Israel’s fourth election in two years dominated by far-right forces

Jean Shaoul

Israel goes to the polls on March 23, following the failure of the seven-month-old national emergency coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and its allies and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White electoral bloc, to set a budget.

Three previous inconclusive elections in the past two years pitted Netanyahu against Gantz’s so-called “centre-left” bloc, which fought on an “Anyone but Bibi” [Netanyahu’s nickname] slogan without putting forward any alternative or progressive policies.

This time Netanyahu faces a strong challenge from the far right, his former colleagues. These forces have gained strength and moved to fill the vacuum left after Gantz joined and served as Netanyahu’s political accomplice in imposing the government’s “herd immunity” policies that have created a healthcare and social disaster for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike. Having lost all credibility, the centre-left is disintegrating and faces electoral wipeout.

Benjamin Netanyahu [Photo: Office of the Israeli Prime Minister]

Essentially a ferocious contest between far right parties, the election paves the way for ever escalating militarism abroad and social reaction and repression against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, its own Palestinians citizens within Israel, and the Jewish working class at home.

Netanyahu’s political strategy is dominated by his determination to avoid trial—the evidence sessions are due to start in February when he will have to appear in court--and conviction for corruption, bribery, and breach of trust in three separate cases. This means retaining the premiership at all costs, since a legal quirk allows an indicted prime minister but not a cabinet minister to remain in office and to introduce legislation preventing his trial from going ahead.

He agreed a coalition with Blue and White, promising to introduce a two-year budget and rotate the premiership with Gantz after 18 months, a pledge that everyone knew he had no intention of honouring. From the start, he had the measure of Gantz and his political allies, who even before the government was assembled abandoned their efforts to introduce legislation to stop Netanyahu from heading a government while under criminal indictment and limit a prime minister’s term to a maximum of eight years.

He excluded Gantz and his party from all the major decisions, including the recent normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, so that he could posture as a world statesman and a master foreign policy strategist. He used the pandemic to give himself unprecedented airtime, while taking the credit for obtaining the vaccine and inaugurating a speedy rollout programme that envisages inoculating two million of Israel’s nearly 10 million population by the end of January, including all of Israel’s over 60s.

The pandemic has thrown a million Israelis out of work, even as business leaders warn that thousands of companies are likely to close and a third partial lockdown has been imposed as the number of cases soar. Israel has reported more than 400,000 infections and 3,226 deaths, the vast majority since August, after the government lifted an early lockdown without adequate safety precautions and in defiance of recommendations by the country’s health experts. As cases began to rise, a second, partial lockdown was imposed in September and then lifted a few weeks later.

The situation is far worse in the Palestinian territories, for which Israel is legally responsible. The West Bank has recorded around 134,000 COVID-19 cases and 1,332 deaths, mostly in the last few months. The besieged Gaza enclave has run out of testing kits and the healthcare system is on the point of collapse, as more than 210 people have died.

Netanyahu’s fractious cabinet rarely met. Citing the pandemic as an excuse, he refused to set a two-year budget, prompting three senior finance ministry officials to resign over the political infighting, and precipitating the automatic dissolution of the Knesset on December 23. The government, which has been without a budget, has been operating under a pro-rated 2019 budget.

Gantz nevertheless did everything he could to keep the coalition afloat, agreeing to a three-month budget postponement until December. He reportedly agreed to limit the powers of Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn, a member of his own party, as a concession to the prime minister’s Likud party that was seeking to fire Nissenkorn to prevent him from appointing a state attorney and attorney general, whose roles are critical to Netanyahu’s criminal trial.

For Netanyahu, precipitating fresh elections before a new budget enables him to continue as caretaker prime minister, whereas a collapse of the coalition after an agreed budget would have given the rotating premiership to Gantz.

Netanyahu had hoped to profit from the latter’s vanishing popularity and form a more sympathetic coalition that could ensure his immunity from prosecution. But that hope has now been upended by his two former proteges turned rivals: Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. Seizing the opportunity presented by the discrediting of Gantz’s bloc, right-winger Sa’ar, who last year challenged Netanyahu in a Likud leadership contest, established New Hope as his own political vehicle. He has stated his refusal to sit with Netanyahu in a future coalition. Sa’ar has the support of several Likud ministers, including Netanyahu’s key political ally, the far right, religious and pro-settler Ze’ev Elkin, who is committed to a Greater Israel policy, as well as other Likud legislators and members anxious to see the end of Netanyahu’s reign.

Sa’ar is to the right of Netanyahu, having openly opposed the 1982 evacuation of Israeli settlements in Sinai as part of the peace deal with Egypt, the so-called “two-state” solution, and Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005 and supported the annexation of the West Bank which Israel has illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. As Interior Minister, he oversaw the deportation of more African asylum seekers than any other official.

Bennet, another former Likud member who now heads the religious Yamina Party, has now announced his intention to seek the premiership. Together with Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Israel Beiteinu, the ultra-religious parties and defectors from Gantz’s Blue and White Party, they have the potential to unseat Netanyahu.

In the meantime, Netanyahu is constantly provoking Iran ahead of US President-elect Joseph Biden’s inauguration and the possible resumption of talks to revise the nuclear agreement. It is widely accepted that Israel’s Mossad was behind the assassination of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh earlier this month. It comes in the wake of the much-publicized US-brokered “peace deal” with several Arab states that is part of the Trump administration’s broad anti-Iranian axis being formed in preparation for a potentially catastrophic war aimed at regime-change in Tehran, and rolling back Chinese and Russian influence in the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The normalization of commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel, including the first direct flights to the UAE and the right to use Saudi airspace, has prompted increasing concerns in Tehran of Israeli encirclement. It fears that the petro-state will provide Israel with a secret forward base for use against Iran amid Israel’s close cooperation with Azerbaijan, Iran’s neighbour on the Caspian Sea, where Israeli weaponry played a key role in the recent fighting against Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Israel has stepped up its provocations against Iran after Tehran blamed Israel for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and warned that it would not stay idle while its neighbours build up their military strength. A few days ago, an Israeli submarine passed through the Suez Canal in coordination with Egypt en route for the Persian Gulf. Speaking at a military ceremony, Israel's army chief of staff General Aviv Kochavi threatened a stiff response against Iran and its allies. This was followed two days later by Netanyahu insisting that Israel would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel continues to bomb Iranian-linked targets in Syria, while the Israel Defense Forces have been placed on a state of high alert, reportedly because of a possible US attack on Iran.

