Health minister warns: Ukraine on the verge of coronavirus “catastrophe”

Jason Melanovski

Ukraine is on the verge of a coronavirus “catastrophe,” according to its health minister. The country continues to report daily records of new infections with cases reaching over 10,000 for the first time this month since the start of the pandemic.

Speaking to parliament last week, health minister Maksym Stepanov warned that “the situation quickly turns from difficult to catastrophic. We need to prepare for the inevitable—it is impossible to easily pass the second wave.”

As cases have spiked in recent months, the Eastern European country of approximately 40 million has been forced to reintroduce limited lockdown measures that were eased in May after the initial rush of COVID-19 cases ebbed last spring.

Cases throughout the country have been steadily rising since September. In October, Stepanov stated that the government would enforce stricter lockdown measures if new cases rose to 11,000–15,000. According to Stepanov, Ukraine’s medical system would simply be unable to cope with a daily rate of 20,000 new infections, a rate it is quickly approaching as temperatures drop and people are forced to spend more time indoors.

Image shared by a patient in Kharkov with the Kupiansk Novosti, source: Telegram channel of Kupiansk Novosti

Indicative of the country’s worsening state of COVID-19 infections, President Volodomyr Zelensky announced on Monday that he himself had tested positive for the virus and would be entering self-isolation. Zelensky’s wife spent several weeks in the hospital last June after contracting the virus.

Despite the deaths of nearly 9,000 Ukrainian citizens and a country on the verge of a medical “catastrophe,” Zelensky has publicly displayed an unserious attitude towards the pandemic. In June, he told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that he had considered purposely contracting the virus just to prove to people “it’s not the plague.”

While the millionaire former television star Zelensky will undoubtedly receive the best medical care available, contracting the virus is deadly serious for the vast majority of working class Ukrainians who are forced to seek treatment from the country’s impoverished medical system.

Speaking to Bloomberg News last week, Pavlo Kovtonyuk, the head of the health care economics department at the Kyiv School of Economics, reported that despite being aware that the country may be hit with an influx of new cases come fall, little preparation had been carried out by the Zelensky government. “There was very little preparation to set up hospitals, equipment and to provide training for medical personnel ahead of the autumn wave,” Kovtonyuk noted. He added, “slow test processing makes it difficult to trace contacts and to properly isolate infected people.”

To make matters worse, Bloomberg reported that just 13 percent of the country’s $2.3 billion coronavirus fund went to the Health Ministry for hospital equipment, testing and ventilators, while more than four times that was used for road construction and maintenance.

Image shared by a patient in Kharkov with the Kupiansk Novosti, source: Telegram channel of Kupiansk Novosti

As a result of the influx of newly infected COVID-19 patients into an unprepared medical system, the nation’s hospital capacity has already reached 67.2 percent and there are currently no regions remaining in the country where capacity is below 50 percent.

With infection rates climbing, Ukrainian medical workers are already working under highly stressful conditions with limited resources.

This week, photos taken by a COVID-19 patient being treated for the virus near the eastern city of Kharkiv circulated on social media, highlighting the horrid conditions of Ukrainian hospitals. According to the patient who sent the photos by cell phone to Kupiansk News, “… a nurse asked me for a syringe, because an old lady was in the next room and she injected her with the same syringe for 5 days until the needle bent. All because the old lady didn’t have money for new syringes. The nurses received 6,000 syringes a month and there were not enough of them. We had one nurse for 60 people.”

A large number of Ukrainian hospitals in rural areas have been forced to close in recent years due to the austerity measures introduced since the 2014 US-backed coup. As a result of the pro-market reforms first introduced by the former American-born health minister Ulyana Suprun, the country now finds itself lacking both hospitals and medical workers to deal with the pandemic.

Despite the rapidly worsening situation, the Ukrainian government has hesitated to enforce stricter measures so as not to endanger the country’s worsening economy. On Wednesday, the government approved a nationwide quarantine that would only be effective on the weekend and will last until the end of the year.

In addition to the deteriorating medical situation, the pandemic has further impoverished what is already Europe’s poorest country.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the pandemic is pushing the country into a deep recession and may force over 9 million Ukrainians into poverty. The report also noted that “more than 80 percent of households have lost income, and over 40 percent have at least one family member who has lost a job since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Workers Party pushes back-to-school campaign amid warnings of second COVID-19 wave in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

Workers Party (PT) and Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) state governments in Brazil’s Northeast region are showing once again that they have no significant differences with the essential response to the coronavirus pandemic by fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the rest of the right-wing parties in Brazil: implementing a de facto herd immunity policy.

In October, Ceará’s deputy state governor, Izolda Cela of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), pointed to a series of coronavirus-related issues in returning to school (means of transporting students, staffing, school infrastructure). She went on to state that the decision for the gradual reopening of the private schools was correct because the simultaneous reopening of the public school system could have provoked “a rigorous demand for health care,” effectively admitting the surge in cases and deaths that would follow the return.

Students in a socio-educational center in the state of Ceará, Brazil (Credit: George Braga, SEDUC Ceará)

On October 1, the PT state governor, Camilo Santana, announced that the offer of in-person classes would be increased in the metropolitan region of Ceará’s capital, Fortaleza, which is the most populous center of Brazil’s Northeast.

