Migrant caravan of workers displaced by hurricanes departs Honduras

Andrea Lobo

A caravan of about five hundred Hondurans, including many families with young children, began its journey to the United States on Wednesday night and early Thursday. The migrants are trying to escape the destruction of their homes and livelihoods by two back-to-back and record-setting storms last month, Hurricanes Eta and Iota. These intolerable conditions have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The caravan assembled informally over several days at the main bus station in San Pedro Sula. After the Guatemalan government announced that migrants will not be allowed to enter without passports and a negative COVID-19 test, the caravan split up in an attempt to enter Guatemala through two different border crossings.

Much larger groups are expected to join or form new caravans in the next weeks departing from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and southern Mexico. As early as December 7, a director of a migrant shelter in the Mexican city of Tenosique on the Guatemalan border reported, “About 20 people are arriving each day who say they lost properties, homes, crops, from Honduras as much as Guatemala.”

The UN estimates that across Central America 6.8 million people were affected by Hurricanes Eta and Iota, 5.5 million of them in Honduras and Guatemala. In these two hardest-hit countries, 140,000 homes were destroyed, and 400,000 people remain in makeshift shelters—many without running water or food.

About 330,000 people have not received any emergency aid because they remain isolated by the destruction of roads and communication infrastructure. Even before the pandemic, over half of the population was already living under the official poverty line, with the UN estimating that 5.2 million people in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala required humanitarian assistance due to “chronic and extreme violence, forced displacements, food insecurity and the increasingly adverse effects of climate change.”

The flooded town of Campur, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, on December 3 nexto to a satellite image before the flooding (Credit: UNICEF)

Throughout December, countless testimonies have appeared on local, international and social media describing absolute desperation. Among the most frequent statements of the hurricane victims are “We lost everything,” “We only left with what we could carry,” “We escaped with what we were wearing,” “We have been living on the streets since,” and “How are we going to eat?”

A 13-year-old child at Campur, Alta Verapaz, a Guatemalan town that was entirely flooded, explained to UNICEF: “It was hard leaving our home. It’s still hard. At least I can’t get used to being here at the Cruce Chinamá school. I’m used to my normal life at home. I don’t know what to do here. It feels like a dream that never happened. I would like to wake up and see it never happen.”

After years working to save money and open a fruit shop, Luis Salgado from Honduras told Jornada that the flooding damaged all his produce, and he was left in debt and unable to feed his three children. “First came the pandemic, then the hurricane. We have no money for the children,” he said as he began to march north.

That these migrants are not being dissuaded by the massive deployments of troops and the creation of unsanitary detention camps by the right-wing governments in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States speaks volumes about the situation they confront. Neither has the ongoing upsurge in COVID-19 cases and deaths across Central America, Mexico and the United States stopped their journey.

As recently as October, a caravan of 3,000 Honduran migrants was broken up by Guatemalan soldiers and summarily deported, while Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was threatening them with prison sentences of up to ten years had they reached Mexico. The Mexican government had already deployed more than 26,000 soldiers under orders of the Trump administration to detain earlier migrant caravans.

The post-hurricane wave of migration also coincides dangerously with the efforts of Trump to overturn his electoral defeat in November and remain in power through extraconstitutional means. This has included the stoking of anti-immigrant chauvinism to mobilize fascistic militias and layers of law enforcement and military officials in his support.

Refugee rights groups in Guatemala and Mexico have reported that migrants have also been encouraged by the election of President-elect Joe Biden of the Democratic Party, which is seen as more immigrant-friendly than the Republicans.

Biden, who was Vice-President under an Obama administration that carried out a record number of deportations and the separation of migrant families, has signaled through his cabinet selections that the rampage against immigrants will continue under his administration. He nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to head the deportation machinery at the Department of Homeland Security after being deputy secretary under Obama and the warmonger Susan Rice as domestic policy adviser, being charged with implementing the tactics of the war on terrorism against native and migrant workers alike within the United States.

On the other hand, the migrant caravans, a phenomenon that reached large proportions after 2018, objectively represent contingents of workers and part of a resurgence of the class struggle across the Americas and beyond in recent years. Just like the strikes and mass protests, the caravans are mass mobilizations of workers and youth driven by capitalist austerity and the neocolonial exploitation of labor and natural resources by Wall Street and imperialism.

The caravans have coincided with waves of strikes and mass protests in Honduras against the authoritarian National Party regime, which was installed in a military coup backed by the Obama administration in 2009.

The murderous business re-openings and lack of economic assistance despite the pandemic and hurricanes have already fueled several mass protests across Guatemala, following the congressional approval of an austerity budget that has since been suspended.

The struggles against the right-wing policies imposed by the local elites, the transnational corporations and globalized finance capital can only develop in an insurrectionary mass character and succeed if they become strategically oriented to a unity with the international working class and the overthrow of the capitalist nation-states and the profit system.

It’s an existential matter for workers in Mexico, Guatemala and the United States to join forces with workers in Honduras and internationally to confront the efforts of imperialism to pick off the global working class and poor one piece at a time, while the nationalist and pro-capitalist parties and trade unions fan nationalism and pit workers against each other across national lines.

Based on these fundamental considerations, workers across the region must fight for the defense of their migrant class brothers and sisters from Honduras, Guatemala and beyond. This means defending their ability to travel and settle anywhere they see best for their families, with full citizenship rights.

Workers must also fight for the expropriation of the financial oligarchies and major corporations to allocate trillions of dollars to rebuild Central America, including an emergency program to provide health care, quality education, housing and all other basic needs for those displaced by the storms.