Coronavirus accelerates as new strain detected across Europe

Will Morrow

As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across Europe, several governments announced over the holidays that they had detected cases of the new, even more infectious strain of the virus, currently believed to have originated in England.

Yesterday, Britain reported more than 40,000 cases—a record since the beginning of the pandemic. Most new cases in at least southern England are believed to be due to the new strain of the virus. The seven-day average is also at an all-time high of more than 36,000, equivalent to almost 180,000 daily cases in a country the size of the United States.

The strain has now been detected on every continent. Its spread is intersecting with the criminal policy of European governments, refusing essential measures to stop the pandemic’s spread that would threaten corporate profits, including the closure of non-essential workplaces and schools and provision of a decent income to the population.

Health care workers transport a COVID-19 patient from an intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital in Kyjov to hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

On December 26, the French health ministry published a notice announcing the first confirmed case involving the new strain in France. The patient was a French national residing in England who returned from the UK on December 19. It was only detected because the patient, who was asymptomatic, went to the hospital to be treated for a different illness on December 21, and was tested according to standard procedures.

Also on Saturday, Spain announced four confirmed cases of the new strain, all among people recently arrived from the UK. Madrid deputy health chief Antonio Zapatero reported that three other suspected cases could not be confirmed until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Italy registered its second confirmed case of the new strain on December 21. In Europe it has also been detected in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Yesterday, Canada announced that it had detected two cases, and on Friday Japan announced that it had found five cases, all in people recently arrived from the UK. Finland reported yesterday that two people arriving from abroad had tested positive for the new strain, and another for a variant recently detected for the first time in South Africa. It has also been detected in South Korea, Lebanon and Australia.

There is currently no indication that the more recent strain is more deadly, or resistant to recently developed vaccines. However, it is significantly more contagious, threatening to flood hospitals more rapidly with critically-ill patients, and cause a large increase in deaths.

On December 23, researchers at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, released preliminary results of new research on the transmissibility and severity of the new strain. The group fitted a two-strain model of the virus to COVID-19 hospital admissions, ICU and hospital bed occupancy, and deaths in the three most heavily affected National Health Service regions of England.

They estimate that the strain is 56 percent more contagious, with a 95 percent confidence interval between 50 and 74 percent, consistent with previous estimates that the strain is 70 percent more contagious.

The group conclude that “the increase in transmissibility is likely to lead to a large increase in incidence, with COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths projected to reach higher levels in 2021 than were observed in 2020.” They state that this would be the case even if current lock-down restrictions introduced on December 19 are maintained.

The researchers call specifically to close schools: “Our estimates suggest that control measures of a similar stringency to the national lockdown implemented in England in November 2020 are unlikely to reduce the effective reproduction number R to less than 1, unless primary schools, secondary schools, and universities are also closed.” At the same time, they call for an increase of the vaccine roll-out to more than 2 million cases per week, approximately 10 times the number currently being carried out.

Across Europe, official policy is dictated not by the scientific requirement to combat the virus, but the economic imperatives of the financial elite and the protection of corporate profits. The lock-downs implemented in France, Germany, the UK, Italy and elsewhere beginning in October kept schools open, so parents could be kept at work. Their policies have caused a second wave that is killing hundreds of thousands across Europe.

The official death toll in Europe (including Russia) now stands at 525,000, but the real figure is far higher. Yesterday, the Rosstat national statistics agency announced that an estimated 186,000 Russians have died from the virus this year—more than three times higher than the number previously maintained by the Russian government. The figure is based on an analysis of the excess mortality rate; from January to November 2020, the death toll in Russia from all causes increased by over 229,000 compared to the previous year.

In the UK, while the official death toll is now over 71,000, separate figures published by the national statistics agency, including all cases where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, place the number at 87,000. There have been over 72,000 deaths reported in Italy, 63,000 in France, 50,000 in Spain and 30,000 in Germany. Hundreds of deaths are being reported from all these countries every day.

There are clear warnings by scientists that a further acceleration has already been underway for several weeks. In France, the official case numbers reported over the holiday period have been below 10,000 since Sunday, due to the impact of reduced testing. But the real number is closer to that reported on Friday and Saturday, with more than 40,000 cases detected in 48 hours. The R rate is again above 1, denoting exponential spread of the disease.

Amid the expanding death toll, EU governments and media have focused almost exclusively on the first use of the COVID-19 vaccine on the continent. The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were approved by European regulatory authorities on December 21.

France administered the vaccine for the first time to aged-care residents in Sevran and Dijon on Sunday. Vaccines have been administered in Italy, Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

Billions of people worldwide rightly welcome the arrival of a vaccine as a means to eradicate the spread of the deadly virus. But the propaganda campaign of the European governments and media is aimed at covering over the policy of death that they are pursuing, which is allowing the virus to spread.

In France, for example, the official timeline for the roll-out of the vaccine estimates that it will not be administered to the 14 million most vulnerable people until at least the end of April, and possibly later. In contrast, experts give varying estimates of 85 percent or more of the population who must be immune to stop the spread of the virus. Yet nothing is proposed to prevent the spread of the virus in the interim period.