Ceará’s state government had already authorized in-person classes in the 44 municipalities of the metropolitan region starting in September. In the following month, it authorized reopening for all middle school students with reduced capacity (35 to 50 percent), all senior high school classrooms (35 percent) and an increase in capacity of preschool to 75 percent. In-person teaching was also re-started for 739 inmates in socio-educational centers and prisons. Local public schools in the capital of Fortaleza had already been declared closed until 2021, but the city authorized the reopening of private schools for middle school students last week.

As of Tuesday, just in Fortaleza, 27 schools had already reported confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases to the Ceará Health Department (Sesa). Sesa did not disclose the numbers in each school and declared that no school had been closed by the state Health Surveillance after the reports of contagion.

In the state of Piauí, Governor Wellington Dias of the PT announced the return of high school seniors in September, postponing the return of the other students until 2021.

In the state of Bahia, governed by Rui Costa, also of the PT, the state health secretary declared that the return to classes for higher education would take place on Nov. 3, and for high schools two weeks later. Costa said at a press conference: “We are monitoring and evaluating this [return] along with the decision of other states. Today, we are closer ... to the return to schools.” Even as he admitted that the low rate of cases is nothing but “an assumption,” he affirmed that the drop in the number of deaths would allow the reopening “within [safety] protocols.”

Maranhão’s state governor, Flávio Dino of the PCdoB, had declared a return to school for July, at the height of the wave of cases and deaths in Brazil, following the same policy as right-wing state governments. In the face of enormous opposition from teachers and parents, with positive tests of private school students being reported, the state government canceled the return to classes in the state’s public school system. In October, Dino promoted the policy of herd immunity, declaring that he would conduct a serological inquiry to verify the “collective immunity” of the population.

The lie of an alleged concern for workers during the pandemic in the states governed by the PT and PcdoB, supposedly counterposing support for science to the herd immunity policies of the federal government of Jair Bolsonaro, was completely exposed by the admission—on the same day that the health secretary of Bahia announced a return to classes—that there existed a state of public calamity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Ceará and Bahia.

The back-to-school campaign is driven by the capitalists’ need to force workers back into workplaces. Fortaleza had registered a fall of 84.5 percent in the monthly enrollment of beginners in the state school system between March and October. In São Paulo, the number of public student school enrollments between January and September fell by 94 percent compared to last year, underlining a trend in school dropout rates. In the first half of the year, a very high number of dropouts was recorded, connected to financial pressures on poor families, with school-age family members sent out to work to make up for the loss of income during the pandemic.

The Northeast is one of the regions most affected by poverty and social inequality. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 42 percent of people living in Ceará are below the poverty line, classified as those living on between US$36 and US$105 per month. The entire region suffers from similar poverty rates, with 53 percent living under these conditions in the state of Maranhão, the highest number in the Northeast. In 2017, more than a third of the entire Brazilian population did not have access to sewage systems and the figure was a staggering 91.7 percent for the population of Piauí.

Ceará faces one of the most devastating impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. It is the state with the third highest number of deaths, despite being eighth in terms of population, with 8.843 million inhabitants. It had recorded 9,416 deaths as of Tuesday. This corresponds to a mortality rate of 103.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest in the country.

In some regions of Ceará, the weekly average for new cases increased by more than 50 percent during the month of October, while deaths increased more than 30 percent. Last Saturday, the IntegraSUS system registered for the first time in four months more than a thousand cases per week in Fortaleza.

The ruling elite is implementing the same murderous policies throughout the country. At the end of last month, Infogripe, an Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) group, stated that 10 Brazilian capitals show signs that the spread of the virus is once again on the rise. So far, Brazil has registered roughly 5.8 million confirmed cases and 165,000 COVID-19 deaths, trailing only the United States in fatalities.

In São Paulo’s capital, a 48.7 percent increase in hospitalizations was reported over the past two weeks. The state governor, João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), has been touting an early vaccine since the middle of the year for political gain. He was accompanied by the director of the state Coronavirus Contingency Center, João Medina at a press conference on Monday, where Medina said: “There wasn’t a real lockdown during the first wave and there shouldn’t be one in this second moment, because the increase in the number of cases shouldn’t be sufficient to saturate the health system the way it’s organized now.”

On October 22, the Scientific Committee of the Northeast Consortium issued an alert about the possibility of the second wave of COVID-19 reaching the region in the next few months. In the report, the committee points to the advent of the region’s high season, with the arrival of tourists from Europe, and this month’s municipal elections as major factors threatening an increase in cases and deaths. The reopenings and the precarious conditions faced by the majority create the perfect conditions for a new and even more deadly surge.

The serious risks posed by a second wave did not prevent the Brazilian educators’ trade union from covering up for Governor Camilo Santana’s policy in Ceará, while suppressing and diverting teachers’ opposition. Following the same line as unions throughout the country, the APEOC (Union of Teachers and Servants of Education and Culture of the State and Municipalities of Ceará), linked to the PT-controlled CUT union federation, filed a public civil action requesting that in-person learning remain suspended for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, the union is organizing a series of meetings for this year’s wage negotiations, in which they are using the slogan “Enough Bolsonaro/Do it Camilo.”

Last week, the APEOC declared that it would send Santana a proposal for the end of the school year calendar, at the same time that it declared its opposition to the policy of reopening schools being carried forward by the governor.