Sri Lankan president calls on companies to exploit pandemic for cost-cutting

Saman Gunadasa

Addressing the Sri Lanka Economic Summit early this month, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse called on big business to take advantage of the “beneficial consequences” of the coronavirus pandemic. The virtual event was organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the country’s premier business lobby.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapakse, attends an event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

India’s Minister of Finance & Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman was the keynote speaker at the summit, which was held on December 1. She spoke about the “synergistic and complementary” nature of India’s so-called “self-reliant visions” of India and Sri Lanka—jargon used by both governments to cover up their big-business agendas.

Sitharaman is a key figure in the right-wing Bharatiya Janatha Party-led government which has stepped up its pro-market program in recent months. This has included changing labour laws to allow the use of contract workers in every industry, accelerated privatisation and agriculture reforms at the expense of small farmers. These actions have ignited mass struggles of workers and farmers throughout India.

Like governments around the world, New Delhi claims that employees must remain at work and learn to live with the deadly virus as the “new normal.” These policies have seen COVID-19 infections in India climb to almost 9.8 million, with over 141,000 deaths.

In his address, President Rajapakse declared India to be Sri Lanka’s “closest friend and partner” and hailed its efforts to boost international finance capital through a “digital unified single window clearance system”—in other words, to by-pass previous investment rules and regulations.

Rajapakse, who is making similar changes in Sri Lanka, told the summit that his government was balancing “the twin imperatives of containing the virus on the one hand and ensuring continued economic activity on the other.” In some ways, he continued “this new normal has had beneficial consequences. It has forced the adoption of many new work practices.”

Rajapakse’s entire address, in fact, was devoted to urging business to reap the “beneficial consequences” of the crisis—i.e., to step up labour exploitation and boost profits. There was not one word in his speech about dealing with the dire situation facing workers and the poor, social conditions created by the government in league with the big companies.

The president’s claim about the government balancing between the pandemic and economic activities is bogus. Since the end of the April, Colombo has actively demanded employees return to work, producing a new surge of COVID-19 infections.

The number of confirmed cases has jumped from around 3,000 in early October to over 30,000, with 144 deaths according to yesterday’s figures. This is under conditions where the government is following a low-testing regime while claiming that the situation has been properly managed.

One of the so-called “new normal” opportunities cited by Rajapakse at the summit was to “improve efficiency so that work can be carried out even by a skeletal staff.” The government, he declared, was “strongly encouraging new business models,” and new technologies and infrastructure improvement “needed to support this productivity enhancing transformation.”

Stripped of its corporate rhetoric, this means more workforce downsizing and increased exploitation.

When he called for the economy to be reopened in late April, Rajapakse—using social distancing as an excuse—directed state and private institutions to only call back a “required number of employees.” This was a clear signal to employers to slash jobs and wages whilst maintaining the same productivity.

In some factories the monthly wages of permanent workers, who were “temporarily retrenched,” was reduced to 14,500 rupees ($US78) while other positions were eliminated. These measures were imposed with the full backing of the trade unions, which regularly meet with government ministers, state officials and CEOs in a so-called tripartite task force.

During his speech, Rajapakse nervously referred to Sri Lanka’s ballooning foreign and domestic debts. “The large volume of pending debt repayments is a matter of concern… our over-reliance on loans must come to an end,” he said. The solution, Rajapakse continued, was to “attract more foreign direct investment and encourage more local investment to drive our economic growth.”

Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves were reduced this year to about $6 billion after debt-servicing payments. These payments are expected to be $4.5 billion annually for the next four years with the country’s debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio likely to surpass 100 percent next year.

In September, Moody’s downgraded Sri Lanka’s credit rating to Caa1, one above the default level. Last week Fitch, another rating agency, lowered the country’s rating to CCC. While Rajapakse has said that the government will meet its debt obligations, the country, in reality, is teetering on the brink of default.

Rajapakse’s attempt to boost foreign reserves by “attracting more direct investments” will involve new laws to fully protect these investors. While he did not elaborate, these measures will be designed to ensure lower business taxes and unhindered exploitation of Sri Lanka’s resources and the working class. And like in other under-developed countries, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, who mainly export to the US and Europe, this means an intensification of the already cutthroat race to slash jobs, wages and other production costs.

The Rajapakse government previously ordered the Central Bank to release 178 billion rupees to the commercial banks to provide cheap loans to big business. In its 2021 budget, it announced sweeping tax concessions, including cuts in personal and corporate tax, as well as exemptions and tax holidays for foreign and local investors. It also announced more downsizing of the public sector and further privatisations of state-owned enterprises.

Sri Lankan Treasury Secretary Sajith Attygalle told the summit that the government had immediate plans to sell-off non-strategic state enterprises and to list others on the Colombo Stock Exchange. This includes the state-owned Grand Hyatt, Grand Oriental Hotel, Hotel Developers, land belonging to the Ceynor Foundation and expressways.

A few weeks ago, Rajapakse imposed an essential service order on 15,000 port employees after they began challenging demands that they continue working without proper protection from the pandemic, which was spreading through the docks. The repressive move was a direct signal to corporate chiefs that the government will try to crush all opposition to unsafe COVID-19 working conditions and the increasing austerity attacks on the working class.

Notwithstanding the verbal posturing of the opposition parliamentary parties—the Samagi, Jana Balavegaya, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA)—these organisations have supported the government’s assaults on working people, its enrichment of the major corporations and moves towards dictatorial methods rule. They endorsed the reopening of the economy, the allocation of bailout funds for big business and the essential services order on port workers. Last week, all of them, apart from the TNA, passed the budget’s huge defence expenditure allocation.

Rajapakse’s “advice” to the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce summit further underscores the necessity for the working class to break from every faction of the Sri Lankan capitalist class and their trade union and opportunist hangers-on and to mobilise on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.