The EU declared December 27-29 to be “EU vaccination days,” and EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that the vaccine had been “delivered to all European countries,” calling it a “touching moment of unity.” In fact, to the extent that there is “unity” among the European powers, it is that an untold number of lives must be sacrificed for the interests of the capitalist class.

Brexit deal paves way for further conflicts

Robert Stevens

Britain and the European Union (EU) are set to ratify the trade deal agreed on December 24. The deal between the UK and the EU’s 27 countries covers trade worth around £660 billion and preserves tariff and quota-free EU-UK trade for goods.

Agreement on the “EU-U.K. Trade and Cooperation Agreement as of January 1, 2021” formally concludes the Brexit process which began in June 2016, when the UK voted in a referendum by a slim majority to leave the EU.

The deal is being rushed through the UK parliament Wednesday, after just one day of debate on a 1,246-page document. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has an 80-seat majority and support for the deal from the main opposition Labour Party. Only the Scottish National Party (just 47 MPs) and Liberal Democrats (11) are pledged to vote against.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed the Withdrawal Agreement for the UK to leave the EU on January 31st. [Credit: U.K. Prime Minister]

EU ambassadors met in Brussels yesterday to approve the deal, initiating the process for adoption. The EU can provisionally implement it on January 1 with the approval of EU countries, but without the consent of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is expected to ratify it sometime in February.

The agreement was reached just days before the December 31 deadline. Britain left the EU in January, via its Withdrawal Agreement with Brussels, and entered a one-year transitional phase. Without the deal agreed last week, the UK would have left the EU in a “hard Brexit” and been forced to trade on World Trade Organisation terms and via a complex tariffs system.

The trade talks were fractious, with both sides engaged in grandstanding and threats up to the last minute. Both sides were forced to make concessions, particularly the UK on fishing rights.

As the talks concluded, Johnson was massively undermined by the November US presidential election victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump. The victory of the Democrats, whose hostility to Brexit is well-known, was a boon to the EU. The Tory government’s Brexit strategy had leant heavily on a slavish adherence to Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and his hostility to the EU.

With both sides wanting a deal, the agreement, with many issues left unresolved, was all that could be achieved in a global situation dominated by escalating trade conflicts between the major imperialist powers.

Ultimately, the deal does nothing other than set the short-term parameters of the ongoing conflict between the UK and EU. It is the fullest expression to date of the vociferous tensions that are tearing the EU apart, bringing into sharp relief global tensions that have erupted between the US and Europe, with the UK the main fault line.

It is inevitable that the issues the negotiations were unable to resolve will become the focus for major geo-political conflicts.

The document has nothing to say on foreign policy, defence and security. On many of these issues, the UK is aligned with the US, and Britain will continue to be pitted against the EU even as Biden seeks other allies on the continent. In the run-up to the agreement, the UK had already exited a raft of EU security and defence arrangements, including Galileo, its Global Satellite Navigation System.

There is nothing in the deal on financial services, an area where Britain is a global leader with a £132 billion industry that accounts for almost 7 percent of GDP. In 2018, financial services employed more than one million people, with London accounting for 49 percent of the sector's output.

The Financial Times reported that Brussels told London that it “will need to wait until after January 1 to learn what market access rights its financial services companies will have in future, warning that they will hinge on how far Britain diverges from EU standards.”

Agreement had been reached earlier that access to each other’s financial services markets will be based on an “equivalence” of regulatory systems. But Brussels is getting its retribution in first, fully aware of the inevitable moves by London to gain economic advantage by undercutting the EU on workers’ protection rights, environmental standards, and other regulations Britain is no longer tied to.

Announcing the deal, Johnson made clear his intention to establish a “Singapore-on-Thames” in direct competition with the EU. What “we’re jointly creating”, he declared in a speech on December 24, is a “giant free trade zone.” The UK would now “be able to decide how and where we are going to stimulate new jobs and new hope, with freeports and new green industrial zones.” Applications are already in for 10 freeports around the UK, based on offering corporations low taxes and a cheap labour force, including on the Thames in London.

Johnson gave his first post-deal interview to the Sunday Telegraph, with the newspaper noting how the prime minister signaled that “he would be ready to rip up the agreement should Brussels ‘regularly’ attempt to take retaliatory action.” Business taxes and regulations would be pored over, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak, the main proponent of freeports, “doing a big exercise on all of this”.

The Brexit deal pits the working class into conflict with the most ruthless and rapacious sections of the ruling elite, who view Brexit as their great opportunity to complete “the Thatcher Revolution”.

The reactionary claims propounded by the Left Leave campaign in 2014—headed by the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party—that Brexit would ever be anything other than a Thatcherite nightmare for the working class have been exploded. As the deal was being finalised, the SWP commented pathetically in a Socialist Worker piece headlined, “Brexit could have meant more than this,” that the “Tories have come up with various versions of Brexit designed to make it even easier for the bosses to exploit people. They hanker after a Singapore on Thames’ where workers’ rights are shredded and racist laws are strengthened.”

Who would have thought that the Tories would consider such a thing?

The other great myth left shattered is the claim of the Remain section of the ruling elite and its supporters that the EU was or could ever be a restraining influence on the “free market” worshipping Brexiteers and offer a progressive way forward for workers. The entire European continent is wracked by social inequality, with far right forces being deliberately cultivated to wield as a weapon against the working class. Moreover, Brussels is a just as committed to trade war as London.

The vicious pursuit of the class interests of all the European powers was clear even in the timing of the agreement. This year has witnessed the largest preventable loss of life on the continent since World War II, with over 525,000 succumbing to a deadly disease. Over 71,000 officially and at least 80,000 according to other authoritative estimates have died in the UK alone from COVID-19. But at no point did anyone on either side suggest that perhaps the UK leaving the EU might be delayed, even though, as is confirmed by the chaotic scenes at the port of Dover, the distribution of food and medicines was threatened, including the vaccine for COVID-19.

