When we see all around that so much is being said and done in the name of environment protection, it seems very surprising that on the whole environment protection is not really progressing and environmental conditions are in fact deteriorating from the point of view of most indicators. This situation can be better understood if we see clearly the different trends of environment protection for what they are.
Firstly, there are the environment protection campaigns and claims of some of the worst polluters of our planets. As some of the biggest businesses including multinational corporations faced increasing criticisms and regulation during their highly polluting activities, they launched a number of schemes which could present them as protectors of environment. In effect the vast majority of these schemes are only a cover-up so that the overall polluting activities of the corporations can continue unabated. There is the rare possibility of some real and sincere contribution, but on the whole it is just cover-up and environmental harm continues much as before. In fact some cover-ups can even increase harm.
Secondly some environment protection actions are of such a nature that there is only outer appearance of more greenery or environment protection, while in effect there may be even more harm. For example a park may be created and maintained using huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Outwardly you see a lot of greenery , but actually much more environmental damage has been cased in the process of creating and maintaining it.
Thirdly there may be actions in the name of environment protection which do not actually protect environment but merely shift the location of environmental destruction. A highly polluting industry may be shifted from a rich country to a poor country, or from a city to a rural area, or huge waste dumping may be similarly shifted. The actual environmental costs are only likely to increase due to more transport related environmental costs.
Fourthly, many environment protection initiatives are taken without really taking into consideration the need for a simpler life involving lesser consumption, or else even when this is considered, the consideration is at a very superficial level in the sense that only changes which are very easy and in accordance with high comfort levels are considered. This cannot go far in environment protection and merely creates a comfort-giving illusion.
Fifthly, several environmental campaigns take the form of one activity campaigns. These can be useful in a limited way, such as the campaigns in many parts of India to avoid daily shopping in polythene bags are, but these single-activity campaigns cannot go very far by themselves. Sometimes alternative products that are introduced are also harmful in some other way. Recognizing this limitation should not be misinterpreted as discouragement. Even a limited contribution, and the environmental consciousness this generates, is welcome.
Sixthly, due to lack of holistic thinking, some limited gains made in environment protection can be overwhelmed by even more destructive changes. To give an example, some improvements may have been made in a region or country in terms of reducing the adverse environmental impacts of industrial farming, but then suddenly a decision to allow introduction of GM crops is taken and the gains made earlier are buried in the much higher destructive impact of GM crops.
As distinguished from all this sometimes very sweeping changes for protection of environment and wild life are made, such as preventing all human activity over vast areas designated as various forms of green zones. While this certainly helps environment and wild life protection in some contexts, in other contexts , where a significant human presence exists in such areas, such actions can create avoidable loss of livelihoods and new conflicts which ultimately lead to new environmental problems as well.
All these kinds of environmental protection actions taken together can at best lead to very limited gains ,and are as likely or more to also result in a worsening of environmental and other problems . As most environment protection actions, programs and schemes are of this kind only, one can see why there has been more talk, more visibility but very less results.
What we really need is holistic approach to environment protection which is also linked to protection of livelihoods and justice, an approach which recognizes the critical importance of time-bound big systemic changes needed to check climate change and other survival threats in time, linked to matching ground-level, daily life actions. This is the approach which will give best results and we need to move towards this.
The doxa of neoliberalism as the post second world war dominant ideology spreads utilitarianism, narrow visions of life, individualistic values, and competitive-essentialist knowledge traditions that destroy the emancipatory and collective foundations of social, political, cultural and economic life. It has dismantled the collective foundations of families, states and governments. The ideological and political differences have submerged within different waves of neoliberalism. Such an ideology has consummated the states and governments around the world. But the ravages of Coronavirus pandemic unravels the dynamic nature of neoliberalism and its abilities to transform individuals, communities, societies and states singing the glories of its free-market ideology and hide all its failures. Neoliberalism has failed as an ideology and as a project of global capitalism. The neoliberal states, governments and policy agendas have also failed earlier and during the Coronavirus led pandemic. The failure of neoliberalism does not mean the end of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism survives within structures of state and its governance practices. The governments around the world follow different variants of neoliberalism in their everyday policy formulation and implementation. The elusive neoliberal ideological framework of governance and its principles continue to destroy every available alternative for a better tomorrow. The ambiguity and incoherence of neoliberalism as an ideology is not merely a survival strategy but its doctrinaire core.
In spite of its ideological commitment to free market and opposition to state intervention, the survival of neoliberalism depends on a strong and securitised state and a corporate compliant government. It is a necessary requirement. Therefore, it is a fundamental mistake to write off neoliberalism and its intrinsic relationship with powerful states and authoritarian governments. The neoliberal culture has successfully managed to enter into electoral practices of constitutional democracies, where corporate media manipulates the minds of citizens with unsatiable and unnecessary desires. The failure of markets, states and governments are branded as failure of individuals for their greedy desires. In reality, the austerity programmes and policies have destroyed the abilities of individuals, states and governments to perform during a crisis. Neoliberalism and its market compliant states and governments are acting as barriers to successfully control, contain and manage to overcome the COVID-19 crisis and economic downturn.
The fraudulent worldview of neoliberalism based on individual freedom, prosperity, economic growth and development continue to attract people to reimpose their faith on such a reactionary project, which was further exposed by the pandemic. But neoliberalism is resilient process, which weakens the states and governments for the welfare of the citizens but strengthens the states and governments to protect corporate capitalism. Such a contradictory character of neoliberalism breeds multiple forms of crisis that helps capitalism to growth without any democratic barriers. The pestilence of Coronavirus has created havocs for last thirteen months and exposed the failures of neoliberalism, but it could not destroy its ideological and institutional apparatus led by states and governments. It has not only helped to deepen multiple forms of crisis from health, employment to education but also successful in maintaining its hegemony policies and practices over people and planet.