The following day, the union’s president, Reginaldo Pinheiro, met with Fortaleza’s 2020 mayoral candidates to announce the inauguration of an online education platform. During the meeting, he expressed the union’s readiness to promote hybrid education as a means to reduce costs and attract private investments. He said that “Considering all this reality of revenue retraction, the moment is urgent. In the document, we point out a concern with the year 2021, which must first reconcile the remote and in-person activities, and for that it must have more investment and security for the teachers.”

The trade union’s legal maneuvers and empty statements of opposition, made at the same time that it negotiates with the government, expose the deceptive policy of APEOC and of the unions throughout Brazil, which are carrying out similar policies.

The return-to-school campaign faces huge opposition from educators and families. Mobilizing this opposition to prevent a catastrophic resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic requires a break with the trade unions and the PT and other parties that support the ruling elite’s murderous policies. Teachers should form rank-and-file committees, in alliance with workers across Brazil and internationally, to demand the shutdown of in-person learning and all non-essential production—with full income compensation—and to organize a struggle against the capitalist system to place the defense of life over the drive for profit.

The mental health of young adults is being ravaged by the pandemic—the suffering needs to stop

Kate Randall

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, medical experts have predicted that the resulting social isolation and economic stress would negatively impact mental health. Many months into the pandemic, with a surge in COVID-19 cases affecting virtually every US state as a result of the murderous “herd immunity” strategy pursued by the ruling elite, a new study shows that there is a veritable tsunami of depression flooding over the nation’s young adult population.

This age group, part of Gen Z, have seen their lives implode in 2020. They have missed high school and college graduations, had their schools shut down or been forced into dangerous conditions in them, have been isolated from their friends and robbed of social interaction. They have lost jobs, had their pay cut, or been forced to work in unsafe conditions in restaurants, retail, the service industry and factories.

A man walks past a mural in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020 (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Many of those living with their parents before the pandemic are even less likely now to be able to move out. Those living on their own have seen the excitement of having their own place for the first time turn into numbing isolation. American families are facing devastating poverty due to lost jobs and hours, translating into hunger, poverty and eviction.

Parents with young children, or those living with grandparents, must live in fear of passing the deadly contagion on to them. Like all of the population, they have seen relatives and friends suffer through COVID-19 illness and even death. Contrary to the lies spread by the Trump administration and quack scientists, young people can and do contract the coronavirus and face horrible consequences and death. If they do survive, they may suffer long-term health consequences.

The nationwide survey of young Americans, ages 18-24, examined depressive symptoms among these young adults, including thoughts of suicide, generalized anxiety and disruption in sleep. It was conducted and authored by researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University/Harvard Medical School, Rutgers University and Northwestern University and published by the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States.

Overall, across four national waves (in late May, late June, late August and mid-October), researchers found alarming rates of depression, with nearly half of this young adult population—47.3 percent—showing at least moderate depressive symptoms in October, the highest level since June. This is close to 10 times the pre-pandemic rate.

The survey also examined the proportion of respondents who described at least occasional thoughts of being better off dead, or of harming themselves during the two weeks prior to taking the survey. As with depression, such suicidal and self-harm symptoms have skyrocketed among young adults, reaching 32.2 percent in May, and 36.9 percent in October, a more than tenfold increase over an epidemiologic study from 2013-2014, which found 3.4 percent reporting such thoughts.

These staggering figures show that an entire generation of young people are being emotionally ravaged by a pandemic which has unnecessarily claimed the lives of nearly a quarter-million Americans and threatens to become even more deadly in the coming months. Government authorities at all levels have pursued a policy of criminal neglect of the physical and mental health of the population.

In October, survey respondents were asked to identify particular consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic that might have impacted them or their households. The most commonly reported consequence was closure of school or university (51 percent), followed by working from home (41 percent), a pay cut (27 percent), losing employment (26 percent), inability to make rent/mortgage payments (16 percent), and stopping/reducing work to take care of children (15 percent).

The survey findings show the comparative effects of these consequences of the pandemic on mental health. They show that social isolation, economic pressures and the stress on parents while working from home and tending to their children’s remote learning have been key factors in the explosion of mental health problems among young adults.

The largest increase in depressive symptoms was observed among those whose homes were or potentially were impacted (inability to pay rent or mortgage, eviction), with more than 60 percent of these respondents reporting moderate rates of depression. Close to 50 percent of this group also reported suicidal thoughts. Close to 70 percent of those facing eviction reported either suicidal thoughts or generalized anxiety symptoms.

Although there are slight variations among demographic groups, no geographical region, gender, ethnicity, or education level has been spared in this mental health crisis among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Interestingly, although there were disparities in moderate depressive symptoms among young adults by region in June, by October the symptoms were similar in the US Northeast, South and West. This is an indication that all regions of the country are facing similar challenges as the pandemic surges.

Young women showed slightly higher levels of depressive symptoms than men, with higher levels of generalized anxiety, mild and moderate depression and disrupted sleep. Young Asians saw the highest levels generalized anxiety, mild and moderate anxiety and suicidality compared to whites, blacks and Latinos.

While those without college reported slightly higher levels of mental health symptoms compared with those with some college, the difference was not significant.

The mental health impact of the pandemic on not only young adults, but the population as a whole, has been disregarded by both the Trump administration and President-elect Joe Biden. Neither Trump nor Biden has provided any roadmap for confronting any health aspect of the pandemic.

