interests of the company, the union focuses its fire on the alleged incompetence of the Embraer management. The main slogan advanced by the PSTU is the “re-nationalization” of the company.

Behind this slogan—which has nothing to do with socialism—the PSTU seeks to subordinate the working class to the nationalist bourgeoisie and the Brazilian military. Shortly after the failure of the negotiations with Boeing, the Morenoites launched a chauvinist manifesto under the headline “An Embraer for Brazilians. Re-nationalize, now.”

The manifesto states that Embraer “carries the pride of being an accomplishment of Brazilian effort and competence ... the accumulation of five decades of heavy investments, which allowed Brazil to figure among the select group of nations that have the capacity to develop airplanes.”

This is an open defense of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Embraer was created by the Brazilian Air Force in 1969, at the height of the regime’s reign of terror. The fact that it was driven by the Brazilian state, which owned 51 percent of its shares and controlled its management, doesn’t change the fact that it was completely oriented to capitalist profit and the reactionary interests of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, subordinated to US imperialism.

The manifesto attacked the attempt to sell Embraer to Boeing as a deal that “would mainly benefit the American company ... to the detriment of the strategic interests of the Brazilian nation.” And it insisted that “Defending its re-nationalization, now, is the duty of the Brazilians who dream and fight for a sovereign country aware of its power.”

Based on this ultra-nationalist policy, they gathered support from a wide range of bourgeois politicians and trade unions. This alliance was celebrated at an event attended by the main leaders of the Workers Party (PT), the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the Democratic Labor Party (PDT).

In this sordid event, the PSTU made it clear that the “strategic interests of the Brazilian nation” they defend have nothing in common with the interests of the working class; rather, they are based on their intense exploitation.

Defending the company’s competitiveness in the global market, the PSTU’s economics specialist, Gustavo Machado, declared: “This supposed crisis that Embraer is going through has nothing to do with its performance. The company has a net worth that is far superior to its competitors Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier. It has a profit rate that is superior to the profit rate in the market.”

The profitability of the company praised by the PSTU is the product of a series of layoffs, wage cuts and an intensification of the exploitation of workers that resulted from the company’s privatization process in 1994. Although they now attack the privatization process as a blow against the “national interests,” the Morenoites extol the results of its destructive effects upon workers.

The PSTU argues that to compete with its global rivals, Embraer needs substantial financing from the Brazilian state, “Especially in the face of the crisis that we are experiencing today with the paralysis of much of the commercial aviation sector and competitors that are emerging with very strong input from the state,” said Machado. He pointed out that Boeing has an important part of its revenue linked to “partnerships with the U.S. government, especially in defense and security.” The suggestion, clearly, is that Embraer should enjoy similar “partnerships.”

Embraer plant in São Paulo. (Credit: Ministério da Defesa)

This appeal to the military is by no means hidden by the PSTU. Its event was closed with a call to those in the Brazilian military, especially the Air Force, who defend “national sovereignty” and believe in the “Embraer project.”

This call is aligned with the growing demands of the military in the government of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro for greater funding. Recently, the Defense Ministry demanded a 37 percent increase in the military budget “to fund projects considered a priority, such as the purchase of fighter jets, rocket launchers and nuclear propulsion submarines.”

The National Defense Policy (NDP) and the National Defense Strategy (END), published this year, present the demand for an increase in military funds alongside the forecast of a world scenario marked by “rivalry among states.” This is a clear response by the Brazilian ruling class to the escalation of international geopolitical tensions, strongly driven by Washington’s strategic policy based upon “competition between major powers.”

Growing US intervention in Latin America has dragged Brazil into an increasingly direct military role in the region. On his last trip to the US in March, Bolsonaro signed a military agreement to boost the sale of Brazilian weapons to the Pentagon. The discussions involving the agreement were fully connected to Brazil’s support for US-led regime change operations in Venezuela.

The attempt by the PSTU union to subject workers to the interests of the Brazilian state and its military has an absolutely reactionary character. This policy does not represent the defense of workers’ jobs or conditions, but rather demands ever greater sacrifices in the name of capitalist profit.

Embraer workers must join with their comrades around the world to defend their jobs and living conditions, promoting a relentless struggle against the capitalist oligarchy controlling the transnational corporations. Their billionaire wealth must be expropriated and redirected to attend to social needs, first and foremost the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, while guaranteeing wages for all workers.

The study of the International Committee of the Fourth International’s protracted struggle against revisionism, and the building of revolutionary parties in Brazil and throughout Latin America based on this experience, are essential to defeat the attempts to betray the working class and lead it to victory.

Open letter in Le Soir: Belgian ruling class calls to spread COVID-19

Jacques Valentin

On August 27, the francophone Belgian newspapers La Libre Belgique and Le Soir published an open letter signed by doctors, legal experts, economists, teachers and journalists. Titled “An open letter to our political leaders: It is urgent to totally review the handling of the Covid-19 crisis,” it denies outright the seriousness of the epidemic as well as the necessity of health measures taken to contain it.