The only party advancing this perspective is the Socialist Equality Party which fights for a workers’ and peasants’ government in Sri Lanka as part of Union of Socialist Republic of South Asia.

Tens of millions of Americans require aid as USDA food box program nears expiration

Alex Findijs

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Box Program is set to expire at the end of the month. The program was designed to provide food to charities and food banks by contracting companies to purchase food from farms and deliver it to local charitable organizations.

This is the fourth round of budget allocations for the program, running from November 1 to December 31. In total, the program has been allocated $4.5 billion since it began in May of this year. The first three two-month rounds had budgets of over $1 billion.

This current two-month round of funding, however, was drastically cut to just $500 million.

Volunteers pack boxes of food outside Second Harvest Food Bank in Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020, in Irvine, Calif. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

With the amount of funding cut by more than half, food banks around the country are already reporting that contractors have already used up their funding, leading some contractors to cease their scheduled deliveries earlier than expected.

The USDA claims the drop in funding was the result of many charities choosing to receive more boxes earlier in the year with an understanding that it would deplete resources by the end of the year. However, charities interviewed by the Washington Post stated that they were not informed of the potential lack of resources for this round.

The food box program was part of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP), which was enacted with up to $19 billion in funding to support farmers who had suffered financial losses during the pandemic. The second iteration of this program, approved by the USDA after the end of the first round on September 11, allowed for up to $14 billion in funding.

With $14 billion allocated to the same program that funded the food box initiative, there is no reason that more money could not have been provided for food aid. This is especially true with a record number of people turning to food banks this year.

The need for more food aid has risen considerably during the pandemic. In 2019, an estimated 34 million people suffered from food insecurity. That number is expected to rise to 54 million by the end of the year, according to Feeding America, the largest food bank network in the United States.

With such a drastic increase in the need for food aid, the stress upon food banks and charities to meet the demand has been immense. Miles-long car lineups have been seen at food banks across the country, with many reporting that it is their first time seeking assistance. Food banks across the country are reporting upwards of a 100 percent increase in demand, making the aid from programs like Farmers to Families so important.

Amid the crisis triggered by the pandemic, the food boxes that the USDA has provided have been critical for many communities, but the USDA has not done enough to address the needs of the working class.

Feeding America estimates that between June 2020 and June 2021 the nationwide demand for food aid will total 17 billion pounds of food, three times last year’s distribution.

So far, the USDA has provided 126.1 million boxes of food. While the USDA has changed the size of the boxes over the course of the program, an average box was likely around 25 pounds of food. This means that the USDA has provided around 3.15 billion pounds, about half of what Feeding America alone expects to be able to distribute next year.

This is a significant amount of food, but it does not meet the need and the program has been plagued with chronic issues, from delivery to quality.

Since food boxes are packaged by contractors, they are all different in their composition and quality. Some recipients have reported high-quality produce from one vendor but low-quality processed meats and moldy produce from another.

A lack of oversight and standard quality requirements has made the program a mess. Some contractors failed to provide the number of boxes promised, while others failed to deliver the boxes to the actual distribution location, ultimately costing the food bank extra money to store and move it.

No program of uniformity regarding what food items would be provided was enforced either. Recipients could only hope that the food they received was of good quality and quantity. In the early stages, many boxes were only filled with one item, forcing the USDA to require that all boxes be composed of produce, meat and dairy products.

But even still, the boxes remained a mystery to those who received them, and the inability of people to choose their items often led to waste as people discarded poor-quality items or allergens.

The USDA is allowing the program to expire as the pandemic breaks records every week. Tens of millions of people are in dire need of food. The food crisis has become so acute that instances of people shoplifting food items from stores have increased considerably. Millions of people cannot afford to pay for rent and utilities, lines for food banks are miles long and tens of millions of people still cannot afford decent health care during an international health crisis.

Considering how little the United States government has done, in both the Republican and Democratic parties, it is inconceivable that the Trump administration will provide more aid between now and the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Nor is it likely that a future Democratic-run government would compensate for Trump’s failures, given Biden’s refusal to commit to saving lives during the pandemic and the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to demand that adequate social resources be provided.

Spain’s ruling PSOE, Podemos use “anti-disinformation” tool for internet spying

Alice Summers

More details have emerged on the censorship apparatus operated by Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. A new cyber-monitoring tool, known as ELISA, has been rolled out across the country, which will scour the internet for supposed instances of “disinformation” and report them to Spain’s central government for further action.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

According to the daily El País, which is closely linked to the PSOE, ELISA began by monitoring only a few dozen web pages. However, its surveillance operation has now expanded to around 350 sites. It has been described as a “Digital Observatory,” designed to “facilitate the monitoring of open sources, as well as the profiling of media and social networks,” according to the National Cryptological Centre (CCN), which developed and runs the program under the aegis of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI) spy agency.

To avoid any judicial oversight, ELISA will supposedly only monitor open source data, rather than private communications. It will nonetheless mine vast quantities of information on online sources, social media usage, news platforms and other internet content.

According to El País, quoting a CCN source, ELISA’s aim is to detect “systematic and malicious campaigns to distribute disinformation which aims to generate polarisation and to destabilise society, exacerbating its conflicts and taking advantage of its vulnerabilities for the benefit of a foreign state.”

ELISA’s development and implementation is the latest in a series of internet-monitoring and censorship measures recently made public in Spain. As unrest grows in Spain and internationally at governments’ criminal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Spanish ruling elite is intensifying efforts to crack down on domestic political opposition and denounce foreign states—particularly Russia.

Revelations about the CCN’s ELISA tool come hot on the heels of a new protocol, the “ Procedure for Intervention against Disinformation ,” approved by Spain’s National Security Council (CSN) in October. Details of this document were made public in November in the Official State Gazette (BOE). It allows the state to monitor and suppress internet content, under the pretext of combatting “fake news” and “disinformation.”