Among younger children, state and local authorities are pushing the reopening of schools so their parents can get back to work. At the university level, they are working to keep campuses open and to maintain the operation of the lucrative college sports industry.

The Trump administration, along with many governors—both Democratic and Republican—have pushed for opening schools and keeping them open with the justification that this is in the best interests of the mental health of youth. Such arguments should be rejected with contempt.

The pandemic has imposed tremendous social and economic hardships on the American population, but much of these effects could be alleviated or lessened with an infusion of government funds and programs. Mental health services have been slashed to the bone under both Democratic and Republican administrations. At a time when these services are needed more than ever, there is no proposal to revive them to provide the mental health care so desperately needed.

Non-profit suicide and mental health hotlines are inadequate substitutes for a comprehensive social program to fund mental health services to assist families that are struggling with educating their children at home, paying their rent and utilities, and buying groceries.

While a virulent virus will inevitably create physical and mental health challenges, the ruling elite in America has allowed it to run rampant as it seeks to keep schools open while forcing workers into dangerously unsafe factories.

In their young lives, 18- to 24-year-olds have seen an unending explosion military aggression of US imperialism—from the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq to Syria and Yemen, to name just a few. Now they are seeing at home how an invisible virus is being allowed to unleash its wrath under conditions where the scientific and social resources are available to fight it, but the profit-drive of the ruling class demands that the population suffer.

The mental health crisis created by the malign neglect and homicidal policies of the ruling elite can only be confronted by the organization of the working class, independent of the two big business parties and the trade unions that defend and accept their murderous back-to-school and back-to-work policies. Along with developing a vaccine and treatments for the coronavirus, the scientific advances in treating mental health must be marshaled, under the guidance of the working class, to assist those suffering under the weight of the pandemic.

European governments seize upon terrorist attacks in France and Vienna to build a police state

Johannes Stern

European governments are responding to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, Dresden and Vienna by adopting the political agenda of the far right. Under the pretext of the “war on terror,” EU leaders and European leaders on Tuesday agreed on a massive expansion of “Fortress Europe,” the de facto abolition of the right of asylum, and the creation of what amounts to a Europe-wide police state.

“The work at government level is aimed at bringing our various services and authorities into line and better coordinating our efforts to fight terrorism, radicalisation with many targeted measures,” declared French President Emmanuel Macron, at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and former German Defence Minister.

French President Emmanuel Macron by the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty in the courtyard of the Sorbonne university, Oct. 21, 2020 in Paris (AP Photo/Francois Mori, Pool)

“The task now is to implement these measures consistently, for example the interoperability of databases, the linking of our databases and the cooperation of our security services also at the external borders.” Another topic “we discussed was the determination with which we want to combat terrorist propaganda and hate speech on the internet,” Macron added. “We are working to ensure that in the coming weeks a regulation on the removal and deletion of terrorist content within one hour is adopted.”

“We must also work on a reform of the Schengen rules,” Macron said. “This means that we must strengthen and better defend the external borders of the European Union and that we must better control and implement the functioning of the Schengen rules … I hope that we will soon be able to establish a real Security Council.”

Merkel also pleaded for a strengthening of Europe’s external borders and stepped-up censorship, stressing that “the German Presidency of the Council still wanted to finalise the regulation on preventing the distribution of terrorist content on the internet.” She boasted: “We have recently given our security authorities in Germany new opportunities” for monitoring “messenger services [such as Telegram] and surveillance.”

Von der Leyen took the same line, announcing that the EU Commission’s 2018 proposal to prevent terrorist content online “will now be finalised in the Council and Parliament trialogue.” She said it was important to “focus on the speed of deleting such terrorist content. It is crucial to be fast.” This will also involve “giving greater responsibility to the major Internet platforms in the fight against illegal and harmful online content.” To this end, the so-called Digital Services Act will be “presented in a few weeks’ time.”

It is clear what this means. Under the guise of the fight against “terrorist content,” the censorship of left-wing content and websites in particular will be expanded. Only on October 28, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted at a hearing before the US Senate that Google’s search engine censors the World Socialist Web Site.

The new directive will oblige internet giants such as YouTube and Facebook, which work closely with the secret services and governments and already censor left-wing and progressive content on a massive scale, to delete “harmful” articles, videos or other postings even faster.

In order to justify the construction of a European police state, the ruling class is seizing upon the horrific terrorist attacks of recent weeks and fueling fears of a continuing terrorist threat.

“We have a constant danger among us. We have thousands of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ who either survived the fighting in Syria, in Iraq for the IS and returned or who did not get through at all because they were stopped somewhere when they left,” warned the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. He therefore called for a “more robust approach to the threats throughout Europe.” If we want to “protect the freedoms of all, we have to restrict the freedom of these people.”

What Kurz concealed was that European governments are in many ways responsible for the terrible terrorist attacks of recent weeks. The thousands of “foreign terrorist fighters” did not fall from the sky, but were used by the imperialist powers and their reactionary regional allies—above all Saudi Arabia—as shock troops in the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.

Almost all the assassins of the major terrorist attacks in recent years were known to the security authorities: Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016, the Kouachi brothers who stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie He bdo in early 2015, and also Kujtim Fejzulai, the assassin in Vienna.