With nearly 10,000 deaths for a population of less than 12 million, Belgium has suffered a horrific 853 deaths per million inhabitants, a mortality rate only surpassed by Peru. In spite of “sometimes terrifying conditions” in which many elderly Belgians died, according to Doctors without Borders, the Open Letter speaks not a word of compassion for the victims of the pandemic or their bereaved families. This chilling indifference is especially disturbing given the large number of doctors among the signatories.

The Open Letter, whose arguments are astonishingly impoverished given the professional qualifications of the signatories, sets out to minimize the catastrophe. It calls the coronavirus a “virus posing dangers no worse than the seasonal flu that we experience every year amid ‘near’ total indifference.”

The Open Letter carefully avoids citing figures for the number of lives lost to the pandemic. However, its reference to flu is a brazen lie. Seasonal flu in Belgium accounts for 10 times fewer deaths than has COVID-19 so far this year. According to the infectious disease specialist Yves Van Laethem, flu kills around 1,000 people per year in Belgium, with small variations from year to year. One would have to go back to the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, the worst since Spanish flu in 1918-19, to observe a comparable number of deaths.

Unlike the flu, the population does not have antibodies against COVID-19, which is highly contagious; without lock-downs to contain it, the disease could easily infect 60 percent of the population. The rate of hospital admissions for COVID-19 is far superior to the flu, as is the mortality rate. This is why there are many gravely ill patients and deaths, despite lock-downs that succeeded in limiting infections to a relatively small fraction of the population.

The Open Letter denies the proven benefits of lock-downs, however, flatly stating: “There is no scientific basis to recommend isolating healthy people.”

In fact, due to the lack of preparation this spring, the lack of masks and protective equipment, and the impossibility of easily distinguishing the healthy from the sick, the epidemic surged across Belgium, Europe and internationally. Every contaminated person transmitted the disease to roughly three others, and the number of daily deaths doubled every two days on average at the pandemic’s peak intensity.

If lock-downs had been decided a week later, the peak in April deaths would therefore have been substantially higher, as well as the overall number of deaths. In France, the public hospitals in Paris, which were saturated with sick patients, openly acknowledged that they would have been overwhelmed if the lock-down had been decided one day later.

The Open Letter is not interested in scientific results, however, nor does it seek to honestly establish what health measures did or did not help treat the disease. It is above all a partisan attack against the lock-down policy. It tries to snow the reader in with dubious or discredited arguments: that some countries which did not impose lock-downs had as many or fewer deaths as countries which did; that lock-downs encourage domestic violence; and that they increase poverty, which leads to deaths.

These arguments are a lying cover for the interests of the financial aristocracy. Its fundamental objection to lock-downs—namely, that too much money is spent saving the lives of people who are mostly workers or poor—also appears in the “Open Letter.” It laments, “On the economic level, 50 billion euros have evaporated. Never has so much money been invested to ‘save’ lives, even with regard to the insane estimations of the number of so-called avoided deaths (a figure which remains presently unknown).”

In reality, everything here is false: the number of deaths and their rise during the pandemic is fairly precisely known. As for the “evaporated” sums of money, it is not €50 billion but €2 trillion which have been allocated to European bank and corporate bailouts. Unemployment and poverty are surging, and small businesses are going bankrupt, not because the health system has tried to treat the disease, but because the banks and super-rich monopolize the resources of society.

The “Open Letter” spares the reader nothing as it lists various fallacious arguments to claim that nothing can or should be done to halt the spread of this deadly disease.

While declaring that “the wearing of masks has strictly no benefit” except possibly if “physical distancing cannot be met,” it adds: “Vaccines have immediately been presented to us as the sole solution to end the pandemic, whilst their harmlessness, efficiency and duration of protection are uncertain. Other solutions in the medium and long term must be envisaged, such as herd immunity.”

Herd immunity consists in allowing the maximum number of people to be infected, while hoping that the survivors will conserve an immunity which will slow down the virus’ spread in the broader population. That is the strategy of Donald Trump in America, claiming as nothing can be allowed to disturb the economy and extraction of profits, the disease should be given time to spread across the general population, whatever the resulting death toll. As a result, the world’s richest country has the most fatalities—191,481 to date.

It is a policy which, in order to preserve the fortunes and privileges of a parasitic ruling class, refuses to base itself on scientific knowledge and society’s capacity to organize itself to confront the virus. In spite of the extraordinary progress of science since 1918-1919, it proposes to let COVID-19 infect and kill millions, as did the Spanish flu.

The letter shows that broad sections of the Belgian medical and academic community are susceptible to the class pressures exercised by the financial aristocracy as it demands a total, unrestricted re-opening of the economy. The “Open Letter” also demands the departure of experts who advise the government in order to get rid of everything faintly resembling a lock-down policy: “The legitimacy of the experts now in control must be put into question.”

Claiming that “the current climate of covidophobia is totally unjustified and generates harmful anxiety,” the letter demands the adoption of policies known to spread the virus: “The long-term risks associated with excess hygiene must be taken into account…Children must be able to return to nursery, primary and secondary school under normal conditions, allowing for basic hygiene measures like hand washing…University students must get back into the lecture halls and social life in general.”