In the name of entrepreneurship, competition, efficiency and freedom, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed the social and communitarian foundations of availability, accessibility, distribution and exchange mechanisms to disconnect producers from the consumers. Such a disconnection process is central for the creation of independent market which can control demand and supply with the help of pricing tool independent of consumers and producers. Such a profit driven market system destroyed both the independence and abilities of both producers and consumers. The states and governments have played a major role in accelerating market forces through both democratic and authoritarian means. The pyramid of neoliberalism has created a monetised society where usefulness and disposability of individuals and communities depend on their abilities to access market and engage with culture of consumerism. Neoliberalism enforces the idea of strong states and governments to pursue its own agendas.
The strong states and governments are sponsored by the corporate powers to increase security apparatus to protect the consolidation of corporate wealth with the help of legal and judicial frameworks. The systems are designed to control the people and provide absolute freedom to market forces. The pandemic is an opportunity for the neoliberal ideologues to ensure that strong states and governments to reorganise and impose their version of society that remains subordinated to the needs of the markets with the help of worldwide culture of consumerism. The unquestionable orthodoxy of neoliberalism is neither new nor liberal. It shows all its medieval and feudal tendencies in letter and spirit. It forms alliance with authoritarian, fascists and reactionary forces to promote the primacy of profit and dominance of markets over individuals, families, communities, states and societies.
Mass alienation of individuals, betrayal of citizenship rights, corporatisation of states, governments and societies, dismantling of communities and families, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, poverty, inequality, exploitation, discrimination and destitution are the net outcomes of neoliberalism as an ideology and a project of global capitalism. Neoliberalism produces its own structures power based on deceptive culture, politics and knowledge traditions to sustain itself as a dominant ruling ideology with the help of strong states and governments. The disenchanted economics and anti-politics cultural machines are weapons of neoliberalism to establish absolute control over people and resources. The structural pandemic of neoliberalism is as dangerous as Coronavirus ruining lives and livelihoods of people. The mass struggles against neoliberalism are only ways towards the renewal of collective spirit of democracy, peace, prosperity, health and wellbeing.
The Airbus plant in Hamburg has become a coronavirus hotspot. A total of 21 workers at the aircraft manufacturer have been infected with COVID-19. As a result, 500 workers on an entire shift have been sent into quarantine. The outbreak at Airbus shows once again that workers are completely on their own when it comes to the high health risks to which they are exposed. The company, the authorities and the trade unions and their works council representatives owe their allegiance to the bank accounts of the shareholders rather than the lives and health of the workforce.
Around 12,000 people work at Airbus in Hamburg. There was no press release announcing the infection and quarantine of an entire shift at the Hanseatic city’s largest employer, neither from the company nor the IG Metall union, which dominates the works council, nor by the Hamburg health authorities. It was only after the tabloid Bild reported the incident that the Hamburg health authority and Airbus Group felt compelled to confirm the outbreak to the Deutsche Presseagentur (dpa).
The origin of the cases is still under investigation, Airbus told dpa. The employees had been working in two neighbouring halls and using common break rooms, where the virus was believed to have spread. Whether it was a highly contagious strain of the virus that has greater and more dangerous effects in the workforce, the health authority would not be able to say until the middle of the week at the earliest, it said.
Airbus plant Hamburg-Finkenwerder (Image: Oxfordian Kissuth / CC BY-SA 2.0)
In the meantime, thousands of workers continue to be sent to work, although the dangers cannot be assessed. This applies to all 27 Airbus sites in Germany alone.
The Airbus works council in Hamburg, led by Sophia Kielhorn, has explicitly supported this. In the IG Metall shop stewards’ Facebook group, she rejected any responsibility. “We live in capitalism,” she wrote to justify her support for the top management. “Capital calls the shots there, and the workers’ representatives can only mitigate and balance things out.”
She was supported by other trade union representatives. Marcus Baitis from the shop stewards committee at Premium Aerotec, a supplier and part of Airbus SE, said that the works council and “even the shop stewards” had no legal basis “to force the employer to close the plant.”
The strategic adviser for the works councils, Peter Müller, agreed and warned of damages and fines if the union called a strike. This, he said, was “playing with people’s livelihoods.”
What a distortion of the facts! Since the beginning of the pandemic, the corporations have been playing with the livelihoods—and the lives—of their workers and their families. In Germany alone, over 50,000 people have fallen victim to the pandemic—over two million worldwide—and there is no end in sight. On the contrary, due to the mutations of the virus with even more dangerous contagion potential, an increase in the number of infections and deaths is to be feared.
The self-imposed impotence of the trade unions comes from the fact that they have devoted themselves body and soul to the corporations and their shareholders. No matter how high the price paid by working people with their health and lives, the economy must keep running.
IG Metall Chairman Jörg Hofmann recently stated in the Augsburger Allgemeine that the facts “do not support shutting down the industry to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. … Shutting down the industry would have the most severe economic consequences.” It was impossible to imagine what would happen “if Airbus were to shut down production for months or work only one shift throughout,” wrote Kielhorn, head of the works council.
The health and lives of the 12,000-strong Airbus workforce are being permanently subordinated to corporate profits. This also applies to jobs. At the end of June last year, Airbus took advantage of the pandemic and announced it would be eliminating 15,000 of its 135,000 jobs worldwide, including 5,100 in Germany.