Kurz’s assertion that European governments are concerned with “protecting freedom” is a blatant lie. In fact, the policies of the ruling class do not protect freedom and life, but bring oppression and death. Due to the lethal “herd immunity” strategy, over 300,000 people have died in Europe alone since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In previous years, tens of millions of people had already been killed, injured or made refugees in the EU-backed neo-colonial wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. Tens of thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. Within Europe, the ruling class is cultivating and using extreme right-wing and fascist forces to intimidate and suppress the growing opposition of the working class and youth.

The latest police-state measures are part of this strategy. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the advanced economic, social and political crisis of the capitalist system. The ruling class feels it is sitting on a social and political powder keg. In recent days and weeks, teachers and students in Greece, Poland and France have protested against the unsafe reopening of schools.

These protests are only an anticipation of massive working-class struggles that will be directed against the entire capitalist system, including in the US. There, the Democrats not only play down the coup plans by President Donald Trump, who seeks to overturn the election results and establish a fascistic dictatorship. They themselves appeal to the military and the state apparatus out of fear of a revolutionary development of the working class.

The same fear is also driving the nominally left-wing bourgeois parties on this side of the Atlantic. In Germany, the Greens and the Left Party, which articulate the interests of affluent sections of the middle classes, stand at the forefront of a sharp shift of the entire political establishment to the right.

Last weekend, excerpts from a so-called “eleven-point action plan” drawn up by Green Party leader Robert Habeck and others became known. Both in terms of its form and content, the paper could have also been drawn up by the right-wing extremist AfD. According to the paper, so-called Islamist “Gefährder” (potential offenders) must be “consistently and closely monitored”. For that, more police and secret service agents are needed.

The Greens attack the grand coalition and its notoriously right-wing Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) from the right. They demand that arrest warrants against “Islamist perpetrators” be executed more consistently and that deportations be organized more quickly.

At the European level, according to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Greens demand the establishment of “a European Criminal Police Office with its own investigative teams, a uniform definition of the term ‘Gefährder’ and more cross-border cooperation between national security authorities.”

This is a blueprint for the creation of a pan-European police state where nobody is safe. If one takes the recent tightening of the Berlin police law by the “Red-Red-Green” (SPD-Left Party-Green) Senate majority, any person who might be willing and seems able to commit a terrorist crime can be classified as a “Gefährder.” This means that anyone can be classified as a “Gefährder” on the basis of a mere presumption and thus prosecuted by the security authorities.

The Left Party leadership is also calling for a strong state, combining this with anti-Islamic agitation. In a commentary for the right-wing Springer newspaper Die Welt, Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of the Left Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag (German parliament), called for an end to “ambiguity and inaction” and a “clear reaction of a well-fortified democracy.”

By this Bartsch obviously understands the oppression of Muslims—among other things, he pleads for a headscarf ban “in day-care centers and primary schools”—and the criminalisation of any opposition to racism and the police state.

“It was shocking that demonstrations took place in this country after the attacks in France—against the French President,” he wrote angrily in Die Welt.

Bartsch could hardly make it clearer where he and the Left Party stand on the class struggle. Protests against the hated “President of the Rich” Macron—who praised Nazi collaborationist Philippe Pétain as a hero and has ordered the suppression of the “yellow vest” protests—are just as taboo for the former Stalinist state party of East Germany as protests against police violence.

In early June, the Red-Red-Green senate in Berlin organized police violence against peaceful demonstrators protesting against the police murder of George Floyd in the USA. At the time Bartsch repeatedly praised the police forces, which are permeated by right-wing extremist networks, and declared that “the police do not deserve less, but rather more social recognition and personnel, especially on the streets.”

Immigrant women who accused ICE doctor of forced sterilization deported from the United States

Kevin Martinez

The Trump administration has deported multiple women who complained they were forcibly sterilized by a Georgia gynecologist while held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention camp.

Already six former patients who alleged mistreatment by Dr. Mahendra Amin have been forced out of the country. Amin is accused of operating on immigrant women without their consent and performing medically unnecessary procedures which resulted in some women unable to have children. Another seven women from the Irwin Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia who spoke out also face deportation according to their lawyers.

Immigrants seeking asylum hold hands as they leave a cafeteria at the ICE South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas on August 23, 2019 (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

One of the women who spoke to federal investigators was told only hours later by ICE that the hold on her deportation had been removed and that her removal was “imminent.” Another woman described being taken to a rural Georgia airport and made to sign deportation papers, only to be brought back to the jail as her lawyers file a lawsuit in federal court.

All of the women described operations by Amin that worsened their pain without being given any non-surgical alternative. The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general have opened investigations.

While Amin is no longer treating women at the Irwin County Detention Center, his lawyer, Scott Grubman denied any wrongdoing on the doctor’s part saying he was a “highly respected physician who has dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk, underserved population in rural Georgia.”

Immigrant advocates have warned that the deportations of the women, often to unsafe countries, will hamper the investigation into not only Amin but also ICE. Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia University law professor who is defending several of the women told the Associated Press (AP), “ICE [is] destroying the evidence needed for this investigation.”

In a statement, ICE denied that the deportations had anything to do with the investigations of Amin, while the Justice Department refused to comment. Grubman also did not say whether Amin was talking to investigators.

One of the women, Mbeti Ndonga, 37, was taken to Amin last year after she complained of abdominal pain and excessive vaginal bleeding. Instead of being given a treatment that was ordered by her previous doctor, Amin insisted that they operate.