These nauseating arguments underline the indifference of the ruling class to the number of deaths produced by the defense of its riches. Workers have the right to information and scientifically-founded perspectives in order to protect their lives and class interests. We invite our readers to share widely the WSWS analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to form their own rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the state and trade unions, to watch out for their health and safety in the workplace and in the working-class neighborhoods.

General Motors, Honda announce joint venture to cut billions in production costs

Jessica Goldstein

Last Thursday, General Motors and Honda Motor Co. announced a deal to merge some operations in North America with a focus on sharing design teams and manufacturing technology to streamline the production of both electric-powered and combustion engine vehicles.

The planning discussions will begin immediately for the joint design venture, according to the Associated Press, with a timeline to begin engineering work for new vehicles at the start of 2021. The two companies will also join operations on “manufacturing, parts purchasing, research and connected services.”

The agreement is thus far nonbinding, and the two corporations have yet to come to definitive cost-savings, but Reuters reported the day of the announcement that both corporations expect to reap savings in the billions of dollars from the joint venture.

The announcement marks a deepening of the relationship between the two auto giants less than one year after Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and PSA Group signed a binding merger agreement in December 2019. Before the plans between GM and Honda were announced, the two automakers had already committed to financial collaboration in October 2018 on production of autonomous, that is, self-driving vehicles. Honda committed to investing $2.75 billion into the development of a line of mass-produced autonomous vehicles manufactured by GM’s self-driving unit, Cruise Automation.

The timing of the announcement is significant. For the past several years, the global auto industry has experienced one major shakeup after the other as automakers scrambled to enter the competitive market of electric and autonomous vehicle development, currently dominated by US-based Tesla. Companies are desperately seeking ways to produce the greater profits demanded by the global stock indexes in the face of declining demand for new vehicles on the world market, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

In December 2019 the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter wrote of the FCA-PSA merger that it was “the first of what is expected to be a wave of new consolidations in the global auto industry, under conditions of a slowing world economy, the eruption of trade conflict and an intense battle to dominate emerging markets for electric and self-driving vehicles and other so-called ‘mobility technologies.’”

The wave of consolidations will no doubt accelerate after 2020 comes to a close and auto corporations come to grips with the full financial impact of the pandemic.

According to S&P Global Platts, auto industry tracker Wards Intelligence predicted that global auto “inventories could still be about 30 percent lower than year-ago levels at the end of July.” The drop in second-quarter inventory factored into a sales drop of 33.3 percent year over year for the quarter, based on calculations by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The auto industry is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels of production and profit generation for several years. The S&P report cited analysis by CFRA Research, which “expects U.S. new-vehicle sales to plummet 22% in 2020 year over year, with a 12.8% rebound in 2021 from 2020.”

GM’s announcement of the tie-up with Honda is the latest move by the Detroit-based automaker in response to the threat posed by the merger of its rival FCA with PSA, which will create the world’s fourth-largest automaker, to be called Stellantis. The merger will knock General Motors and Ford Motor into sixth and seventh places respectively.

The FCA-PSA merger is set to close by the end of the first quarter of 2021 and will provide a windfall for the two corporations, including $3.7 billion in annual cost savings. Some features of the GM-Honda deal mirror those of the FCA-PSA merger plan. The decision to join production on electric vehicles is aimed at meeting government pressure to cut emissions and to carve out a slice of the burgeoning electric vehicle market.

As part of the proposal, General Motors will help to develop two new electric vehicles for Honda, which will be built at GM plants, the exact locations yet to be decided, and powered by GM’s Ultium electric batteries, which are still under development.

Under conditions of the pandemic, automakers across the world are using the crisis as an opportunity to restructure and to deepen the exploitation of workers. In response to the threat to private wealth caused by the temporary factory shutdowns earlier this year, implemented only after workers in North America and Europe carried out wildcat actions against the threat to their lives posed by the virus.

As the stock markets were bailed out by governments around the world, the global automakers began to force workers back into the factories as the pandemic still raged under threat of economic blackmail in order to extract profits to meet soaring debts.

The trade unions fully collaborated in this process, agreeing to totally inadequate safety protocols in order to get workers back onto the assembly lines.

Along with the French Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the United Auto Workers welcomed the merger of PSA and FCA, even though analysts expect it will slash jobs across Europe and North America when the companies consolidate vehicle-building platforms.

Voicing the UAW’s enthusiasm toward the FCA-PSA merger, UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada said she hoped it will “bring opportunities for growth that will benefit UAW members and our communities.”

In relation to the GM-Honda announcement, the UAW has done nothing to prepare opposition to the coming attacks. Last week, UAW Local 2250 in Wentzville, Missouri issued a web post titled, “Are You Ready To Build a Honda?” implying the UAW takes it as a given that the companies will merge to create electric vehicles and workers will have to deal with whatever cuts to their livelihoods the corporations deem necessary.

In October 2018 the UAW forced through a sellout contract after a determined 40-day strike by 48,000 GM workers. The deal closed a number of plants, including the historic assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. During the strike, the UAW doled out starvation rations of $250-275 per week to workers. After the contracts were forced through, GM then sold the Lordstown plant to a startup, Lordstown Motors, which at the time planned to utilize the factory to build electric trucks.