The majority, 3,200 jobs in production, administration and other areas, will be in northern Germany. In the plants in Hamburg-Finkenwerder, Buxtehude and Fuhlsbüttel, more than 2,300 jobs are to fall victim to the cuts—almost one in six jobs there. The coronavirus-related slump in orders is expected to cost over 400 jobs in Bremen, around 360 in Stade and 40 at other locations.
As in the question of working despite the dangers of the pandemic, the union and its works council representatives do not see their task as defending jobs. It is the employer that decides on the jobs and thus the livelihoods of the workers and their families, according to the profit interests of the owners and shareholders. The works council regards itself as an accomplice and henchman, who has no choice but to “cushion the cuts in a socially acceptable way,” as Kielhorn would put it.
As everywhere, Airbus management and the works council have agreed on the now-familiar cuts implementation mechanisms. The company says it will refrain from compulsory redundancies until the end of March. Until then, older employees aged 58 and over, in particular, are being urged to give up their jobs and accept severance payments. Airbus is planning a so-called “transfer company” in which employees can supposedly be retrained or gain further qualifications—before usually being forced into unemployment.
If not enough workers decide to leave “voluntarily,” the company is threatening compulsory redundancies starting in April.
The coronavirus outbreak at the Hamburg-Finkenwerder plant and the loss of one in six jobs make clear how urgent it is for workers to organise independently into action committees to take the defence of their health, lives and jobs into their own hands.
The first thing to do is to inform workers in all the other plants and demand they receive immediate and comprehensive information about the coronavirus crisis in their workplaces. The continuing refusal to provide information and the conspiracy of the management, the works council and the trade union can no longer be accepted.
If such a massive coronavirus outbreak can occur in the Hamburg-Finkenwerder plant, which has always praised its high safety standards and its “comprehensive hygiene concept,” then this means it can take place in any plant and is already developing everywhere.
As of January 25, there have been six cases of a new COVID-19 variant, B.1.1.7, identified in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Of those cases, five have been associated with the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (UMich) campus.
The Washtenaw County Health Department (WCHD) and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) announced on January 16 that the variant was discovered in a local woman, who had recently traveled to the United Kingdom. On January 21, two other individuals who had been in close contact with the woman initially infected were also diagnosed with the B.1.1.7 strain. All three women were associated with the university.
By January 23, the MDHHS identified two more cases of the variant in individuals associated with the university and an additional case in the Wayne County area.
Striking graduate students at University of Michigan, September 11, 2020 [WSWS Media]
“B.1.1.7 spreads more easily between people, but there has been no indication that it affects the clinical outcomes or disease severity compared to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has been circulating across the United States for months,” according to the January 23 MDHHS briefing.
Contrary to the latest information from MDHHS, however, a document covering a study by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) in the UK from January 21 said that “there is a realistic probability that infection with B.1.1.7 is associated with an increased risk of death compared to infection with non-VOC (non-variant of concern).” Additionally, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged on Twitter January 22 that the new strain “may also be associated with a higher degree of mortality.”
A Sunday announcement by GoBlue.com, the university’s news site, said that the school’s Athletic Department would immediately cease activity for up to 14 days, in compliance with an MDHHS mandate relating to the B.1.1.7 variant. “The (MDHHS) is mandating a more aggressive strategy for this B.1.1.7 variant, which exceeds current program efforts designed around the standard form of the virus,” the article read. It specified that individuals infected with the new strain on campus had been diagnosed by the Athletic Department’s own facilities.
UMich President Mark Schlissel published a briefing on the same day addressed to members of the campus community, in which he acknowledged that the variant is known to be “more contagious” and that “[n]ew information suggests that this strain might be more likely to cause severe illness.” He advised students to take extra precautions.
Schlissel’s announcement also noted, “We’re also seeing additional clusters of the regular COVID-19 virus in the campus community and are monitoring and addressing those as well.”
In a January 19 Michigan Daily interview with Schlissel, he explained that while the campus’s medical systems were suited for vaccine distribution, limited state supply made it unlikely that vaccines would be available until after the current semester.
The UMich winter semester began on January 19, following a fall term which saw widespread opposition by students and campus workers to the administration’s reckless reopening policies. A nine-day strike in September was led by the Graduate Employees’ Organization union and garnered the support of broad layers of the campus for the universal right to remote learning. The strike was ultimately canceled by the union leadership in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers, its parent organization, which cowered in the face of legal threats by the administration.
The university was doubtlessly forced by explosive popular opposition to implement mandatory mitigation measures for the new semester. Last term, the number of total positive cases quickly rose to approximately 3,000, and positivity rates rose as high as 7.6 percent in late September. The new measures for the winter term include the reduction in capacity of on-campus residential buildings, stricter penalties for health code violations, as well as a drastic reduction of in-person learning.
While these new guidelines ostensibly provide respite from the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, the rapidly emerging threat of B.1.1.7 underscores the fact that nothing has systematically changed to prevent the further spread of the deadly infection. As long as the virus remains unchecked on local, national and international levels, there cannot be a fully reliable method to contain it while campus activity is resumed. At the same time, the university, acting in concert with mandates by the capitalist state, insists that no action be taken which fundamentally impedes the resumption of the accumulation of its profit.