This gives the Spanish government full decision-making power to determine what is or is not fake news, and makes legal provision for constant state surveillance of social media platforms and the media more broadly to detect “disinformation” and formulate a “political response.”

The ELISA tool will expand on this spying framework. The CCN will report on ELISA’s findings fortnightly to the Permanent Commission against Disinformation, a body set up to operate the censorship apparatus detailed in October’s protocol.

The Permanent Commission is coordinated by the Secretary of State for Communication and directed by the National Security Department. Members of the committee will come from the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry and the CNI spy agency, among others. The CCN’s reports on ELISA findings are thus received and studied at the highest levels of the Spanish state.

Podemos general secretary Pablo Iglesias sits on the board of the Intelligence Affairs Commission, which supervises the CNI and thus its subordinate body, the CCN. The “left populist” Podemos party will therefore directly oversee the operations of the CCN and ELISA, receiving the fortnightly spying reports.

Information on the exact functioning of the ELISA tool is limited. While it was designed at the end of 2019, according to the CCN, it appears to have become operational as of April this year, during the first wave of the pandemic in Spain.

According to an initial report published online by the CCN, between April and September this year, 1,808 items of “anti-globalist” content were detected by ELISA across 157 different online platforms. The CCN report states that these “anti-globalist” narratives have an “anti-system character, [and are] against democratic institutions and can pose a direct threat to social cohesion [and to] stability, including to the country’s health.”

“The Covid-19 crisis has facilitated a large growth in these narratives,” the report continues, “as well as in the digital sources which have disseminated this type of content.” The CCN makes clear that the rollout of ELISA was intended in no small part to combat the massive popular opposition to the government’s murderous handling of the pandemic, and prevent strikes and protests against it.

The CCN tries to obscure the main targets of its surveillance operations with references to the alleged anti-Semitic content published by “anti-globalist” sites, which include far-right web pages like El Correo de España, Alerta Digital and Mpr21, according to online newspaper El Confidencial. These sites “systematically link hidden interests to the ‘Jewish Lobby’ (George Soros or the Rothschild family and including Bill Gates),” the report states.

While no doubt anti-Semitism proliferates on the far-right websites cited by the CCN, these are by no means the only sites being monitored, and the objective of the ELISA spying tool is not to eradicate fascistic sentiment online. Anti-Semitic content is only a small part of the vast array of material flagged as “potentially malicious” by the CCN, which seeks to detect and criminalise any perspective challenging the rule of the bourgeoisie. Ultimately the target of this censorship operation is the working class, including various religious minorities.

According to El País, of the sites monitored by ELISA thus far, around 25 percent were pro-Russia, with a third based in Russia and another third in Spain. Thirty-five percent were anti-system websites in Spanish, 22 percent were far-right pages and 18 percent were far-left. These web pages were located both on Spanish servers and on foreign ones, including in other European countries, in Latin America and in the United States.

“[The] main nucleus [of the anti-globalist content],” the CCN report states, “consists of stating that democracies do not obey the needs of citizens, but are at the service of hidden elites who make the decisions, beyond the will [of a country’s citizens].” In a world where a handful of multi-billionaires control more resources and wealth than the vast majority of the world’s population, this is hardly an unpopular opinion.

Other viewpoints marked as online “disinformation” include opposition to “the legitimacy of States” and the “market economy,” lack of trust in “traditional media,” and opposition to “multilateral organisms” like NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In a PowerPoint presentation on the “Characteristics of disinformation narratives and media,” the CCN lists the following as possible signs of disinformation: the “dissemination of an image of the State as violent and/or corrupt”; “support for organisations that reveal state secrets like WikiLeaks”; “denial of the official, proven and judged version of terrorist attacks or great crimes”; and “theories about reverting to the gold standard [or about] the corruption of the capitalist system.”

ELISA is only one of a number of cyber-monitoring tools developed by the CCN, with others including ANA, CARMEN and MONICA, most of which were developed and rolled out in 2019. In total, the CCN uses around 20 different tools, each bearing a woman’s name.

The new ELISA framework creates an ideological dragnet for criminalising an exceptionally broad range of viewpoints commonly held by the left, under the pretext that these are “disinformation” or “potentially malicious.” These anti-democratic measures are only the thin end of the wedge. Monitoring and reporting on oppositional viewpoints prepares the censoring and prosecution of those who espouse them.

The working class most oppose these authoritarian moves, beginning by opposing those who are ramming them through: the “left populist” Podemos party and similar pseudo-left organisations across the world.

Private school permitting students to wear Islamic clothing closed in Paris

Samuel Tissot

The Meo High School (MHS) in Paris’s 19th district announced its closure following an order on December 7 from the Parisian police prefect. The school gives instruction to 110 children aged 11-18 years old, many of whom are from a Muslim background. The school’s closure is only the latest provocation in a series of attacks launched by the Macron government against institutions that serve France’s six million Muslims.

A statement published on Twitter by the school’s staff described the “disproportionate and manifestly arbitrary response” that was not “taking into account the welfare of the children in this unprecedented situation.” The staff statement reiterated the school’s commitment to “universalist values and excellence in education” and asked for “responsible support, solidarity, and peace in the face of this injustice.”

The closure of MHS takes place as the vast majority of French children and teachers are forced to remain in school under the criminal “herd immunity” policy of the Macron government. The announcement exposes the government’s claim that the deadly drive to reopen schools is aimed at protecting children’s education and welfare, rather than permitting the continued extraction of profit from working parents. The shutdown of MHS will leave 110 students out of school half-way through an already thoroughly disrupted semester.