The company also planned the 2022 opening of a new battery plant next to the shuttered assembly plant, to be operated jointly with Korean company LG Chem under a separate UAW contract. The factory will only employ 1,100 workers, a quarter of the more than 4,000 who once worked at the Lordstown plant. The new workers will earn poverty-level wages of just $15-17 per hour. Earlier this year, GM announced that it will receive a 75 percent local tax abatement over 15 years for the building of the battery plant. These cost savings no doubt were used to entice Honda into signing onto the merger.

To resist the coming attacks, workers should place no faith in the corrupt scandal-ridden UAW.

Workers must take the opposition into their own hands. New organizations, rank-and-file committees, must be built in every plant by the workers themselves to break through the barriers of nationalism and forge international working class unity against the attacks of the corporate giants, who do not care which country workers live in but only how much surplus value can be extracted by cutting jobs and wages to the bone.

Mexican medical workers, facing highest death toll in the world, protest layoffs and lack of protective gear

Andrea Lobo

Amnesty International reported last week that Mexico has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths among medical personnel of any country in the world. As of September 4, a total of 1,410 health care workers have died from the virus and 104,590 have tested positive. These figures are a damning indictment of the criminal response to the pandemic by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The United States, Britain, and Brazil follow in the list of COVID-19 fatalities among medical workers, with 1,077, 649 and 634, respectively.

In Mexico, the health care sector constitutes about 2 percent of the total COVID-19 deaths and 17 percent of the cases, demonstrating in part a massive gap in testing for COVID-19 between medical professionals and the population in general. The government claims, however, to have tested only 283,000 medical workers, or one-third of the total, throughout the pandemic.

Mexican health care workers protesting against COVID-19 deaths (Credit: Facebook)

Numerous strikes, roadblocks and protests among nurses, doctors and other staff at hospitals have taken place since March, demanding above all personal protective equipment. The response by officials, as demonstrated by the appalling numbers of dead and infected, has been wholly inadequate.

Hospital administrators have been recorded telling workers that there is simply no equipment available, while the federal government has expressly dismissed their demands claiming that public medical workers who took leave got infected at similar rates. Many, however, kept working in the private sector, where they have also become infected in high numbers.

During a press conference last Thursday, José Luis Alomía, general director of epidemiology, had no response to the Amnesty International report, claiming that the government has taken all necessary measures to protect health care workers and adding evasively, “The comparison between countries on this matter is not viable since each one has its own model.”

Amid generalized outrage, the government has instead turned to firing workers who express opposition. In one of the numerous reports of firings, Expansión reported the case of Cristian Javier Erosa, who delivered food at a hospital in Quintana Roo. He was fired after “I demanded a written order that I had to enter the COVID area because they were not providing me with adequate protective gear.”

The trade unions have not only refused to wage any struggle to protect the lives of medical workers, but played a crucial role in the suppression of discontent.

A doctor in Mexico City wrote on September 5 that, “At the General Hospital in Mexico, the union encouraged [personnel on leave] not to come back throughout August, and did nothing to provide protective equipment or to replace temporarily the personnel on leave.”

Several groups with thousands of Mexican health care workers have been formed on social media to organize outside of the corrupt union bureaucracy. One of them, United Health Care Workers (UNTS), led a protest on September 1 in Mexico City that involved hundreds of employees from hospitals, along with workers from the Metro, the state company Liconsa, the Fire Department and the Mail Office.

At the demonstration, Rafael Soto Cruz, a nurse and spokesperson for the UNTS, exposed that he was fired for demanding PPE on the pretext that he “usurped the trade union’s functions.” He denounced trade union officials for “identifying the union dissidents and beginning to harass them, sanction them and fire them,” as cited by Infobae.

The UNTS released a statement on September 5 declaring, “Those unions that should have spoken out to defend workers did the abominable job of hiding the dead, silencing the voices making denunciations; there is no one more responsible than these parasites for being first in deaths globally.”

While being denied proper protective equipment, medical workers are faced with the overwhelming of hospitals by the raging pandemic. The World Health Organization warned Mexico specifically on July 10 that its reopening would “accelerate infections and possibly collapse the health care systems,” COVID-19 deaths have doubled since, to over 68,000.

Nonetheless, the López Obrador government continued its murderous reopening of factories in major but nonessential sectors such as auto, auto parts and electronics, caving to pressure by the Trump administration and North American transnationals. The other factor exacerbating the pandemic is the refusal by the ruling class to provide any aid to those laid off and those who depend upon the informal sector for their income.

This has forced a majority of Mexico’s impoverished workforce, which depends on informal street sales and services, to risk infection to earn a living. Within Mexico City, the three municipalities with greatest infections have among the highest numbers of people living in poverty. While outside of Mexico City, the next five states with the highest COVID-19 cases have higher informality rates than the national average, from 54 percent in Guanajuato to 71 percent in Puebla.