The resumption of the UMich semester occurs within the context of a Biden administration committed no less than that of Donald Trump to the full-scale reopening of schools and businesses in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed over 430,000 lives in the US since February 2020. While Biden glosses over the fascistic insurrection of January 6, issuing calls for “unity” and “bipartisanship,” he has openly claimed that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of more Americans are all but inevitable. No one should be deceived into thinking that the token health measures proposed by the new administration are anything but a rebranding of the same policies which serve the interests of Wall Street.
Students and campus workers must immediately demand the shutdown of all nonessential university activities, with full refunds for tuition and residential expenses, as well as full compensation for any wages lost. Students with privately held, off-campus leases should build and coordinate with student-worker neighborhood committees to demand the nullification of all rental contracts rendered obsolete due to COVID-19. They should demand that affordable housing and extended visas be provided for international students with no way to return home.
Britain officially passed 100,000 coronavirus deaths on Tuesday according to the government’s measure of a fatality within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test. This means that 147 people have died for every 100,000 people in the UK, a figure only topped by two other nations—Belgium and Slovenia.
More people have now died in the UK from COVID-19 than its civilian death toll in World War II.
As the milestone was reached, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called a Downing Street press briefing, in which he had the gall to declare, “[I]t is hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic. The years of life lost, the family gatherings not attended and, for so many relatives, the missed chance even to say goodbye—I offer my deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one.”
Asked why so many had died in Britain, he replied, “I think on this day I should just really repeat that I am deeply sorry for every life that has been lost, and of course as I was prime minister I take full responsibility for everything that the government has done.”
Boris Johnson holds a Covid-19 Press Conference with Chief Executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, as the total number of recorded deaths from Covid in the UK surpassed 100,000. 10 Downing Street. (credit: Picture by Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street)
Had he answered truthfully, he would have replied, “Because of the murderous ‘herd immunity’ policies pursued by my government on behalf of the major corporations.”
Instead, he said “we make this pledge: that when we have come through this crisis, we will come together as a nation to remember everyone we lost, and to honour the selfless heroism of all those on the front line who gave their lives to save others.”
Johnson was speaking of national mourning at the end of the crisis on the day that 1,631 deaths were reported, taking the overall total to 100,162, and 20,089 new infections, taking the total to 3,689,746.
Speaking at the press briefing National Health Service England leader Sir Simon Stevens also noted, “This Sunday, it will have been a year since the first two patients with coronavirus were treated in a hospital in Newcastle.” In that time, he said, “Over a quarter of a million severely ill coronavirus patients have been treated in hospital.”
Ever since it prematurely ended last spring’s lockdown, the government has allowed the virus to spread—with only the most inadequate restrictions in place for the last eight months. Far from the pandemic being brought under control, more than a quarter of all deaths have occurred in the first 26 days of this year—26,606 lives lost.
Following Johnson’s statement, the government’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty warned, “Unfortunately, we are going to see quite a lot more deaths over the next few weeks.”
But every comment that followed was equivocal, as Whitty said in response to a media question as to when the government could start relaxing restrictions only that, “I think we need to be careful we do not relax too early.” He added that with 35,00 people ill in hospitals with Covid-19 this was an "incredibly high number” but had "flattened off" and was not rising overall.
Substantial sections of the Conservative Party are insisting on a timetable to end to the current lockdown, which is due to be reviewed February 15. Central to their demands are that schools be fully reopened so that all parents can return to the workplace and produce profits for the corporations.
According to a front page article in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, the Tory Party house organ, “Government sources said last night that mid-March was now viewed by ministers as the target deadline for reopening.” This was accompanied by an editorial titled, “When will schools be allowed to reopen?”
The number of deaths admitted to by the government is a massive underestimation of the real tally. The Guardian quoted Dr David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre at Cambridge University, who said, “There will be a lot of attention given to deaths with Covid reaching 100,000, but this is based on the figures released each day, which only include people who had a positive test and then died within 28 days.
“The more accurate ONS [Office for National Statistics] data show that over 100,000 people in the UK had already died with Covid on their death certificate by 7 January, nearly three weeks ago. This rose to 108,000 by 15 January, and the total now will be nearly 120,000.”
The Financial Times reported, “A Financial Times model estimates 120,200 excess deaths so far, again putting the UK in a position alongside Belgium, Spain and Italy as the worst in Europe and higher than the US.”
On March 13 last year, two days after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Johnson’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance suggested publicly that the population could “build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.” Johnson spelled out the practicalities of this policy in an interview the week before, where he explained, “one of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population.”
Johnson has been able to oversee this herd immunity policy and death and destruction on an horrific scale because he has faced no challenge from the Labour Party or the trade unions, who pledged that they would only function as a “constructive” opposition during the pandemic. This took obscene form when Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer gave a filmed address following the Downing Street briefing, in which mentioned neither the Tory government, nor Johnson himself.
In a meagre two-minute address, Starmer said the deaths were “nothing more than a national tragedy, a terrible reminder of what we’ve lost as a country.” And like Johnson, his answer was to dispense bromides about the post-pandemic future: “To those that are mourning, we must promise to learn the lessons of what went wrong. And to build a more resilient country, a country that can give people security of health and of work and of opportunity.”
What had to be built was a “better future that is worthy of the British people” This was why “we must be vigilant in the national effort to stay at home, protect our NHS and vaccinate Britain.”
The truth is that to defend the profits of the capitalist class, Starmer’s party functions as de facto coalition partners of Johnson, in alliance with the trade unions and frames everything in terms of a mythical “national interest” to conceal the irreconcilable antagonisms between big business and the working class.
Workers and young people must draw the lessons and take matters into their own hands. Control of the response to the pandemic must be taken from the political criminals in Downing Street and their allies.