COVID-19 cases skyrocket in South Korea and Japan

Ben McGrath

Both South Korea and Japan have seen sharp increases in COVID-19 cases over the past several weeks, brought on by government neglect and a refusal to take any serious measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Instead, as in countries around the world, the responses of Tokyo and Seoul to the pandemic have been driven by concerns for big business.

South Korea reported 808 new COVID-19 cases for Sunday, down from a record number of 1,241 new cases on Friday. The decline, however, is attributed to fewer tests over the weekend. By 9.30 p.m. Monday evening, there were already 931 cases. The numbers have been growing by approximately 800 to 1,000 new infections per day since mid-December. In total, there have been 58,611 cases in the country while at least 819 deaths have occurred.

The densely populated capital of Seoul has overtaken Daegu as the epicenter of the pandemic in the country. The city continues to be the location of most new infections, with the surrounding metropolitan area of Gyeonggi Province close behind. In total, there were 485 new cases between the two areas on Sunday. The region is home to approximately half of South Korea’s population of 51 million.

People walking in Shibuya, 2 February 2020. (Wikimedia Commons/nakashi)

Under the central government’s five-tier social distancing scheme, the Seoul metropolitan area is under “Level 2.5” while the rest of the country is under Level 2. Level 3 is the highest. On December 21, the government announced that it would ban personal gatherings of five or more people from December 23 until January 3. This means that workers are still being kept on the job and most businesses can remain open, though with some restrictions.

Despite the skyrocketing numbers, the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in has refused to implement enhanced social distancing measures. Moon stated earlier this month that doing so would cause too much “pain and damages” through the closure of stores and other facilities. In other words, the government has no intention of providing aid or assistance to workers or small businesses adversely affected by the pandemic.

The ban on personal gatherings is an attempt to shift blame onto individuals and away from the government. On Friday, Prime Minister Jeong Se-gyun, sounded a similar note, saying, “The vast majority of the nation is faithfully adhering to the government's antivirus measures despite the inconvenience and pain they entail, but if a few cheat for their own gains, it is difficult to expect results from participating in the antivirus measures.”

Seoul’s response to the pandemic has been reactive from the beginning, making decisions in response to new developments, rather than having any serious plan in place. Despite the nearly year-long pandemic and time to prepare, Seoul is now scrambling to find enough hospital beds to accommodate seriously ill patients. The Health Ministry stated Sunday that there were only 68 available beds in the capital region.

While workers and those without material means are being left out to dry, the government’s response in March demonstrates its true concerns. That month, the Bank of Korea stated that it had “decided to provide an unlimited amount of liquidity to financial firms to help minimise the economic fallout from the spread of COVID-19 and remove uncertainties in the financial market.” While workers suffer, the rich get anything they want.

It is a similar situation in Japan, which has also reported a record high number of new COVID-19 cases, with 3,841 new infections on Friday. There were 888 cases in Tokyo, which was also a record. In total, there have been more than 217,312 cases and 3,213 deaths.

The number of new cases is quickly putting a strain on the medical system. In seven prefectures and regions including Tokyo and Osaka, hospital bed capacity has surpassed 50 percent—the threshold for declaring the most affected regions to be at “Stage 4,” the highest level in a four-tier system indicating the most rapid growth of the virus.

The tier system was implemented in July as part of the government’s reckless “Go to Travel” campaign, designed to stimulate the economy and present a sense of normality to justify its own refusal to adopt safety measures. It has undoubtedly contributed to the proliferation of the virus. Even as cases spread, the program, which provides government subsidies for domestic travel, has not been halted, but only suspended from December 28 to January 11.

As of now, the government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has denied the need for a state of emergency that would enable the government to implement limited lockdown measures. This is despite the fact that the Japan Medical Association and eight other healthcare organisations declared on December 21 that the country was facing an emergency. In a joint statement, the groups said: “The spread of the coronavirus infection shows no signs of stopping. Left unchecked, people in Japan will not be able to receive regular medical care, let alone care for COVID-19.”

Suga responded on Friday by appealing, “Please cooperate by refraining from gatherings as much as possible, so that we can stop infections from spreading.” In other words, just as the government in Seoul has claimed, spreading infections is the fault of individuals—many of whom are forced to go to work or school while taking overcrowded public transportation. The Tokyo metropolitan area is home to approximately 38 million people.

Suga’s refusal to implement a state of emergency demonstrates that the main concern is protecting big business and the extraction of profit from the working class. However, it also demonstrates the real nature of the state-of-emergency law that was passed in March. Rather than being a tool to protect the population, the government has used the pandemic as a pretext for strengthening laws that will be used to suppress political dissent.

On Friday, Japanese health authorities also confirmed the first cases of the new, mutated COVID-19 strain that is currently spreading in the United Kingdom. The strain was detected in five people who had recently arrived from the UK. The Health Ministry claims that none of the patients has had close contact with others since returning to Japan, but this is almost certainly not the case given the nature of travel.

The lack of preparation or regard for the health of the majority of the people in both countries demonstrates the need for a working class response to the pandemic.

Housing crisis fuels poverty and inequality in New Zealand

Tom Peters

For hundreds of thousands of families in New Zealand, the holiday period this year will be one of the hardest in living memory.

Like other countries, the working class is bearing the full brunt of the most severe global economic crisis since the Great Depression, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although New Zealand has, so far, experienced only 25 deaths from the virus, the social impact has been devastating.

The Labour Party-led government, which was re-elected in October and formed a coalition with the Green Party, is presiding over soaring social inequality and poverty. Its main response to the crisis was to hand out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, mostly to large businesses. The Reserve Bank is making more than $100 billion available to the commercial banks, to prop up their profits and ensure unlimited cheap cash for big investors. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs and 30 percent of households have reported a drop in income this year.