MHS is in a predominantly immigrant district in north-eastern Paris and provides education to a high proportion of Muslim students. The private school is secular and teaches the national syllabus. Its website describes its “conception of education for all without any prejudices and with the acceptance of the personal freedom of conscience of each individual.”

The closure of MHS is part of a wave of mosque and Muslim charity closures ordered by the Macron government. The message of the French state is clear; any institution that refuses to conform to its attacks on freedom of expression will be targeted. Many families have undoubtedly sent their children to MHS and other similar private schools to avoid draconian laws passed by successive administrations outlawing religious clothing at public schools.

Religious symbols were banned in schools in 2004, by a law that was aimed at whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment and was targeted at the veil. In 2010, full-face veils like the burqa were banned in all public places in France.

MHS was closed through byzantine administrative methods. The authorities ordered the shutdown on the pretext of the school’s utilization of an unsafe building. The school explained in its English-language statement that “this building is shared with other institutions also working with kids that were not asked to shut down.” The statement reports that the school has enacted “massive work” to ensure security requirements have been met in recent months.

The closure order followed an inter-ministerial inspection on November 17, when the school was stormed by 40 inspectors, ministerial agents, and police officers. The unnecessary presence of police in what was officially a safety inspection, seems to have been an effort to intimidate students and staff at the school.

Macron’s cynical efforts to posture as the defender of French teachers in the aftermath of the murder of Samuel Paty have been further exposed by the closure. In the context of a worsening economic crisis, the closure has left eighteen teachers without jobs. This follows his use of the police to violently suppress lycée students and teachers striking against dangerous health conditions in schools.

MHS’s shutdown came just two days before the anti-separatism bill (recently renamed the bill confirming republican principles) was presented to the council of ministers on December 9. In an interview with Le Monde published on the same day, Prime Minister Jean Castex stated, “[Muslim separatism] is not there in the text [of the law]. But the enemy of the Republic is an ideology called radical Islamism, which aims to divide the French people.”

Castex went to absurdly insist that “we [the French government] will never equate radical Islamism with Muslims.” In fact, the government has been engaged in an increasingly open campaign targeting Muslims. Last week, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced that 76 mosques around the country will be targeted for inspection and closure. Already before his announcement, there had been more than 70 mosques closed since the beginning of the year.

In the wake of the terrorist killing of high-school teacher Samuel Paty on October 15, this campaign has been intensified. Following the attack, Darmanin declared in a television interview that he was personally “shocked” when he saw supermarket aisles with international—i.e., kosher and halal—foods, and making clear that the mere presence of such food aisles led inexorably toward “separatism” that the government is combatting.

Another 52 cultural and other associations were closed down, including the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), one of the largest Muslim charities in the country, which primarily offers legal aid to Muslims in discrimination cases.

Speaking at the beginning of this month to Le Figaro, Darmanin stated that “up until now, the government has been interested in radicalization and terrorism. Now, we will also attack the terrain of terrorism, where can be found those people who create the intellectual and cultural space to secede and impose their values.” His definition, of those who “create the intellectual and cultural space to secede,” could be used to encompass Muslim cultural associations across the country.

Private education institutions such as MHS are a main target of the anti-“separatism” law. The law will make it easier for the government to dissolve such institutions by executive decree—as well as vastly expanding the state’s power to dissolve a broad array of political and cultural associations. Pointing to the government’s wider preparation for anti-democratic attacks on the entire population, Castex stated in his interview with Le Monde that although the current target is “Islamism,” in the future, “Any political ideology that stands against the values of the Republic would be concerned.” The government’s campaign against Muslims is directed against the rights of the entire working class, under conditions of mass opposition to social inequality and police violence. At the same time, it is aimed at dividing the working class along religious lines while promoting the far-right.

Auto companies’ stocks rise as workers die from COVID-19

Shannon Jones

With COVID-19 cases surging in auto plants, Wall Street is demanding car companies increase production to restock depleted dealer inventories. At same time, anger among workers is growing over the mounting toll of sickness and death and the efforts of the United Auto Workers and management to suppress opposition to unsafe conditions.

According to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, manufacturing facilities, including auto plants, continue to be major vectors of virus transmission in the state. For the week ending Dec. 3 the state’s health department reported 40 new outbreaks at manufacturing and construction sites, including 12 in the greater Detroit area and another four at agricultural and food processing worksites. These are in addition to 112 ongoing outbreaks identified in manufacturing and construction sites.

As the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter has reported, there have been three recent COVID-19-related deaths of workers at Detroit-area Fiat Chrysler plants, including one death at Sterling Heights Assembly (SHAP) and two at Warren Truck. On Monday, 53-year-old John Stamper, who worked at the Faurecia auto parts plant in Saline, Michigan, died of a COVID-related heart attack.

Workers at the FCA Warren Truck Plant in Warren, Michigan (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

On Wednesday, the Detroit Free Press broke its silence on the deaths at Warren Truck and SHAP and was compelled to acknowledge the role of the WSWS in bringing the deaths to light. At the same time, the newspaper promoted the false narrative peddled by FCA and the UAW that there is no spread of the virus in the plants, and that workers are essentially at fault for contracting the disease.

Despite the growing number of deaths, auto sales and car company profits are booming. Stock rating firm Zack’s Equity Research has upgraded Fiat Chrysler stock to “strong buy,” meaning that the company has a high likelihood of producing profits well above market estimates. Over the last three months the estimate for FCA has increased 158 percent. The Dodge Ram, produced at SHAP and Warren Truck, is one of FCA’s most profitable vehicles.

Fiat Chrysler stock prices have been rising steadily since May, and now are slightly above pre-pandemic levels. The same is true for rivals Ford and General Motors.