At least 43 refugees drowned on January 19 off the Libyan coast during their attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Only 10 people could be rescued. They were returned to Libya by the Libyan coastguard. The mass death in the Mediterranean, for which the European Union (EU) bears responsibility, thus continues into yet another year.
The dinghy, carrying more than 50 people, suffered engine failure amid rough seas and capsized shortly after leaving the port city of Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, in the early hours of the morning. The survivors, who came from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Gambia, stated that everyone on board the capsized boat came from West Africa.
Chief responsibility for these pointless deaths of people fleeing civil war, poverty and misery lies with the governments in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Vienna and The Hague. In close collusion with the European Commission, they have blocked all legal avenues to Europe.
Syrian and Iraqi refugees from Turkey arrive at Skala Sykamineas on the island of Lesbos where they are rescued by volunteers of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms, October 30, 2015 (Source: Ggia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
When refugees are then forced to attempt crossings on tiny, unseaworthy dinghies, the European governments do everything in their power, in what amounts to a despicable crime, to halt virtually all rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. Their hands are, in the most literal sense of the phrase, dripping with the blood of the 20,000 people who have drowned in the Mediterranean over the past eight years.
The experience of Souleymane, a refugee from Guinea, gives a sense of the tragedies taking place in the Mediterranean. Souleymane was interviewed by the Infomigrants news website last March while he was living in Libya, waiting on an opportunity to reach Europe. The 18-year-old was one of the victims who drowned in last week’s boat tragedy.
His friend Moussa, who was among the survivors, told Infomigrants that the sea became increasingly rough in the hours following their departure. The boat then capsized, and Souleymane, who could not swim, was thrown into the water. Moussa was able to grab him and pull him back to the boat. Souleymane was still in the water holding onto the boat from the outside when a second wave struck.
“I am broken. I can’t hold on anymore,” were the last words Souleymane spoke before he disappeared underwater. “He never resurfaced again,” whispered Sylla, who also comes from Guinea and lives in Libya.
Souleymane told Infomigrants last March about his plight in Libya, where he arrived in 2018. He was detained twice by the police after his boat was intercepted by the Libyan coastguard.
The Libyan coastguard is financed, equipped, and trained by the EU. In essence, it consists of the country’s warring militias, who abuse migrants and often trade them as slaves.
Souleymane was brought to the detention camps of Tajourah and Zouara and tortured, like all of the refugees there. The people who took him there on the pretext that they could offer him work abused him and inflicted severe injuries with knives.
His mother died last summer in Guinea, but Souleymane could not even attend her funeral because he was confined in Libya. Then, last Tuesday, he boarded a tiny dinghy for the fourth and last time, hoping to reach Europe, find work and start a new life. He died in the first ship accident in the Mediterranean of the year.
Emergency rescue at sea
“We have a huge gap in naval emergency rescue because almost all lifeboats have been detained by the authorities or they can’t sail because legal proceedings against them are ongoing,” a spokesperson from the aid organization AlarmPhone explained about the situation in the Mediterranean.
The only aid organisation currently able to operate a boat in the Mediterranean is SOS Méditerranée. Their ship Ocean Viking, which returned to sea on January 11 after a five-and-a-half-month break, rescued 374 refugees from the ice-cold waters in the first 48 hours alone. However, the Ocean Viking arrived too late at another shipwreck and was forced to watch as the Libyan coastguard detained 80 refugees and returned them to Libya.
The Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reported Friday that the Libyan coastguard has violently returned over 300 refugees to Libya already this year, including women and children, and detained them there. The IOM renewed its demand that no refugee should be returned to Libya.
In a joint statement, the IOM and UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed the fear that the number of deaths last year in the Mediterranean was likely much higher than estimates suggest, because naval rescue operations are barely monitored any longer.
The EU withdrew from emergency rescue missions in 2019. Last year, it criminalised civilian emergency rescue missions, persecuted them, and deliberately withdrew them from service. The so-called Libyan coastguard remains solely responsible for naval emergency rescue missions, performing the dirty work for the EU in its brutal policy of deterrence towards refugees.
But the IOM and UNHCR stress that Libya is not a safe refuge for refugees, as the European governments like to proclaim. “Migrants continue to be arbitrarily detained there and interned under the most terrible conditions. They are bullied and exploited by people traffickers and smugglers, detained to secure ransoms, tortured, and abused,” noted the joint statement.
According to the Missing Migrant Project, 977 people officially lost their lives last year on the Mediterranean route from Libya, making it the deadliest refugee route in the world.
AlarmPhone estimates that in 2020, 27,435 people tried to flee from Libya. 5,375 people in 75 boats made it to the small Italian island of Lampedusa. 2,281 people made it to Malta. 3,700 people were rescued at sea by civilian ships and brought to Italy. But 11,891 refugees were seized at sea by the Libyan coastguard and returned to Libya’s torture camps. In total, around 200,000 refugees continue to reside in Libya in horrifying conditions, a significant percentage in the numerous internment camps controlled by the militias.
Last April, the Italian government seized on the coronavirus pandemic to declare all Italian ports “unsafe,” so as to prohibit all refugees from landing. Crews of civilian ships were criminalised and charged with allegedly assisting illegal immigration.
At the same time, the EU not only supported the Libyan coastguard’s illegal repatriation of refugees, but also conducted illegal “pushbacks” of refugees at sea. This refers to the process of turning refugees away without giving them the chance to file an asylum application.