Meanwhile, Forbes Mexico reported last month that the country has 33 oligarchs with fortunes of more than $500 million. Last year, there were 3,790 people in Mexico with more than $30 million in net worth, among 8,040 in total across Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Wealth X report.

Even more wealth, which is all generated by the working class, has ended in the coffers of the financial oligarchies in the United States and Europe through the imperialist exploitation of the country’s cheap labor and natural resources.

Experts have made clear that containing the pandemic requires shutting down non-essential sectors, providing income for those suspended or laid off, appropriate staffing and protective equipment for medical and other essential workers, and expanding tests and contact tracing.

The response by the López Obrador government, however, has been driven not by an interest to protect the population, but by the capitalist imperatives of resuming the stream of profits for corporations and not impinging on the wealth of the super-rich.

It has slashed ministerial operating budgets by 75 percent during the pandemic, even affecting health care. The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), which manages most hospitals and clinics, has seen its expenditures fall 22 percent during the first six months of this year compared to 2019.

This has involved layoffs of doctors during the pandemic. On August 31, 50 doctors at rural hospitals in Chiapas were informed that they had been fired by the state government controlled by AMLO’s Morena party.

Any “wealth surcharge” in Latin America, wrote the Financial Times recently, would result in “capital flight” by foreign investors. Viridiana Ríos of the Wilson Center indicated to the newspaper that, regarding Mexico, “discussion has been stifled by the leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. … The political elites came to power under the umbrella of the economic elites and as a result have not been able to charge them enough tax.”

At his morning press conference Last Wednesday, López Obrador again rejected any increase in taxes on the wealthy in response to the crisis.

As in every other country, the response of the government to the pandemic has underscored the incompatibility between capitalism and the social needs of the working class, including free and quality health care.

The Morena administration’s indifference to the massive COVID-19 death toll among medical and other workers demonstrates that the only progressive response to the pandemic is the overthrow of capitalism and the taking of power by the working class to reorganize society on a socialist basis in Mexico and internationally.

Global coronavirus death projections point to policy of herd immunity being pursued with impunity

Benjamin Mateus

On September 4, the number of new cases of COVID-19 surpassed 300,000 globally for the first time. After a brief peak in mid-August, the seven-day running average is climbing again, with over 267,500 infections each day. There have been over 27 million cases since the start of the pandemic in December 2019, a period of nine months.

The first 10 million cases were reached on June 27 and the first 20 million on August 9. Cases are expected to exceed 30 million in the second half of this month, after which the number of new cases is set to increase its pace, according to the global projections made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based in Seattle, Washington.

According to Worldometer Dashboard, on September 6, 2020:

* Globally: total cases 27,234,299; total deaths 886,192

* Europe: total cases 3,797,637; total deaths 209,970

* North America (including Mexico and Central America): total cases 7,658,021; total deaths 280,295

* South America: total cases 6,688,579; total deaths 211,692

* Asia: total cases 7,755,652; total deaths 152,104, with India at the epicenter

* Africa: total cases 1,304,400; total deaths 31,332

* Oceania: total cases 29,289; total deaths 784

Based on IHME’s current global projections, by December 1, 2020, the cumulative number of deaths will exceed 1.92 million, an additional million victims over the next three months. By various regions, the figures are as follows:

* East Asia and Pacific: 131,736 deaths, with a peak of 4,820 deaths per day

* South Asia: 404,016 deaths, with daily deaths at 9,716

* Europe and Central Asia: 406,204 deaths, with 5,441 deaths per day peaking in the last week of December at 9,670 daily deaths

* Latin Americas and Caribbean islands: 478,124 deaths, with a peak of 1,600 daily deaths

* North America (the US and Canada): 339,647 deaths, with a peak of 3,137 daily deaths

* North Africa and the Middle East: 113,839 deaths, with an initial peak of 1,671 followed by a second surge mid-December

* Sub-Saharan Africa: 50,033 deaths, with a peak of 809 deaths per day

Daily deaths are projected to start climbing after October 1 and then rise sharply after November 1. By December 1, current projections for the daily number of deaths stand at 26,870. Hospital resources expected in use in December include 1.87 million hospital beds, 399,463 intensive care unit (ICU) beds and 340,307 ventilators. These projections are driven by dropping temperatures in the fall and winter season that drive people indoors, compounded by declining mask usage, which stands at around 60 percent, and declining social distancing measures.

India has become the epicenter of the pandemic as daily COVID-19 infection rates continue their ascent unabated. On September 6, the country recorded a single-day high of 91,723 new cases. With over 4.28 million cases, it is second only to the United States, with 6.48 million cases. Though India ranks third in number of deaths, this is most certainly a gross underestimation. Testing rates remain abysmally low, and most of the population that live in rural areas lack access to medical attention, making a diagnosis attributable to COVID-19 nearly impossible. On the other hand, more than half the population is under the age of 25, which is known to be a factor for improved outcomes.