A typical Porirua street (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In a December 7 interview with Stuff, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said her priorities remained to fix “housing, child poverty and climate change… Child poverty really motivates me, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to be in politics.”

During the election campaign Ardern falsely claimed that child poverty had reduced since she became prime minister in 2017. In fact, more than one in five children are still living in poverty.

A post-election briefing to Ardern from her Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which was only made public on December 15, revealed it expects the number of children living in “material hardship,” i.e., lacking basics such as adequate clothing, shelter and food, to “rise strongly” in the coming period.

Demand for food parcels from charities is at record highs. On Christmas Eve, the Press newspaper reported that queues outside the Christchurch City Mission were causing “traffic chaos.” It noted that “Auckland City Mission has doubled the number of food parcels it makes available” after its phone lines crashed when it “received 42,000 calls in one day.” The charity estimates the level of “food poverty” has doubled from one in 10 to one in five people.

Housing costs are a major factor fueling the crisis. According to the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development, in 2019, 320,000 households were paying 40 percent or more of their income on housing. This has undoubtedly worsened in the past year, as house prices have soared by 11 percent, driven by out of control speculation by wealthy investors. Even in poor suburbs like Otara, South Auckland, modest houses are selling for more than $1 million.

Tee, Porirua emergency housing resident (Source: WSWS Media)

The number of mortgages in arrears increased to 15,000 in November, 2,000 more than in September, as people who have been made unemployed struggle to meet their payments.

As of September, there were 22,000 families waiting for public housing subsidised by the government, up from 6,000 in 2017. These people are basically homeless, living with relatives, in overcrowded conditions, or in caravans, garages, or motels that are serving as “emergency” public housing.

Figures from Trade Me, the main website listing rental properties, show that the national median weekly rent is now $520—21 percent higher than in 2015. In working class Porirua, north of Wellington, the figure is now $595, not much less than the median weekly income.

A 2018 report found that 20 percent of children in Porirua lived in overcrowded houses and a quarter were in damp and mouldy conditions. Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told Newshub on December 19: “This is already a crisis that demands an urgent policy response.”

Tee, a construction worker in Porirua, told the World Socialist Web Site that he and his partner, who is pregnant, were forced to live in emergency housing at a motel. The couple left their old flat in Hamilton when the landlord increased the rent from $350 to $550 “all in one go” after discovering that Tee had got a job.

“I am on $20 an hour, about $680 a week,” he said. This is just above the legal minimum wage. “It’s sad for us to watch on TV that there are kids and parents sleeping in their cars. It is heartbreaking.

“I voted for Labour, my whole family did. We were all thinking that the government was going to make a change. But by the looks of it, they are bringing more people down, not giving them places to live,” Tee said. “I hope that the government does hear us. To be honest, they are only sitting behind their desk and not realising how many people are actually struggling out here on the streets.”

A cleaner in Porirua, who asked to be referred to as Waha, had seen appalling conditions in some of the flats she cleaned. She told the WSWS some people paid $500 or $700 a week for “dumps.”

“I know when the windows don’t shut properly because you get a hell of a lot of mould and grime, and it doesn’t hold the heat in. The tenants are paying astronomical rents and the landlords and real estate agents say it’s a fair trade, when it’s not. If these houses were in better nick, people wouldn’t be spending a lot more money on heating, clothing, firewood, carpets, thermal curtains.

“All the people I know work bloody hard and usually both parents are working. Twenty-five dollars an hour is supposedly good money, but it’s not. As soon as the money hits their bank account it’s gone on power, rent, tax, petrol,” Waha said.

Fifteen years ago, she continued, it was possible to pay $520 a week for a large four-bedroom house, but since then the cost of living has soared, while wages remained stagnant. It was now impossible to save for anything.

Waha asked: “Why is the government allowing landlords to have rents at such astronomical prices? They have to do something. It’s their fault and only their fault. You cannot blame low-income people or unemployed people.” She said her attitude to politicians was the same as Jamaican singer Bob Marley, who once said: “It doesn’t matter to me, because they’re all the same.”

She said Prime Minister Ardern “plays the game very well” and was good at making speeches, but had done nothing for working people. “The working class is very anxious, there’s a lot of worry and stress, and at this time of the year a lot of financial drama. It’s been a hard year for them.”

Active-duty Spanish officers hail retired officers’ fascist calls for mass murder

Alejandro López

Spain’s online daily Público has released fascistic chat messages from a WhatsApp group of 121 active-duty officers from the IX Artillery Promotion. These messages support fascist retired officers who on WhatsApp hailed Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, and called for a political genocide of 26 million people—anyone related by blood to voters for the ruling social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and “left populist” Podemos party. This comes as videos emerge of Spanish soldiers singing fascist and neo-Nazi songs and making the fascist salute.

These chats also expose the false claims of Podemos general secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias as he downplays and covers up fascist sentiment in the officer corps. After the retired officers’ WhatsApp chats were revealed, Iglesias gave a prime-time television speech dismissing the chats as irrelevant, since they came from non-active-duty personnel: “What these gentlemen say, at their age and already retired, in a chat with a few too many drinks, does not pose any threat.”

It is now clear that the retired officers spoke for fascist sentiment that is rife within the entire officer corps, including among those on active duty. The latest chat leaked by Público starts with officer Alberto Vázquez sending an article from far-right online daily esdiario.es. The article accuses Colonel José Ignacio Domínguez, a former participant in the retired officers’ chat group, of having leaked the chats to Infolibreand being related to Iglesias.