The Maltese government even used a civilian fishing boat to carry out such an operation. Eleven refugees died as a result. Similar illegal “pushbacks” are increasingly being used by the Greek government in the Aegean Sea, and by Croatia on its border with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Croatia, Bosnia and Greece
The Croatian border patrols in particular use extreme brutality against refugees. The Border Violence Monitoring Network has counted “pushbacks” on the Croatian border affecting 12,000 people. The refugees are often chased away by the border guards with batons and whips. They are beaten, robbed and abused.
A substantial amount of the financing for the EU member states’ border regime comes from the European Union. The EU made €6.8 billion available for this purpose last year.
“We stand by Croatia as a partner,” affirmed German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in January 2020, when heat-seeking cameras were handed over. The German government then provided Croatian border guards with 20 vehicles in December. Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic not only expressed his thanks for the millions of euros in support but vowed that the German government would be extensively informed about the Croatian border guards’ activities. The German government is not merely well informed about the blatant violations of human rights on the EU’s external borders, but also supports them strongly.
The EU’s criminal approach to refugee deterrence is made particularly clear by the camps on the Greek islands and in Bosnia. On the island of Lesbos, tents housing 7,000 refugees in the Kara Tepe camp are sinking into the mud. There is neither adequate food nor electricity, running warm water or health care services. Despite this, the Greek government refuses to move the refugees to the mainland.
Following the burning of the Moria refugee camp in September 2020, the German government loudly proclaimed its intention to accept at least 1,500 refugees. In fact, only 291 refugees have been flown to Germany to date, while thousands of people, including small children, continue to languish in the camp’s inhuman conditions.
The situation is equally dire in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, especially since the fire in the Lipa camp on December 23. 9,000 people have been left to brave the bitter cold of the Bosnian winter with virtually no protection. Emergency camps have only been made available for around 5,600 refugees. This means that more than 3,000 refugees are sleeping in ruins, makeshift tents, or outdoors.
The humanitarian catastrophe playing out in Bosnia and the Mediterranean is the product of the EU’s criminal and cynical policies. “It bears repeating: the EU’s policies were consistent and coherent, and the EU provided all the necessary financial resources,” noted a confidential paper from the EU Commission on the situation in Bosnia cited by the German daily Die Welt last week.
The procedure in Libya and Bosnia-Herzegovina is always the same: the EU pays hundreds of millions of euros to criminal gangs and corrupt elites so that they perform the dirty work and keep the refugees away from their doorstep. Following German Interior Minister Seehofer’s mantra, “Help must be provided on the ground,” the EU then washes its hands in innocence and claims it is not responsible for the conditions of the refugees on the ground.
As the refugee aid organisation ProAsyl explained in rejecting this, these countries neither have a functioning asylum system nor a framework for receiving refugees. Instead, refugees are at best left to their own devices, and at worst interned and horrifically abused.
In 2015, the Irish government established the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, after sinister revelations regarding the criminal treatment of young unmarried girls and women who became pregnant and were forced into institutions.
The five-year investigation revealed the deaths of 9,000 babies between 1922 and 1998, some buried in mass, unmarked graves. Of the 57,000 babies born in the homes investigated, 15 percent died before their lives had hardly begun.
The final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission
Announcing the investigation in 2014, then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny declared children born to unmarried parents were treated as "an inferior sub-species". He admitted the Dail (parliament) had records reaching back to the 1930s, and that the situation was known as far back as 1972.
Kenny proposed only to probe aspects of the shameful past and avoid apportioning blame. Only 14 mother and baby institutions, which housed 56,000 mothers, run mainly by Catholic nuns, and four state run county Homes, which housed 25,000 mothers, were investigated. Groups campaigning on behalf of the women and children opposed the narrow remit, complaining that a further 182 institutions, state agencies and individuals should be investigated and calling for public hearings.
From the first, the Commission intended to cover over more than it revealed, fearing further catastrophic erosion of what is left of the authority, and financial interests, of the Catholic Church.
The Irish state that emerged from Ireland's brutal partition by Britain in 1921 increasingly relied on the Catholic church to systematically terrorise the entire working population on behalf of the Irish bourgeoisie. This role was recognised and sanctioned by the Irish constitution drafted under President Éamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil in 1937, which overturned the previous secular approach and, while retreating from making Catholicism a state religion, assigned it an undefined "special position" alongside other religions.
Catholic view of the sanctity of marriage and the family were enforced. Sexual relations outside marriage were abhorred. Contraception was illegal until 1985, and abortion only legalised in 2018. Unmarried women who became pregnant were considered sinners and punished. Their offspring were thought unworthy of burial in consecrated ground.
View of the mass grave at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, Tuam, County Galway (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Although part of daily experiences, aspects of the truth hidden in the homes began to emerge in 1975, when two boys discovered child remains while playing nearby the closed Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. The home had been run by an order of nuns, the Bon Secours Sisters, between 1925-1961. The home was a former workhouse. In 2013, local historian Catherine Corless, researching the "staggering number of children [who] lost their lives in the home”, collated death certificates of 798 children. The recorded causes of death were congenital debilities, infectious diseases and malnutrition. Corless, however, could not find records of where the infants were buried. Ever since, the church, state and political establishment have been seeking to delay investigation into circumstances of the lives and death of the women and children forced through the homes.
In 2017, the fifth interim report of the Commission confirmed a mass burial site in the grounds of the Tuam home, containing remains of 786 children—from premature babies to three-year-old toddlers. The skeletons lay in a converted septic tank. One child died there every two weeks between the 1920s and 1960s. After the final report was published, Bon Secours Sisters belatedly issued an apology, admitting their behaviour “did not live up to our Christianity”.