Ndonga told AP, “He was adamant and said I must have surgery.” After the procedure, she was told she would never be able to have children and still suffers bleeding and pain.

She spoke twice to government investigators saying, “I told them that I was abused, tortured, dehumanized.” Hours after her interview last week, Ndonga was told that ICE had lifted the hold on her deportation and she could be sent back to Kenya at any time.

Her lawyer, Mukherjee said, “Mbeti’s fear in answering the investigators’ questions was that it would make her immigration case worse. And within hours of the interview, her worst fears were realized.”

Another woman who asked to be identified only be first name Yanira, because she fears being targeted by criminal gangs if she is deported to Mexico, was also abused by Amin. She said that in February he requested estrogen patches to treat hot flashes, following a hysterectomy by another doctor in 2014.

Amin told her he would perform a vaginal ultrasound and a Pap smear, a test for cancer. The procedures caused her intense pain and were performed with no lubrication causing Yanira to have trouble sitting for a week.

She told AP, “We are humans. We are women. We have feelings. Just because we are detained doesn’t mean we should be treated like animals.”

Yanira’s attorneys said that she wanted to talk to government investigators last Thursday about Amin. On Monday, she was taken to an airport to be deported only to be stopped by another ICE agent who said she was no longer being deported because her lawyers had intervened.

The Irwin County Detention Center is run by the private company, LaSalle Correction. News of the medical malpractice spread after a whistleblower complaint was filed on behalf of nurse Dawn Wooten who worked at the jail until July.

Wooten had dubbed the physician “the uterus collector” because of the multiple surgeries he performed on female detainees. The doctor was later identified as Amin, who had previously been taken to court for filing false Medicaid claims. Amin was accused by the government of charging for obstetric ultrasounds that were not necessary. The case was ultimately settled out of court for over half a million dollars without Amin admitting culpability.

Many of the women interviewed by AP and The Intercept spoke of their fear of Amin who was known for his “rough treatment” and feared losing their reproductive systems if they were seen by him. Amin was accused of performing unnecessary surgeries without women’s consent and would get angry if they asked questions. No interpreters were ever present and they were “unclear about the necessity or purpose of the proposed treatment.”

Amin’s case recalls the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. Mengele performed sadistic experiments on live prisoners and eventually escaped capture at the end of the war to live comfortably in South America thanks to the clandestine “rat lines” set up by the CIA and the Catholic Church to help ex-Nazis escape justice.

The revelations of forced sterilizations of immigrants in ICE custody should serve as a stark

reminder that fascist violence is alive and well in the detention camps set up by the Obama administration and handed over to the Trump administration all across America.

Over 300,000 coronavirus deaths in Europe: Capitalism’s crime against humanity

Will Morrow

This week, as the coronavirus continued to surge out of control, Europe marked the grim milestone of more than 300,000 COVID-19 deaths.

Virtually every European country now faces a resurgence of the virus that threatens once again to overwhelm healthcare systems and kill hundreds of thousands. In Italy, the country first hardest hit when the virus reached the continent, identical scenes to those that occurred just eight months ago are playing out. Yesterday, another 636 people died, up from 623 the day before and the highest number since April. The total number of infections in the country surpassed one million on Tuesday, and the total number of dead is now 43,589.

The country’s hospital system is on the verge of collapse. By Wednesday, coronavirus patients made up more than 50 percent of patients in nine out of 21 provinces, and had reached 75 percent in Lombardy, 92 percent in Piedmont and 99 percent in South Tyrol. Ambulances are queuing up outside hospitals across the country due to a lack of available beds.

Unlike during the first wave, when the pandemic was largely confined to the north, the virus has already overwhelmed a number of regions in the poorer south. In Naples, a 78-year-old woman waited for 26 hours in an ambulance before being admitted to a hospital this week. A video was widely shared online reportedly showing a patient lying dead in a bathroom of a hospital ward. Over the weekend, nurses at Naples’ Catugno hospital provided oxygen treatment to patients sitting in their cars.

“We are very close to not keeping up. I cannot say when we will reach the limit, but that day is not far off,” Dr Luca Cabrini, who runs the intensive care ward at Varese’s Circolo Hospital, told the Associated Press. Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, warned that his city and the rest of Sicily were at risk of an “announced massacre.”

In France, 425 people have died in the last 24 hours. More than 10,000 have died since the start of October, and 42,960 since the beginning of the pandemic. The 551 deaths on Monday were the most in a single day since the peak of 613 on April 6. In the Île-de-France region around Paris, more than 90 percent of urgent care beds are occupied. In Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the number of occupied emergency beds has reached 146 percent of official capacity, with patients now being transferred to other hospitals.

The UK saw another 525 deaths on Wednesday. The official death toll maintained by the government is now over 50,000. The true figure is tens of thousands higher. The British Office of National Statistics had estimated at least 61,000 deaths as of the end of October.

In Spain, there have been more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of the virus, and over 40,000 officially recorded deaths, with 356 reported in the past 24 hours. A study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE reported that the average life expectancy at birth dropped by 0.9 years in Spain from 2019-2020 due to the pandemic. In three regions—Asturias, Murcia and Andalusia—the daily death toll has surpassed the peak of April.