Spanish army members pause during a rehearsal prior celebrations of the Spanish Constitution day at the Colon square in Madrid, Spain, Friday, Dec. 4, 2020. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Vázquez adds, “I trust that in this chat there is no S.O.B. traitor who denounces his colleagues in the worst manners like this chequista [fascist term for communist], without values or camaraderie. A private chat is private, in which you can say whatever you want, without anyone having to wait for a favour or fear of arbitrariness from anyone. We use our individual rights and freedoms, which have nothing to do with the respect that as military men we have for the constitution and the laws, unlike this mob that twists them at will to terminate the nation and the King.”

An officer identifying himself as Membrilla responds with a sticker of a gunner with his thumb raised, to which Vázquez responds, referring to Colonel Domínguez: “I wonder how this guy who is in the military, high ranking, minimally educated and cultured, at seventy years old, can be a communist? Communism is the most genocidal political system invented by man, the most annihilating of human freedom, the [system] most against God and men that we have ever seen.”

After this anti-communist rant, other active soldiers intervene to show their support for the fascist retired officers, the content of their chats and attacking the alleged whistle-blower Domínguez.

Burgos cynically asks, “where is the data protection law, if a private chat can be violated?” Albert Vázquez replies, “Under the rat’s hair bun.” Iglesias is well known for wearing his long hair in a bun, and Público notes that far right groups have manipulated social media links so that searches for “hunchbacked rat” in Spanish return Iglesias in the top search results.

Burgos—whom Público identifies as Second Lieutenant Gabriel Burgos Sánchez, currently in reserve but not retired—then supports the retired officers’ fascist WhatsApp messages, issuing a series of attacks on the Podemos-PSOE government typically used by fascist Vox party in parliament.

He accuses the Spanish government of overstating the COVID-19 pandemic, bemoaning “a Prime Minister [Pedro Sánchez] lying with death figures,” and denounces Podemos: “Pablo Iglesias allows himself the luxury of attacking the Monarchy, rejoicing the beating up of a policeman …” Burgos adds: “And they dare to attack a chat group when they ignore the feelings of many facing this attack and a world turned upside down by the evil ones? Gentlemen, ...... this was always Communism!!!”

Burgos added, “I consider everything to be an insult to all of us. They are coming to tell us: ‘you’re stupid …. Giving your whole life to defend your country when we don’t care.’”

Eventually, the chat members became concerned that these messages might be leaked publicly, as their fascist rants are opposed by the overwhelming majority of workers and youth. Garcia wrote, “we have to be more careful,” accompanying his text with the fascist salute and a cuff bearing the Francoite flag with the imperial eagle.

According to Público, this chat group is just “one of many other chats with a marked extreme right-wing bias and links shared with calls to overthrow the current government”. Público said it would publish more such chats in coming days.

These reports confirm the warnings of the WSWS: amid mounting social inequality and the political crisis triggered by the pandemic, powerful forces in European bourgeois politics are spreading and legitimizing fascism. Terrified by rising anger, protests and strikes against “herd immunity” policies and trillion-euro bailouts for corporations and banks, the ruling class is cultivating these forces against the mounting radicalisation of the working class.

The fact that Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias is hated by the fascists does not make him any less hostile to the working class. Aware that mobilising workers against the threat of a fascist coup would also lead them into struggle against his own pro-austerity and militarist government, Iglesias prefers to downplay its significance.

In a recent book presentation, Iglesias once again downplayed the significance of the chats, stating that to claim that the military could repeat a coup like in 1981 “means not understanding this country.” He criticized attempts to “distract ourselves with the chats of old former soldiers; instead we should focus on those narratives which seek to delegitimise” the PSOE-Podemos government.

Iglesias’ argument that pro-Francoite sentiment in the officer corps and calls for mass murder are irrelevant—in a country where Franco’s fascist military coup in 1936 led to a nearly forty-year fascist dictatorship from 1939 to 1978—is politically criminal. In reality, the Francoites in the officer corps, both active-duty and retired, speak for powerful sections of the entire Spanish ruling class. Their demands for deep social austerity, imperialist war, and “herd immunity” policies on COVID-19, and their coup plotting, proceed under political cover provided by Podemos.

This is because Iglesias is far more afraid of mass opposition among workers and youth to his own herd immunity and austerity policies than he is of a fascistic coup.

Sweden records deadliest November since 1918 Spanish flu pandemic

Jordan Shilton

Sweden recorded last month its deadliest November since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. With 8,088 deaths registered in the country, the excess mortality was 10 percent compared to average deaths in the same month between 2015 and 2019, according to Statistics Sweden.

These figures are a damning indictment of the ruling elite’s criminal response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has consisted of a refusal to take any serious measures to curb the spread of the disease. Sweden’s Social Democrat-led government’s refusal to impose even the limited lockdowns enacted in other European countries, together with its decisions to keep primary and lower secondary schools open and place no restrictions on economic activity, has produced a disastrously high death total and brought the country’s chronically underfunded health care system to the brink of collapse. Leading public health officials, including state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, openly acknowledged in the spring that they were pursuing a policy of “herd immunity.”

Last week, the official COVID-19 death toll in Sweden surpassed 8,000. In a country of just 10 million people, over 400,000 infections have been recorded. Around 100 people are dying on a daily basis, the equivalent of over 3,000 in the United States population. Conditions are especially dire in the Stockholm region, where ICU capacity is over 100 percent and nonessential treatments are being cancelled. Patients must now be transferred to other regions of the country, and the possibility of seeking help from neighbouring Finland and Norway is even being discussed.

Patient in an Intensive Care Unit (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Official figures indicate that large numbers of those infected never receive medical care. Just 3,815 people have received treatment in intensive care since the pandemic began, a figure that includes survivors and people who have died. In other words, only a fraction of the 8,167 people confirmed to have died from coronavirus as of December 22 received intensive care treatment.