With 634,000 cases and over 67,000 deaths, Mexico’s crude case fatality rate has been one of the highest, at above 10 percent. It is fourth in terms of deaths behind the United States, Brazil and India. Recent government statistics place the number of excess deaths from March to August from all causes at 122,765 more than previous years, indicating a gross underestimation of COVID-19 deaths. Excess mortality has been predominately among people between 45 to 65 years of age. Late last week, Hugo Lopez Gatell, a health official for the Mexican state, informed the press that they had run out of death certificates.

On Friday, France saw a spike in new cases reach close to 9,000, the largest daily increase since the beginning of the pandemic. As Bloomberg noted, the surge is arriving just as schools are preparing for the arrival of 12 million students. Yet, Macron’s government is pushing back against any future lockdown measures. Health Minister Olivier Veran, speaking on France’s BFM TV, a 24-hour rolling news and weather channel, said, “I can’t imagine a total re-confinement and the president doesn’t want to consider a general re-confinement.”

Across Europe, cases have been on the rise as lockdowns were eased and summer travels were permitted. Repeatedly, leaders of every country have cited the crippling economy and public fatigue as justification for not reviving future lockdowns or containment measures. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has even called the reopening of schools a “moral duty,” a necessary strategy for recovery from the pandemic. Behind these sentiments lies the policy of herd immunity working through political figures to force the population to accept as inevitable that which is preventable.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times Dr. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said of the growing number of cases throughout Europe, “Lockdown measures can bring case numbers low enough that testing and tracing can break chains of transmission. European countries have already taken a severe economic and social hit to contain COVID-19, but to finish the job and truly crunch the curve, they need to build up a massive diagnostic capacity to be able to run large, fast and accurate testing services. This is a difficult project but not impossible.”

NPR recently sat down with the head of IHME’s team, Chris Murray, as well as Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University and Kalipso Chalkidou of the Imperial College School of Public Health in London to discuss these horrific but possibly controversial figures.

Murray said that according to his team’s calculations, “When you look at the huge epidemics that unfolded in Argentina, despite considerable efforts at lockdowns, the big epidemics that occurred in Chile, the epidemics in Southern Brazil and South Africa and contrasted them with what was happening in the Northern Hemisphere, in places with similar social distancing mandates, where things were actually on average, improving—that’s where in the statistical analysis, we see a very strong correlation with seasonality.”

Dr. Jha said that the projections of 410,000 deaths in the US by January 1 are highly implausible. He explained, “We have gotten so much better at taking care of sick patients, I think mortality has probably fallen by about 50 percent.” Yet, Murray countered that his team found that death rates have failed to improve even after advancements in treatments and various therapies. Dr. Chalkidou added that many countries across the globe lack reliable health statistics, making determination of the cause of death impossible. “This means it’s likely that vast numbers of COVID-19 deaths are going uncounted. We also don’t have good data on comorbidities that increase people’s chances of dying of COVID-19.”

These chilling conversations and reports deserve thoughtfully consideration. They provide a disastrous prognosis that the near-future trajectory of the pandemic will have devastating consequences if immediate measures are not taken to stem the transmission of this contagion. Yet, massive political efforts are being employed to open schools and force society to return to pre-pandemic existence for the sake of the financial markets. That these startling figures do not assume the primary focus in current world events is criminally negligent and the hallmark of the criminality of the ruling elites.

Imperialist powers step up anti-Russia campaign over Navalny case and Belarus

Clara Weiss

The imperialist powers, with Germany taking the lead, continue to step up the anti-Russia campaign over the case of Alexei Navalny and the crisis in Belarus.

On Monday, the right-wing oppositionist Alexei Navalny awoke from his coma in the Charité in Berlin. Doctors said he was responsive.

Last week, the German government, based on an investigation in a Bundeswehr laboratory, claimed that it was “beyond any doubt” that Navalny had been poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent. German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has reportedly personally arranged for Navalny’s transfer to Germany, issued an ultimatum to the Kremlin to “answer serious questions” as to who may be behind the alleged poisoning. Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said that, while Berlin had no exact deadline for such a response, “we are not taking about months or until the end of the year.”

The German media has seized upon the case to escalate an aggressive campaign against the Putin regime and Russia. The Spiegel ran a story last week entitled, “It is time to hurt the man in the Kremlin.” Bourgeois media outlets are filled with calls for the EU and Germany to step up against Russia.

Increasingly, the campaign over the Navalny case is focusing on the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is about to be completed. Ever more outlets and politicians are calling for an end to the project, which has long been bitterly opposed by the US but involves major German and French energy companies.

On Saturday, the New York Times had published an aggressive opinion piece, calling for a “Navalny Act” by Congress and attacking Germany for its involvement in Nord Stream. The New York Times raged, “thanks to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dogged support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, Germany has become Putin’s greatest enabler in Europe. Merkel’s position that the European Union should keep separate economic and political accounts with Russia was never justifiable. Now it’s outrageous.”

German foreign minister Heiko Maas did not rule out freezing the project in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. On Monday, US president Donald Trump, who has threatened sanctions against European companies involved in the project, reiterated his call upon Germany to stop the project.

While the German government has aggressively demanded “answers” and an “investigation” from the Kremlin, it has, in fact, not provided any evidence for its own claims. Not a single toxicological report about Navalny has been released by Germany. Berlin has also not responded for days to a request by the Russian government for data on his case for further investigation and for legal assistance.