RJ, a worker at the FCA Jefferson North Assembly Plant (JNAP) in Detroit, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “It is not about human life, it is about profit. When you put profit before human life, that means you care more about money than you do people. If you were worried about coronavirus you wouldn’t have people here seven days a week. Most plants are running 10–12 hours a day.”

A worker at the Fiat Chrysler Tipton, Indiana, transmission plant said, “It’s pretty evident that the workers are being used like sheep and treated like farm animals and not the great men and women who have carried Fiat Chrysler for years.”

Outbreaks are not limited to the Detroit automakers. According to Facebook posts by workers there is an outbreak at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant. One worker wrote, “Management at Smyrna is flailing trying to get the COVID numbers under control. They think videos are going to help it.

“They are flailing, numbers are going up and it’s getting to the point that we are going to have more people out with COVID than we have working.”

Stephanie Weems, the sixth worker to die from COVID-19 at FCA Warren Truck

Meanwhile, investors are demanding that auto production be ramped up even further. “Factories have to get back to work,” said Ally Financial CEO Jeffrey Brown, referring to depleted inventory levels. Ally Financial is a Detroit-based company that performs auto lending and other banking services. Sales of new and used cars have been booming due to low interest rates.

Auto companies are currently running at near pre-pandemic levels despite a rising number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Michigan, the home base of FCA, Ford and General Motors, is experiencing record numbers of new COVID-19 cases and deaths. For December the state has seen a daily death toll in excess of 100 and more than 5,000 confirmed cases each day. Measures imposed by Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to supposedly contain the pandemic specifically exclude manufacturing facilities and K-8 schools, major centers of disease transmission.

Workers have reported that management in some cases is telling workers infected with COVID-19 not to share the information with coworkers. Where workers are confirmed to have COVID-19, management refuses to acknowledge in-plant transmission. In some cases this has resulted in management refusing to grant sick workers paid leave to recover.

RJ said, “They are not following the guidelines. The numbers are not going down, if anything they are doubling.” Remarking on management’s claim that COVID-19 is not spreading inside the plants, she added, “They know it’s not true. They are not allowing us to clean as we once did. There is lukewarm water in bathrooms all-year round.

“When you are in an environment where there are a lot of people, you can only social distance so far. The jobs are set up so that it is like you are piggy-backing on one another.” For those who are sick or in quarantine, she said, “The big corporations aren’t going to pay you to be off, unless you use your vacation.”

A leaked management memo at JNAP revealed that as of Oct. 5 there had been 59 confirmed COVID-19 cases at the plant and two deaths. Fiat Chrysler management provides the UAW with details on the number of infections, but these numbers are kept hidden from workers.

The Tipton transmission worker said, “In [UAW President] Rory Gamble you see a man can talk a game one way, but when Rory is in the eyes of the company he’s a completely different person who cares more about the shareholders than the lives of the workers and their families.

“The union is virtually non-existent inside the plant and the union stewards are on the side of the company. It’s truly unbelievable how little the union is about the people and more about money period. They help management single out certain people who do not play their games. They feel the best way to fix a problem with union workers is to just get them fired and that’s one less person who can expose everything that’s actually going on in the plant.”

The JNAP worker, RJ, said, “The UAW is not saying anything because they don’t care. They were bought and sold years go. All they do is support their friends and families. None of us can stand on the sidelines. We have to act to save lives.”

She continued, “Wall Street and Washington are in it for the rich. I have heard that some people who get sick, their companies are not even paying for coronavirus. This is a world disaster, it is not natural causes. I just want to stay alive. We have to draw the line somewhere.

“People have to fight with their voice and their knowledge. Michigan is being hit hard just like the South. When they opened back up, they did not use the precautions they should have.”

As Indian farmers step up protests against pro-agribusiness “reform,” Modi prepares mass repression

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

Indian farmers are threatening to expand their protests after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government reiterated that it will not repeal the three pro-agri-business laws it rushed through parliament last September.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers, many with their wives and children, are currently camped at four entrances to the Delhi National Capital Territory. Many have been there since Nov. 27, when phalanxes of security forces, acting on the orders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government, barred them from bringing their Delhi Chalo (Let’s go to Delhi) agitation to India’s capital and largest city.

On Tuesday, millions across India joined a Bharat Bandh (all-India shut down) called by farmer organizations. According to the coordination committee of the Kisan Morcha (Peasants’ March), more than five million people participated in the four-hour shutdown, with 20,000 protests held in at least 22 of India’s 28 states.

Supporters of farmers shout slogans during a nationwide shutdown called by thousands of Indian farmers protesting new agriculture laws in Mumbai, India, Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

In the Punjab, where the farmers’ agitation is centered, daily life ground to a halt. In Haryana, which lies between Punjab and Delhi, there were protests throughout the state. Markets were shut down, and several roads and highways were occupied. Workers from Maruti Suzuki, Hero Motorcycle, and other auto plants in the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, which lies in Haryana on the outskirts of Delhi, held a demonstration in support of the farmers.

On Tuesday evening, Modi’s chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, led a government delegation in a hastily-organized, four-hour meeting with representatives of some of the dozens of farm organizations that are leading the protest movement. Shah repeated previous government offers to make minor amendments to the three laws, which will throw open Indian agriculture to domestic and transnational corporations by gutting the system of state-run markets, and reducing or eliminating restrictions on contract farming and land ownership. But he dismissed out of hand the farmers’ call for the three laws to be repealed.

Big business, which applauded the agrarian “reform” laws and an accompanying labour “reform” that outlaws most strikes and promotes “labour market flexibility,” is adamant that the BJP government stand its ground. First, because they view “modernizing” Indian agriculture at small farmers’ expense as a key element in competing with China for investment; and second, because they fear a visible government retreat in the face of the farmer protests would galvanize social opposition.