The denial of care to certain sections of the population, especially those in care homes, has been even more dramatic. According to a report released earlier this month by the health and social care inspectorate, one in 20 suspected COVID-19 patients in some regions physically saw a doctor. Other regions issued explicit instructions denying all hospital care to care home residents for any illness or injury.

The crisis in the health system is compounded by the exodus of nurses and other health care professionals triggered by appalling working conditions. According to a survey by broadcaster TV4, nurses are leaving the profession in record numbers across the country. Resignations are up in 13 out of Sweden’s 21 regions compared to a year ago, reaching up to 500 a month. A report by Swedish Radio revealed that all of the country’s regional university hospitals, apart from Norrland University Hospital in the far north, no longer have adequate staffing levels to provide care to all COVID-19 patients.

In a desperate attempt to locate staff to treat ICU patients, authorities in Stockholm announced the redeployment of 100 staff from a children’s hospital to work in ICUs.

Sineva Ribeiro, head of the Swedish Association of Health Care Professionals, told Bloomberg that the crisis facing hospitals is “unprecedented.” The main challenge is no longer ICU beds but finding the staff to provide an adequate level of patient care. “In a work environment where you are so tired, the risk of mistakes increases,” she said. “And those mistakes can lead to patients dying.”

The mass death produced by the ruling elite’s policies will result in the largest decline in life expectancy in Sweden since 1944, according to separate figures from Statistics Sweden released in late November. Life expectancy for women will fall from 84.7 last year to 84.4 by the end of 2020, and from 81.2 to 80.7 for men. Researchers warned that these staggering declines in just one year could prove to be even larger, since the number of deaths for the months September to December were estimates based on data from previous years.

While the Social Democrat/Green government’s reckless policies enjoyed the support of the entire political establishment from the outset, popular anger is mounting. This has been further fueled by the release of the official coronavirus commission’s initial report, which sharply criticised the government’s poor handling of the pandemic and pointed to “structural” problems caused by decades of austerity and privatisation as being responsible for the disaster. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven was forced to appoint the commission, which is led by Mats Melin, a former judge on Sweden’s top administrative court, after the government’s failure to protect elderly residents in care homes provoked widespread outrage.

The commission wrote in its preliminary report released December 14, “Apart from the general spread of the virus in society, the factor that has had the greatest impact on the number of cases of illness and deaths from COVID-19 in Swedish residential care is structural shortcomings that have been well-known for a long time. These shortcomings have led to residential care being unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a pandemic. Staff employed in the elderly care sector were largely left by themselves to tackle the crisis.”

The commission noted that one of the shortcomings was the widespread use of zero hours contracts, which forced low-paid and precariously employed care staff to continue coming to work, even if they felt sick, for fear of losing their job. In addition, it criticised low staffing levels, an issue raised by the World Health Organisation prior to the pandemic, and the failure to supply adequate levels of personal protective equipment (PPE). Even though two government agencies acknowledged in early February that problems existed in securing adequate quantities of PPE, the National Board of Health and Welfare only began compiling an overview of the situation in Sweden’s 290 municipalities in April, when the virus was already running rampant.

In unusually sharp terms for a bureaucratic report, the commission placed ultimate responsibility for the catastrophic response on successive governments of all political stripes. “The ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the government in power—and with the previous governments that also possessed this information [about structural shortcomings in elderly care),” wrote the commission, which is not due to present a more comprehensive report on all aspects of the pandemic response until early 2022.

The right-wing opposition Moderate and Christian Democrat parties, together with the far-right Sweden Democrats, have seized on the commission’s report to intensify pressure on Löfven’s minority Social Democrat/Green coalition. Despite having fully endorsed the rejection of lockdowns and other measures to contain the virus, Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson has attacked the government for delays with testing, the provision of PPE, and contact tracing. Figures within the Moderates are calling for resignations, including by Health Minister Lena Hallengren.

Löfven, whose government relies on support from the Centre and Liberal parties for a parliamentary majority, declared last Friday that he has full confidence in Hallengren and suggested that the opposition parties could table a vote of no confidence in his government.

However the immediate political crisis develops, it is clear that the entire political establishment is complicit in Sweden’s disastrous pandemic response. Successive Social Democrat- and Moderate-led governments have systematically cut spending for health care, social services and education, while privatising large chunks of Sweden’s once much-vaunted public services. Under Prime Minister Göran Persson from the mid-1990s to 2006, the Social Democrat government relied on the support of the ex-Stalinist Left Party to carry through this agenda, which paved the way for Moderate Prime Minister Frederick Reinfeldt to launch a sweeping privatisation drive and major tax cuts when his right-wing Alliance government took power in 2006.

Löfven, who returned the Social Democrats to power in 2014, has continued the rightward shift within Swedish politics, including by imposing drastic hikes in military spending while starving health care and critical social services. The Social Democrat/Green coalition is kept in power by the votes of the Left Party, which occasionally issues hypocritical attacks on the government’s right-wing policies while continuing to provide the votes necessary to keep the Social Democrats and Greens in power.

Unanswered questions in the SolarWinds Orion hack

Kevin Reed

On December 14, the IT infrastructure company SolarWinds confirmed that hackers had embedded malware into software updates for its flagship Orion platform and the malicious code had been pushed out to as many as 18,000 of its customers.

The hastily issued announcement from the Austin, Texas-based company said, “This attack was a very sophisticated supply chain attack, which refers to a disruption in a standard process resulting in a compromised result with a goal of being able to attack subsequent users of the software.”

SolarWinds Orion is used widely by US government agencies and Fortune 500 corporations, as well as small to medium-sized companies, to perform basic information system and networking duties such as user accounts administration and performance monitoring, reporting and alerting. According to company marketing literature, Orion is sold as a “scalable architecture that reaches across your physical, virtualized, and cloud IT environments.”