The toxin that the German government claims to have found in Navalny is from the same group of poisons that was allegedly found to have been used to poison the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, Britain, in 2018. The case of Navalny is at least as murky as the Skripal poisoning which has not been clarified to this day.

Nothing that is said by the media and governments can be taken at face value. One of the many unanswered questions is how Navalny could survive the attack with a nerve agent as strong as Novichok.

It is also unclear why only Navalny fell sick. The Novichok poison is so powerful that it usually has a strong impact on the environment, causing people who are in the immediate surroundings of the poisoned to also fall ill. In the case of the Skripal poisoning, one resident of Salisbury died after coming into contact with a perfume bottle that contained traces of Novichok and there was talk of evacuating and destroying entire buildings that had been contaminated.

However, not a single person that Navalny travelled with fell ill or showed traces of the poison.

Moreover, the Bundeswehr laboratory in Munich reportedly found the “traces” of Novichok on a water bottle from which Navalny allegedly drank after being poisoned. No one before had ever mentioned a water bottle in his possession, and his assistant had explicitly stressed at the beginning of the case that the only thing he consumed that day was a cup of tea at the Tomsk airport.

Lastly, even if Novichok was used, it does not conclusively point to Russian involvement. While developed by Soviet laboratories, the agent has long been produced internationally, including in Germany. Moscow continues to deny any involvement in the alleged poisoning of Navalny, and the speaker of the Russian Duma (parliament), Vyacheslav Volodin, has denounced the case as a “provocation.”

The campaign over Navalny is closely tied to the crisis in Belarus, where mass protests and strikes against Alexander Lukashenko, who claims to have won the August 9 presidential elections, have lasted for a month now. The EU is strongly supporting the anti-Lukashenko opposition around Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is now in exile in Lithuania. Navalny himself had been a prominent supporter of the opposition in Belarus and focused his political activities before his illness on discussing the crisis in the neighboring country.

Following an ever more aggressive intervention by the EU and US in the crisis, the Kremlin switched to openly backing Lukashenko two weeks ago. Since then, the EU has further stepped up its support for the opposition. On Friday, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya spoke at the UN Security Council, demanding that international observers be sent to Belarus. While Tikhanovskaya decried “collaboration with the regime” as signifying “support for violence and a staggering violation of human rights,” her opposition, in fact, still focuses on demanding a dialogue with the regime.

On Sunday, tens of thousands again protested in Minsk and other cities in the “march of unity” that had been called for by the opposition. However, the demonstrations were significantly smaller than the week before. Strikes have reportedly also begun to subside. Several leading oppositionists were arrested and their houses searched.

Alexander Yaroshuk, the head of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, which supports the pro-NATO opposition, told the EU parliament that the inauguration of Lukashenko in Minsk could lead to “mass bloodshed.” He called upon the EU to intervene in Belarus, otherwise a tragedy was “possible.”

On Monday, Maria Kolesnikova, a member of the opposition’s Coordination Council, was arrested in broad daylight and has since disappeared. Before her disappearance, Kolesnikova had announced that the opposition would initiate an international investigation into Lukashenko for endangering the “national security of Belarus” by turning to Russian president Vladimir Putin for help in a domestic crisis.

Another opposition politician, Valery Tsepkalo, stated that “we are working with international lawyers in the US and Europe on gathering everything necessary for one or multiple criminal investigations into Lukashenko that can be brought before an international court.”

Speaking to the German Bild Zeitung on Monday, the German foreign minister Heiko Maas demanded “clarity about the whereabouts [of Kolesnikova]” and the “immediate release of all political prisoners in Belarus. The ongoing arrests and repressions, including and above all against members of the coordination council, are unacceptable.”

The posturing of the imperialist powers as defenders of “democracy” and opponents of police repression in Belarus is the height of hypocrisy. The German government has overseen violent crackdowns on left-wing protests in its own country in recent years, while funding and building up neo-Nazi networks in the state, police and army.

The EU’s intervention in the crisis in Belarus and bolstering of the opposition is motivated above all by two concerns: driven by growing inter-imperialist antagonisms and class tensions at home, the imperialist powers seek to, first, bring the strike movement by the working class under control, and, second, to advance their own economic and geopolitical interests in Eastern Europe.

Trump Labor Day press conference: Empty boasts and fascistic threats

Patrick Martin

The Labor Day press conference held by President Trump at the White House was a spectacle of snarling ferocity, lies and appeals based on nationalistic frenzy. All that was missing to complete the picture of Trump as a cornered rat was a declaration that “you’ll never take me alive.”

The US president began by boasting of what he called the “spectacular” performance of the American economy, which he claimed was outperforming that of every other nation. “We are rebounding much more quickly from the pandemic,” he said. “We have added a record-setting 10.6 million jobs since May.”

Since the US economy lost 21.2 million jobs officially in March and April—plus another 10 million or more when contractors, the self-employed and other contingent workers are included—this Trump claim merely demonstrates the gulf between the real conditions of life for working people and the fortunes of the superrich, which have fully recovered and in some cases risen sharply because of the pandemic.