Bon Secours Health System CLG is currently the largest independent hospital provider in Ireland and one of the largest in the United States. Some 50 hospitals and "1,000 sites of care" are also operating in Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia.
Another home investigated was Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork, where 900 children died. The commission report concludes that it is highly likely that hundreds of burials took place in the 200-acre estate surrounding the home. Bessborough was run until 1998 by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The Commission found that of 923 infants who died at the site, proper burial records exist for only 64. The building is currently slated for development into flats.
The highest mortality rate was at Sean Ross Abbey (1931 to 1969), in County Tipperary, where 1,090 infants out of 6,079 died. The report cites evidence from a local carpenter asked to provide coffins for children born to daughters of "respectable" fathers. Others were buried in quick lime.
The Commission’s 2,865 page-long final report—belatedly published January 12—writes, “The very high rate of infant mortality… is probably the most disquieting feature of these institutions. The death rate among ‘illegitimate’ children was always considerably higher than that among ‘legitimate’ children but it was higher still in mother and baby homes: in the years 1945-46, the death rate among infants in mother and baby homes was almost twice that of the national average for ‘illegitimate’ children.”
Infants at the homes were also the subject of illegal medical experiments. These were carried out either by the Wellcome Foundation or Glaxo Laboratories, who subsequently merged to form British owned pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Experiments included multiple trials of diphtheria, measles and various combined vaccines between 1930 and 1973. The commission found that trials carried out at seven institutions were unlicensed, unregulated and "illegal and unethical even by the standards of the time". The trials would have been found in breach of the Nuremburg Code on medical experimentation established after exposure of Nazi medical experiments in the aftermath of World War Two.
Point one of the code states, "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."
The report claims "no evidence of injury" resulted from the experiments, but survivors dispute this on the basis of there having been no follow up contact from the experimenters. The last available figures for GSK reported £9 billion profit on £33.8 billion turnover, the company operates in 95 countries.
The report also documents adoption from the homes, the scale of which has been slowly emerging over the years. Sean Ross Abbey, for example, exported 134 babies for adoption as late as 1969. Only 25 children went back to their mothers. 1,638 children were placed for international adoption, of whom 1,427 went to the United States. Others went to Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia and other countries. The report found the church organised the US adoptions, even though "it had no formal legal or regulatory role in either foreign or domestic adoptions." The report found that concerns about adoptions were raised in individual circumstances as early as 1952.
Numbers of women who spoke to the commission reported being forced to hand over their children for adoption. One said her son had “been taken without her knowledge or consent". She remains "in a lifelong battle’ to discover how this came about and who was responsible.”
Others say they were illiterate when they supposedly signed adoption papers. The report noted mothers explaining “that their most searing memory of their time in a mother and baby home was that of the screams of women looking through a window, through which she could see her child being driven away to a destination unknown; for many, there had not been a chance to say goodbye.”
The Commission reports witness statements of the survivors, which are harrowing as well as telling. They begin on page 2,405.
As soon as an unmarried pregnancy was noticed a priest was informed, and the girl whisked away to one of the mother and baby homes. Here she endured hard physical labour, including scrubbing floors, poor food and sometimes physical abuse.
Some worked in the Magdalene Laundries run first by the Protestant but later mainly the Catholic Church. These were commercial enterprises and the “fallen” women were unpaid. Some spent the rest of their lives there. The inhumane conditions of these workhouses, which operated until the 1980s, were graphically depicted in the 2002 film, the Magdalene Sisters .
Unidentified Magdalen Laundry in Ireland, c. early 20th century. (source-Wikimedia Commons) Scanned by Eloquence* from Finnegan, F.: Do Penance or Perish. A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. Congrave Press, Ireland, Piltown, Co. Kilkenny (2001).
In the homes, “no contact with families or the outside world” was permitted. Even when fathers turned up to marry the girls, they were turned away. Witnesses reported “emotional abuse, denigration and derogatory remarks.”
In the Tuam home, 12 mothers died due to complications during delivery with nuns acting as midwives. The witnesses speak of childbirth without a doctor or pain relief, even during episiotomies (incisions in the perineum to widen the birth canal). The nuns said this was “punishment” for their sins.
After childbirth, bonding between mother and child was discouraged. The new mother was instructed to “feed, change, put down.” Adoption was pursued relentlessly from the 1960s, with pressure placed on the mother to accept. It was not until 1973 that an unmarried mothers’ allowance was introduced, enabling mothers to bring up their babies in the community.
Survivors tell of childhood without love or toys. Those not adopted were sent to the Industrial Schools as slave labour or worked on farms. Later, walls of silence impeded children finding parents or vice versa, as portrayed in the 2013 heart-wrenching film Philomena , starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.
Despite all the evidence of what was effectively church and state organised murder by neglect, kidnapping and vast psychological and physical abuse the report concludes that the main fault lay with... men. “Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families."
This was merely "supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches…"
Issuing a formal but empty apology, current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin conceded, "The Irish State, as the main funding authority for the majority of these institutions, had the ultimate ability to exert control over these institutions, in addition to its duty of care to protect citizens with a robust regulatory and inspection regime. This authority was not exerted and the State’s duty of care was not upheld."
In terms of further response, Martin restricted himself to accepting the report's paltry recommendations, which amounted to proposals for better access to such records as remain available and some limited financial redress, a process which will drag on for years and will only apply to women resident in the homes before 1973. The report noted that a scheme set up for victims of the Magdalene Laundries had, by September 2020 distributed just €31.95 million to 803 applicants.