On Nov. 26, the first day of the Delhi Chalo agitation, tens of millions of workers across India mounted a one-day general strike to protest the government’s “pro-investor” economic policies. They also demanded emergency aid for the hundreds of millions who have been left to fend for themselves over the past 8 months as India has been roiled by the COVID-19 pandemic and its catastrophic economic fallout.

On Wednesday morning, the BJP-dominated Union cabinet met and formally approved a 9-point “offer” to the farmers. Under this “offer,” a handful of the most provocative clauses in two of the three laws would be eliminated. These include a stipulation that private markets, unlike the state-run mandis, shall be tax-free, and provisions that bar farmers from seeking redress from the courts for any matters regulated by the agrarian “reform” laws if government officials or corporate representatives have acted in “good faith”

The government also now says it is willing to “provide a written assurance that the existing Minimum Support Price (MSP) system will continue.” Farmers, however, want the MSP enshrined in law, since they have no confidence the government will honour its word. As it is, the MSP system has already largely collapsed due to the “pro-market” policies pursued by central and state governments, both those led by the BJP and its allies and those led by the ostensible “pro-farmer” opposition parties.

The farmers’ organizations have rejected the BJP government offer, and are now threatening to begin blocking the Jaipur-Delhi and Agra-Delhi highways and other roads into Delhi, one by one, starting no later than Saturday, Dec. 12. In a press release, the aforementioned All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee said the “Modi government (is) insincere and arrogant about resolving farmers’ demands; all farmers’ rightly reject old proposals dressed up as new.”

The farm organizations have also called for a nationwide gherao or sit-down protest blocking transportation routes on Dec. 14. But they remain open to further talks with the government.

The militancy of the farmers has clearly rattled Modi and his government.

They continue to seeking a means to defuse the crisis, by offering minimal concessions and exploiting divisions within the farm groups whose leaders are largely drawn from more privileged farmers and who have close ties to various factions of the political establishment. And while the BJP lashes out, often in vile communally-charged rhetoric against the opposition parties, it also knows that it can count on their help in preventing the farmer agitation from becoming a catalyst for a broader explosion of social anger, especially from the working class.

Last week, Amit Shah held private talks with the Punjab Congress Chief Minister Captain Amerinder Singh. At their conclusion, the Congress leader called on both the government and farmers to seek a compromise so as to ensure “national security” is not jeopardized.

That said, it is manifestly evident that the government is also making the political and technical preparations for violently suppressing the farmers’ agitation. Defence Minister Rajanth Singh has been conspicuously present whenever the most senior BJP ministers have met to discuss the government’s response to the farm protests.

Massive repression, it must be recalled, was the government’s initial response. On Nov. 26-27, the central government and the BJP state governments in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh mounted a massive security operation to prevent the farmers from ever getting close to Delhi. Despite deploying para-military forces, tear gas and water-canon, invoking Section 144 of the Criminal Code in Haryana, thereby making all gatherings of more than four people illegal, and arresting hundreds; the authorities failed to stop tens of thousands of farmers reaching the borders of Delhi. There they were met with an ever-larger show of force.

The government provided a taste of what it is preparing during Tuesday’s Bharat bandh. Section 144 was imposed throughout Delhi and the entire state of Gujarat. The Delhi police, which are under the direct control of Home Minister Amit Shah, placed Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) head Arvind Kejriwal, under house arrest after he met farmers protesting at the city’s Singhu border entrance.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP Chief Minister and arch Hindu supremacist Yogi Adityanath ordered the temporary detention of his main political rival, Samajwadi party leader Akhilesh Yadav, and other Samajwadi party leaders as they were en route to participate in a Bharat Bandh rally. The UP police also detained Chandrashekhar Azad, leader of the Bhim Army, a Dalit rights organization, to prevent him from joining the farmers’ protest.

Yesterday, the two BJP ministers most directly responsible for the farm “reform” laws—Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar and Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Raosaheb Danve—sought to smear the farmer agitation as treasonous in a transparent attempt to manufacture a pretext for its violent repression.

“The agitation that is going on is not that of farmers,” Danve told a public event in Maharashtra. “China and Pakistan have a hand behind this … This is the conspiracy of other countries.” Later Agriculture Minister Tomar urged the media to investigate who is behind the farmers’ protest.

“Media’s eyes are sharp and we will leave it to find it out.”

In so far as the Modi government retains room for maneuver, it is because of the treacherous role being played by the organizations that claim to speak in the name of the working class: the trade unions and the Stalinist parliamentary parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI).

They are determined to prevent the working class from intervening in the political crisis as an independent political force, rallying the farmers and all the rural masses—above all the agricultural workers and landless peasants—behind it in a struggle against the Modi government and Indian capitalism.

The Stalinist unions, the CPM-affiliated Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the CPI-aligned All India Trades Union Congress (AITUC), joined the other unions in instructing workers to remain on the job during Tuesday’s Bharat bandh, and to confine any show of support for the farmers to participation in protest rallies.

This goes alongside the CPM and CPI’s longstanding efforts to divert the mass opposition to Modi behind the Congress Party, until recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government and the party that long spearheaded the implementation of “pro-investor” policies, and various right-wing regional and caste-ist parties

Last Sunday, the Stalinist parties joined with the Congress, the Tamil Nadu-based DMK, the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and other right-wing parties in issuing a statement hypocritically declaring support for Tuesday’s farmer protest. On Wednesday evening, CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury and CPI head D. Raja joined former Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and a handful of other opposition leaders in presenting their concerns about the farm bills to Indian President Ram Nath Kovind, a BJP hack.

Spelling out their opposition to the emergence of a mass movement and political general strike to bring down the hated Modi regime, both Yechury and Raja have declared that they don’t want to “politicize” the farmers’ agitation.