Hailing the creation of one-half or one-third the number of jobs wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic is like cheering the dispersion of flood waters after Hurricane Katrina: The damage has been done, and the wreckage stretches as far as the eye can see.

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference on the North Portico of the White House, Monday, Sept. 7, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

As always, Trump celebrated the stock market, which he said was “setting records. The NASDAQ has set 17 records already.” He pledged a new round of tax cuts to boost “growth,” modeled on those enacted in December 2017, which overwhelmingly favored the wealthy.

As he continued through the 45-minute session, Trump’s tone became more and more strident and his threats about the consequences of a Democratic victory November 3 more apocalyptic.

He warned Wall Street, “Joe Biden and radical socialist Democrats would immediately collapse the economy. If they get in, you will have a crash the likes of which you have never seen before.”

Actually, however, both the stock exchange and the major banks are favoring the Democrats with the lion’s share of their campaign funds, in part as insurance because they see the Democrats as more likely to win, in part because the financial elites view the present occupant of the White House as a spent force who is provoking increasing popular opposition that endangers the profit system as a whole.

Trump denounced any suggestion that his administration was timing the rollout of a new vaccine for electoral purposes, although he referred several times to the likelihood of doing so in October or “before that special date” of November 3. No serious scientist believes that a vaccine will be safe to distribute in less than two months’ time.

But according to Trump, “Biden wants to surrender our country to the virus. He wants to surrender our families to the violent left-wing mob, and he wants to surrender our jobs to China.”

Throughout his presentation, Trump sought to identify the Democratic candidate with the Chinese government, declaring that Biden had supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the shipping of “millions of jobs” from the United States to China, and was guilty of what he called “economic treachery.” He declared, “If Biden wins, China wins, because China will own this country.”

Trump strongly suggested that if reelected in November he will act on his frequent claims that China deliberately unleashed the COVID-19 virus in order to target the United States. “I’m not happy at all,” he said, referring to Beijing. “Frankly, I don’t want to set the world, necessarily, to thinking too much about it right now.”

He said that his strategy towards China was “decoupling” the US and Chinese economies, currently tightly interlinked. He concluded ominously, “We will hold China accountable for allowing the virus to spread around the world.”

While hinting at mounting economic and military conflict with China, Trump denounced his own generals and military planners as warmongers and sought to portray himself as opposed to “endless wars.”

After noting, accurately enough, that the Obama-Biden administration, among others, had “sent our youth to fight in these crazy wars,” he continued, “I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs, who make the planes, and make everything else stay happy.”

This is a statement which has no parallel in modern American history and reflects the deepening crisis in the White House. Trump clearly resents the political damage inflicted by the recent report in the Atlantic magazine about his disparaging references to US war dead as “losers” and “chumps,” and he blames the Pentagon, both for the original leaks to the media,and for the ongoing refusal of the military brass to come to the defense of the “commander-in-chief” over this issue.

Throughout the press conference, Trump combined nationalistic denunciations of China and the Democratic Party with the claim that he was defending “American jobs” against what he called, using the language of his fascistic former counselor, Steven Bannon, “one coldhearted globalist betrayal after another.” Citing the occasion of Labor Day, he reiterated his opposition to trade agreements and doubled down on the economic nationalist perspective he shares with the American trade unions.

In taking questions from the media, Trump vilified reporters who were wearing masks, claiming they could not be understood. A reporter from his favored ultraright outlet, One America News, asked a question about the popular protests against police violence, framed in such a way that Trump was invited to deliver a law-and-order rant. He duly obliged.

It is particularly significant that twice in the course of this response, Trump spoke of the necessity for “retribution” against protesters, without ever referring to “justice.” He hailed the shooting death of antipolice protester Michael Reinoehl, effectively confirming that he had given the order to the US Marshal service to kill him.

“US Marshals went in, and they were not playing games,” Trump said. “If somebody is breaking the law, there has got to be a form of retribution.”

This is not a call for the operation of the legal system—arrest, trial, conviction and punishment—but rather summary execution of anyone targeted by the Trump administration and the fascist right.

Significantly, Trump proceeded directly from hailing the police killing of Reinoehl to threatening to imprison his Democratic opponents, including Biden and former President Obama. “They spied on my campaign,” he claimed, adding they should “have been in jail for 50-year terms for treason and other things.”

He concluded with a complaint that only reveals his own sense of the wide popular hatred of his government. The Democrats were “dirty fighters,” he said. “They are just sending 80 million ballots all over the country, 80 million ballots, non-requested, I call them unsolicited. That’s going to be the dirtiest fight of them all.”

With this language, the president is clearly indicating that he does not intend to accept a repudiation at the polls. He is laying the groundwork for a preemptive intervention against such an outcome by claiming that the massive number of mail ballots—cast because millions are concerned about the risk of coronavirus—is the result of vote fraud by his political opponents.

Trump is preparing to defy the outcome of the election and appeal to his armed ultraright supporters, the police and sections of the military to retain his grip on power.