Manoeuvres are underway to dump the increasingly discredited leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party, Anthony Albanese, following the inauguration of the Biden administration in the US.
Last weekend, former party leader Bill Shorten publicly criticised Albanese’s policy agenda, stoking the pressure that has been applied to him for months. Shorten has remained in parliament despite leading Labor to two consecutive election defeats at the hands of the widely hated Liberal-National Coalition—including the supposedly “unloseable” election of May 2019.
The moves to oust Albanese are intensifying as the worldwide COVID-19 catastrophe worsens, fueling working class unrest internationally, and the incoming Biden administration steps up the US confrontation with China. Significantly, Shorten has a record of close ties to Washington.
Anthony Albanese (Credit: @AlboMP, Twitter).
Whatever the immediate outcome of the infighting wracking the Labor Party and its associated trade union bureaucrats, the result will be a continued commitment to pro-business policies and an unconditional alignment behind the aggressive US drive to stop China challenging the global hegemony that Washington secured via World War II.
In his comments, Shorten voiced concerns in ruling circles that the Labor Party is failing to capture and contain the growing working class discontent with the deepening offensive against jobs and working conditions during the pandemic. Shorten called for an opposition “that stands for something,” saying: “We must be a party of Labor that stands for the real world concerns of working men and women.”
This is rank hypocrisy coming from a former trade union bureaucrat and party powerbroker. Shorten became notorious over decades for betraying and suppressing struggles by workers. At the 2016 and 2019 elections, his phony rhetoric about a “fair go” for workers lacked any credibility.
Shorten’s remarks reflect nervousness that Labor has been unable to recover any ground since its 2019 debacle. Its vote plunged to a near century-low of 33 percent, despite the unpopularity of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the instability and factional warfare in the Coalition.
This historic disintegration of Labor’s support, especially in working class areas, is of grave concern to the ruling class, which has relied on Labor and the unions since Federation in 1901 to subordinate workers to the requirements of capitalism, particularly during economic crises and wars.
It was the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating, working hand-in-glove with the unions via prices and incomes Accords, that carried through the last brutal restructuring of the economy along free-market lines, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and suppressing the opposition of workers.
The fear in the political establishment is that a social explosion could occur if Labor and the unions cannot keep a lid on the discontent produced today by the greatest levels of mass unemployment, wage-cutting, poverty and social inequality since the 1930s Great Depression.
As soon as Albanese was installed as Labor leader, he slavishly followed the line of the corporate media. He falsely attributed Labor’s humiliating loss to having pursued policies that claimed to address the mounting social inequality imposed by the financial elite at “the big end of town.”
Albanese vowed to forge closer ties to business leaders, boost “wealth creation,” rather than “wealth distribution,” and pursue bipartisanship with the Morrison government.
Once COVID-19 erupted, Albanese went further. He collaborated with the government, business chiefs and the unions to restructure economic and class relations via the official response to the pandemic, at the expense of workers’ jobs, wages and basic conditions.
Last November, facing rumoured challenges to his leadership, Albanese made an even more craven pitch to big business, both for himself and for the return of a Labor government. He used a Labor Party business fundraiser to declare Labor is “pro-aspiration, pro-entrepreneurship, pro-wealth creation and pro-growth.” He told corporate executives: “We should be cooperating in the knowledge that ultimately, we are all on the same side, striving for the same objectives.”
This language underscores Labor’s absolute commitment to servicing the profit requirements of the corporate elite, and enforcing them against the working class.
Last week, on the same day that Biden was inaugurated, the embattled Albanese made another appeal to both the Australian and US ruling elites. He emphasised his party’s historic and abiding commitment to the US-Australia military alliance and its support for Washington’s escalating confrontation with China. He chided Morrison for the prime minister’s personal closeness to Donald Trump, thus arguing that he and a Labor government would be best placed to deepen the alliance under the new Democratic Party administration.
As far as Shorten and his backers are concerned, however, Albanese’s pledges to the US and big business are not reliable or strong enough. At the same time, if Labor is to prevent a social eruption it must seek to channel mounting working class opposition into once again returning Labor to office.
Acutely conscious of the working class disaffection, Shorten sought to distance himself from the extent to which Labor, led by Albanese, has pursued a nakedly pro-corporate policy and provided the Morrison government with bipartisan backing.
Speaking at a book launch for right-wing faction Labor leaders on Sunday, and repeated in interviews on Sky News and Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio, Shorten said he had learned his lesson from the 2019 defeat. The problem, he insisted, was that Labor had promised too much. But the answer was not to offer too little—a “tiny” policy agenda. Labor had to “stand for something” in order to regain office.
Shorten aligned himself with another Labor leader, right-wing faction boss Joel Fitzgibbon, who quit Albanese’s shadow cabinet late last year, publicly precipitating the push to replace him.
Whoever leads Labor, however, there is no doubt that Washington will be heavily involved in the backroom machinations and will veto anyone not regarded as fully ready, willing and able to back a US war against China and suppress popular opposition to such a disastrous conflict.
In 1975, the CIA was active in the destabilisation and dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government after the Nixon administration became concerned that Whitlam had failed to contain the strike movement in the working class.
In 2010, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks documented, US “protected sources” inside the Labor leadership spearheaded the installation of Julia Gillard to replace Kevin Rudd. Rudd, like all the Labor leaders, was committed to the US alliance but he had argued that the US should make some accommodation to the growth of the Chinese economy.