In Germany, which has long been praised by the bourgeois media as a role model in handling the crisis, the situation is increasingly getting out of control. As a result of the opening policy, schools have become breeding grounds for the virus. Currently more than 300,000 students and around 30,000 teachers are in quarantine and the numbers of daily infections (21,866 on Thursday) and intensive care cases (3,186) is higher than ever in spring. Over 1,800 patients are on ventilators struggling for their lives. In some cities and regions no free intensive care beds are left and the death toll is rising.

In many smaller countries, the death toll as a portion of the total population is among the highest internationally. In Switzerland, one of the wealthiest countries in Europe with a population of around 8.6 million people, 94 people died in the past 24 hours. In a country the size of the United States, this would equate to more than 3,000 deaths in a day.

How has this situation been allowed to occur, just eight months after the first peak of the virus on the continent? The first lockdowns took place in March, after wildcat strikes that erupted in Italy and Spain forced governments to take action to stem the spread of the virus, for fear of a popular revolt at their indifference at the death of thousands.

The European ruling class then deliberately pursued a policy, knowing it would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. These deaths are not inevitable. They amount to a crime against humanity perpetrated by the capitalist class and its political representatives.

The European Union used the opportunity provided by the lockdowns to push through two trillion euros in corporate bailouts. While lockdown measures massively cut the spread of the virus, the ruling elite concluded that a confinement stopping production and cutting corporate profits was unacceptable, no matter the number of deaths. Across Europe and in the US, governments prematurely reopened nonessential workplaces, herding tens of millions back to work to produce a continued flow of profits. This ensured the continued spread of the virus.

Already in July, the World Health Organization warned that the resurgence of the virus could be seen across Europe. However, nothing was done.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex expressed most clearly the standpoint of the ruling elite, declaring that same month that a lockdown “stops the spread of the pandemic, of course, but from an economic and social standpoint, it’s a disaster.”

At the beginning of October, as medical authorities warned publicly of an approaching collapse of the health care system, governments enacted partial lockdowns, but kept nonessential businesses open. Schools are also open; the public education system is used as a child-minding service, with anywhere up to 35 students crammed into classrooms, so parents can be forced to remain at work.

This week, the Italian doctors association publicly demanded a full lockdown across Italy. However, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte replied to La Stampa on Wednesday that “a generalised lockdown shouldn’t be the first choice—the costs would be too high.”

In other words, while a lockdown could save an untold number of lives, the “costs”—i.e., the impact on the profits of the corporate elite—are unacceptable. As far as the ruling elite is concerned, if the old and infirm die, and allow for further cuts to pensions and healthcare, that is to be regarded as a positive good.

The response to the pandemic cannot be left in the hands of the capitalist class. Against its policy of profits and death, the working class must intervene to fight for a scientific response to the crisis. The Socialist Equality Parties call for the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in every school and workplace across Europe, independent of the trade unions, which have helped implement government reopening policies in every country. These committees would provide the means to organize a Europewide general strike, to compel the closure of schools and nonessential production, and allow workers to shelter at home.

Massive resources must be invested to provide a high standard of living to everyone throughout the pandemic, including the resources required to maintain online learning for students. The claim that there is “no money” for such measures is a patent lie. Trillions of euros have been handed to the banks and corporations in bailouts since the beginning of the pandemic. The resources exist, but they are monopolized by a corporate and financial oligarchy.

The fortunes of the rich must be expropriated, and the major corporations transformed into public utilities, democratically controlled by the working class as part of the socialist reorganization of economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit. This means the struggle of the working class across Europe to take political power and build the United Socialist States of Europe.

Trump campaign presses demands to suppress millions of votes

Patrick Martin

In a further escalation of its open assault on democratic rights, the Trump reelection campaign is now demanding that millions of ballots for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden should be suppressed in order to give Trump the electoral votes of a half dozen states.

These demands make it clear that Trump’s continuing refusal to concede Biden’s victory in the November 3 election is part of a continuing conspiracy against the American people. Side by side with his ongoing silence on the coronavirus catastrophe—Trump has said nothing for the last eight days while more than one million Americans have been infected and thousands have died—Trump is whipping up fascistic forces in an effort to steal the election.

A man voting at a polling place (Credit: Flickr.com)

In Pennsylvania, the most critical state from the standpoint of the Electoral College, since it has the most electoral votes of the six states where the Trump campaign is seeking to overturn Biden victories, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed that 650,000 “unlawful ballots” were cast and counted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the two largest cities in the state.

He told Fox News that up to 900,000 “invalid ballots” were cast across the entire state, nearly 15 percent of the 6.8 million votes cast in the election. Giuliani did not, of course, provide any evidence of vote fraud, and the irregularities actually cited by attorneys for the Trump campaign amount to only a tiny number of ballots, far below Biden’s margin in the state of more than 50,000 votes.

In Michigan, where Biden won by a comparatively huge margin, 148,000 votes, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits seeking an even larger disenfranchisement of the population for having voted the “wrong” way.

A suit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan, in Lansing, demanded the disqualification of every ballot cast in Wayne County, the state’s most populous, including the city of Detroit; in Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), and Ingham County (Lansing and East Lansing). This comes to the staggering total of 1.2 million votes, or nearly one quarter of the 5.4 million votes in the state. Eliminating those votes would give Trump a margin of 300,000 in the rest of the state and Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.