The United States Chamber of Commerce building in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File]

Once the software update containing the malware—now known as Sunburst or Solorigate—is installed on a host system, it creates a backdoor that reveals itself to the hackers after lying dormant for 12 to 14 days. SolarWinds said the Trojan-horse malicious code had been present in updates that were distributed between March and June of this year.

Reuters reported a day after the SolarWinds announcement that “the hackers have already parlayed their access into consequential breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce.” The news agency said that “multiple criminals have offered to sell access to SolarWinds’ computers through underground forums, according to two researchers who separately had access to those forums.”

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security responded to news of the hack with an emergency directive that said, “Affected agencies shall immediately disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products, versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1 HF1, from their network. Until such time as CISA directs affected entities to rebuild the Windows operating system and reinstall the SolarWinds software package, agencies are prohibited from (re)joining the Windows host OS to the enterprise domain.”

While the information published about the Sunburst malware by SolarWinds and the CISA made reference to “threat actor activity” and that it “may have been conducted by an outside nation state,” neither gave a specific national origin or a verified identity of the cyber attacker.

The corporate media sprang immediately into action to claim that Russia was responsible for the breach. On the same day that the SolarWinds acknowledgment was released, for example, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Scope of Russian hacking becomes clear: Multiple US Agencies were hit,” co-authored by David Sanger.

For its part, the Washington Post published an article on December 14, “Russian government hackers are behind a broad espionage campaign that has compromised U.S. agencies, including Treasury and Commerce,” that included the following: “The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.”

Over the next several days, representatives of the US political establishment—both Democrats and Republicans—began repeating the assertion that the Russian government was behind the SolarWinds hack, some calling it an “act of war.”

On December 16, Democratic Party Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, told CNN, “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously.” Two days later, Marco Rubio, Republican Senator of Florida, tweeted, “The methods used to carry out the cyberhack are consistent with Russian cyber operations,” and he told Fox News the attack was “almost, I would argue, an act of war, absolutely.”

On December 19, during an interview with the right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—departing from the position of President Trump—said, “This was a very significant effort and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

Both the corporate media and members of the US political establishment are making the assertion that Russia was responsible for the breach despite the lack of any evidence to support their claims.

On the other hand, new details about the hack of the widely used SolarWinds Orion platform raise serious questions about the events of the past three weeks.

According to security experts and former employees, SolarWinds was extremely vulnerable to an intrusion like Sunburst—not only because of the widespread government and corporate use of its software—but for its own slipshod security practices.

The New York Times reported, for example: “The company did not have a chief information security officer, and internal emails shared with The New York Times showed that employees’ passwords were leaking out on GitHub last year. Reuters earlier reported that a researcher informed the company last year that he had uncovered the password to SolarWinds’ update mechanism — the vehicle through which 18,000 of its customers were compromised. The password was ‘solarwinds123.’ ”

Meanwhile, Robert K. Knake, a senior Obama administration cybersecurity official, asked on Twitter, “I’m struggling with what the SolarWinds incident means for defending forward. How is this not a massive intelligence failure, particularly since we were supposedly all over Russian threat actors ahead of the election?” and “The IC [Intelligence Community] kept reporting that the Russians were targeting the election. That didn’t happen but was the evidence that they were planted? Did NSA fall into a giant honeypot while the SVR [Russian intelligence agency] quietly pillaged the USG and industry?”

The truth is that the United States runs what is by far the world’s most expansive and sophisticated cyberespionage operation. As revealed by former CIA office and National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, there is well-documented factual evidence that the US government has engaged in warrantless surveillance of the public on a massive scale—with the PRISM and XKeyscore systems—and infiltrates and gathers intelligence on the computer systems of foreign entities through the Office of Tailored Access Operations of the NSA.

As was revealed by WikiLeaks in 2015, the US government tapped the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors Gerhard Schroeder and Helmut Kohl.

Last July, hackers breached security at Twitter and took control of dozens of high-profile accounts, including those of Joseph Biden, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. During the Twitter hack, the intruders gained control of a control panel used by administrators at the micro-blogging social media platform to blacklist and censor content down to the level of specific users and their individual tweets.

Although two teenagers—one from Florida and the other from Massachusetts—were charged with breaching Twitter’s security, one of them by pretending to work for the company’s IT department, nothing has been said about the exposure of the blacklisting dashboard.

Lastly, the SolarWinds hack announcement was preceded by a report by the private cybersecurity and US intelligence consulting firm FireEye on December 8 that the firm was, “attacked by a highly sophisticated threat actor, one whose discipline, operational security, and techniques lead us to believe it was a state-sponsored attack.”

CEO Kevin Mandia published a blog post that the hackers had used “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past” to gain access to FireEye’s “Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security.” Although Mandia did not report precisely when FireEye’s testing software had been compromised, he wrote that “we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen Red Team tools.”

Furthermore, Mandia added, “We have seen no evidence to date that any attacker has used the stolen Red Team tools” and “we have seen no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated data from our primary systems that store customer information from our incident response or consulting engagements, or the metadata collected by our products in our dynamic threat intelligence systems.”

The FireEye CEO did not attribute the hack to any particular Advanced Persistent Threat actor or state sponsor, nor did he identify SolarWinds Orion platform as a potential target of the intrusion.

On that same day, the Washington Post published an article, based upon the FireEye disclosures, that “Russian spies” had “carried off another brazen hack” of the cybersecurity firm and stolen its Red Team tools. The Post report carefully stated, “though the firm did not attribute it to Russia’s foreign intelligence service,” the Russians were responsible “according to people familiar with the matter.”

The next day, on December 9, the New York Times published an article about the FireEye hack that stated, “The Silicon Valley company said hackers—almost certainly Russian—made off with tools that could be used to mount new attacks around the world.” Neither the Post nor the Times provided any specific facts or evidence connecting the FireEye hack to Russian intelligence agencies.