‘“It is a conscious decision on our part to stay away from the protest sites,” said Yechury. “The farmer groups themselves also told us that they would want it this way. So, we have no party banners at the protest sites. The CPI’s Raja was even more explicit, declaring, “We don’t need to politicize it [the farmers’ agitation].”

Meanwhile, in a ruling class frightened by the surge in social opposition and above all the possibility of an explosive intervention by the working class, support is growing for state repression and authoritarian methods of rule. Amitabh Kant, the head of the India government think thank NITI Aayog, told an online event Tuesday that “many more reforms still need to be done” if India is to compete against China as a “manufacturing nation.” He then complained “tough” reforms are “very difficult in the Indian context,” because “we are too much of a democracy.”

Sweden sees ICU occupancy approach 99 percent in Stockholm

Benjamin Mateus

The Swedish “experiment” to allow the virus to run rampant has proved to be an utter disaster. Intensive care units in Stockholm have nearly reached capacity as the death toll continues unabated.

Patient in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

The world has now seen over 70 million cases of COVID-19 infections, and nearly 1.6 million have died. Though the seven-day average has briefly peaked for new cases at 623,488 infections per day and deaths at 10,862 per day, there is still a tremendous velocity in the present surge ripping through Europe and North America as tepid containment measures attempt to stem not the virus but the economic damage the pandemic has wrought.

Much of the attention has turned to events in the United States, with deaths now exceeding 3,000 per day. The seven-day average has also surpassed 213,000, while the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations is approaching 110,000. Yet, the political establishment has washed their hands of any responsibility to contain the pandemic.

Yet, Sweden’s situation regarding the winter surge is not any better than in the United States. On a per-capita basis, the curves for new cases, deaths, and positivity rate grimly mirror each other, underscoring both countries’ criminal policies to let the virus run rampant.

Sweden vs US per capita cases

Sweden, a country with a population of just over 10 million, has documented 312,000 cases of COVID-19, or more than three percent of the population. The last 200,000 cases occurred in just the past two months as the surge has thoroughly thrashed the Scandinavian nation. There have also been 7,200 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, 1,200 in just the last month, and that figure is accelerating upwards.

On Wednesday, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that intensive care units in Stockholm hospitals had reached 99 percent of their capacity as an influx of new patients on Tuesday quickly filled beds. A handful of ICU beds are available in a city of one million.

Bjorn Eriksson, Stockholm’s health director, explained at a press conference that the situation is quite serious: “We have mobilized everything we could and taken to everything we had to offer so that everyone will get the care they need. We now need to continue to do our utmost, all actors in society as a whole, to offer resistance to the virus and the pandemic.” Changing only the names of the city and country, this is increasingly the situation throughout Europe.

The intensive care unit is the last safety net for patients with critical COVID-19 infections, who have to fight for their life. Lifesaving oxygen, dexamethasone and various therapeutic agents are but a few weapons in the arsenal needed to combat the infection and its sinister manifestations. The physicians and nurses must pay careful attention to vital signs and laboratory findings, looking for subtle changes in the patient’s physiology. When these capacities, specifically those of the ICU team, reach their limit, the situation begins to change rapidly for the worse.

Sweden vs US per capita deaths

According to Bjorn Persson, the operations manager for the intensive care unit, adjustments with nurse-to-patient ratios have been maximized at the Karolinska University Hospital. Staff work times have been extended, or they are kept after their shift to bridge shortages. Eriksson added, “It was exactly this development that we did not want to see. It shows that we Stockholmers have been crowded too much and had too many contacts outside the households where we left. The healthcare is not under so much pressure that there are no major margins in the healthcare system.”

Since cases began to rise in late September, Sweden has shifted to implementing piecemeal restrictions. On Nov. 20, bars and restaurants were banned from selling alcohol after 10 p.m. Five of the 21 regions across the country were placed under stricter guidelines, specifically urging public social distancing. Indoor and outdoor gatherings have been limited to eight, down from 50. Additional measures included public health warnings against attending parties, avoiding indoor gatherings and not using public transportation if unnecessary. Yet, these measures have done little to stall the surge.

On Nov. 22, an emotional Prime Minister Stefan Löfven addressed the nation over the pandemic, saying, “It is clear that it is going to take time before we can go back to normal. The little respite we got this summer and autumn is truly over. It is November now. People’s health and lives are still in danger. And the danger is increasing.”

In the face of their present circumstances, the Swedish Health Agency continues to reject face masks despite the World Health Organization’s recently expanded recommendations for their use, citing “poor evidence” of their effectiveness and concerns people will use them to avoid isolating.

State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell (Credit: Wikipedia)

“Face masks may be needed in some situations. Those situations have not arisen in Sweden yet, according to our dialogue with the [healthcare] regions,” said Anders Tegnell, the government’s chief epidemiologist. Tegnell had endorsed the homicidal policy of herd immunity under the deceitful pretense that this would entail “focused protection” that would supposedly protect society’s most vulnerable. The young and healthy were to become infected in sufficient numbers to establish broad-based immunity within the community while the elderly remained isolated to avoid infection. Yet, half of Sweden’s deaths in the spring occurred in long-term care facilities.

On the contrary, many scientists have criticized the Health Agency’s approach. Anders Vahlne, a professor of virology at Karolinska Institute, said, “They didn’t try to save their lives. They were scared that the intensive care units would be overwhelmed and you couldn’t take care of young people. And so, they were selecting [patients], a bit too harshly, I think.”

Piotr Nowak, a physician working at Karolinska with COVID patients, said, “Authorities chose a strategy totally different to the rest of Europe, and because of it the country has suffered a lot in the first wave. We have no idea how they failed to predict the second wave.” He explained that the medical community as a whole did not share the public-health agency’s misplaced “optimism.”