The principal allegation in the suit is that Republican ballot observers were spoken to rudely or compelled to observe social distancing and kept more than six feet away from the election workers doing the actual opening of mail ballots and their tabulation. No evidence of actual illegal voting or ballot stuffing is provided, only claims based on “expert reports” and data analysis.

“Upon information and belief, the expert report will identify persons who cast votes illegally by casting multiple ballots, were deceased, had moved, or were otherwise not qualified to vote in the November 3 presidential election, along with evidence of illegal ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting, and other illegal voting,” the lawsuit states.

On this threadbare basis, the four plaintiffs propose to disenfranchise 1.2 million people, claiming because in those locations “where sufficient illegal ballots were included” the effect was to cause the ballots of people in other counties to be “diluted.”

A second lawsuit, filed in Wayne County Circuit Court against Wayne County and Detroit election officials, proposes an even more grandiose exercise in disenfranchisement: suppressing the Michigan vote entirely, and ordering the state to conduct an entirely new election.

Whatever the legal prospects for these suits—and every Trump lawsuit but one has been denied or thrown out by the courts, with the exception of a single technical issue in Pennsylvania affecting a few hundred votes—the sheer scale of the disenfranchisement proposed is breathtaking. What the Trump campaign really means is that it should be illegal to vote against Trump.

These suits are being filed even as the scale of Biden’s victory in terms of the popular vote begins to become even clearer. By one measure—the share of eligible voters supporting him—Biden has reached landslide territory, since the voter turnout in 2020 reached records not seen in a century in terms of the proportion of the population voting.

At his current 50.8 percent of the vote, by one calculation, Biden has 34.04 percent of all eligible voters. This is the largest figure since 1972, in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide over George McGovern. If his percentage increases to 51 or 52, which is quite likely given the delays in counting mail ballots on the West Coast, which is heavily Democratic, he will end up matching the 34.17 percent of eligible voters achieved by Lyndon Johnson in his rout of Barry Goldwater.

While Biden leads by five million in the popular vote, his leads in the six states under challenge are sizeable, ranging from just under 12,000 in Arizona to the 148,000 in Michigan. According to one study of all statewide recounts conducted in the last 20 years, the largest vote swing was less than 2,600 votes, and the average shift was only 430 votes.

Given these figures, the continued refusal of Trump to concede the election and of his campaign to allege fraud become more and more provocative. As the SEP Political Committee warned two days ago, “the working class cannot be indifferent to the efforts to overthrow an elected government by a right-wing and neo-fascist conspiracy.”

There were signs Thursday of divisions within the Republican Party over how far to go in support of Trump’s campaign to discredit the election and delegitimize a Biden administration. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine became the first Republican governor of a state won by Trump to admit the obvious, that Biden is the president-elect. Only Republican governors of Democratic states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont had made such statements before.

A handful of Republican House members have made similar statements, but the number of Republican senators who have acknowledged Biden’s victory remained at four—Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

However, a sizeable group of Republican senators, speaking individually, announced their support for such token measures as giving Biden access to the Presidential Daily Brief, an intelligence summary, and other materials necessary for a presidential transition.

They cited “national security” concerns, indicating that in the event Biden enters the White House, he should be aware of whom the US military-intelligence apparatus is planning to kill, subvert or overthrow, so that there is no disruption to ongoing operations. Biden is a trusted member of the national-security elite as the former vice president in the Obama administration.

There have also been pro-Biden signals from sections of the Republican media, not merely Fox News, which has openly clashed with Trump, but from the Las Vegas newspaper owned by billionaire Trump supporter Sheldon Adelson, which published an editorial advising the president to accept his defeat, and from numerous Republican pundits.

Leading congressional Democrats continued to downplay the significance of Trump’s refusal to concede the election, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissing Trump’s efforts as “ridiculous shenanigans,” at a press briefing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking at the same press briefing, made a longer critique of Trump and the congressional Republicans, but without drawing any broader political conclusions.

“This morning I have a simple message for Senate Republicans,” he said. “The election is over, it wasn’t close. Trump lost, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States. Senate Republicans, stop denying reality. Stop deliberately sowing doubt about our democratic process and start focusing on COVID.”

He concluded, “Let us bring the country together and get things done,” without addressing the obvious fact, staring the American public in the face, that Trump and his supporters have launched a direct attack on democracy.

From an electoral standpoint, the critical step would be the intervention of state legislatures in the states under challenge, because five out of six are Republican-controlled, and the legislators could potentially take action to hijack the state’s electoral votes. Republican state legislative leaders in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two largest “battleground” states won by Biden, have said they would not intervene, but they may be challenged by Trump diehards within their caucuses.

From the standpoint of Trump’s preparation of a political coup, the attitude of the military and security agencies is of decisive importance. Earlier this week, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and three other officials and replaced them with ultra-right loyalists.

On Thursday, the purge extended to the Department of Homeland Security, although here the issue appeared to be simple retaliation against those who had undercut Trump’s claims of vote fraud. Bryan Ware, assistant director of cybersecurity for the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was forced to resign, and his supervisor, Chris Krebs, the director of the CISA, said he expected to be fired as well.

The CISA vigorously combated false claims on the internet that supercomputers were being used to “flip” vote totals during the election tabulations in critical states. On Thursday, Krebs retweeted an election technology specialist who warned people not to share “wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”