Dutch neo-fascists incite riots against anti-pandemic curfew

Alex Lantier

After a night-time curfew ordered by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s right-wing government went into effect on January 23, riots broke out across the Netherlands. While small numbers of Moroccan immigrants have reportedly joined in, these riots are incited and orchestrated above all by Dutch neo-fascists.

The curfew was voted as divisions mounted in the Dutch government over what to do about the spread of the more deadly British variant of COVID-19. Rutte, who refused lockdowns or curfews last year, said the curfew had “to do with the British variant and the big worries we all have.” Besides Rutte’s government, the Maoist Socialist Party (SP), the Labour Party (PvdA), the Green Left and the 50Plus pensioners’ party voted for the curfew; the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) and Forum for Democracy (FvD) opposed it.

A right wing demonstrator in the anti-lockdown riots In Netherlands (Photo: Twitter)

On January 18, before the curfew was voted, far-right groups organized a protest against social distancing measures in Amsterdam. This protest also involved members of the far-right Pegida (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”) movement who came from neighbouring Germany or from its local Dutch sympathizing group.

As the curfew went into effect, the neo-fascists began organizing riots against social distancing measures. As riots continued, they denounced alleged Moroccan participation in the riots and joined the Rutte government in calls for a major police or military deployment, supposedly to restore order. They also issued repeated calls to vote for far-right parties in the upcoming March 17 elections.

On Saturday morning, a COVID-19 testing centre was burned down and protesters fired fireworks at police in the seaside town of Urk. The PVV branch in Urk reportedly led the riot, after posting a statement online that it would “do everything in its power to ensure [the curfew] is not enforced in Urk.” Riots involving hundreds of people ensued in Amsterdam, The Hague, Eindhoven, Enschede, Venlo and other cities. Rioters in Eindhoven looted the city’s main train station, and tried to break into Enschede’s Medisch Spectrum Twente hospital.

Police said the rioters included football hooligans, drug addicts, and people “genuinely angry at the government,” apparently meaning the far right. One police spokesman said: “You can see that some of them are really well prepared with special clothing and weapons, including blackjacks, knives or Molotov cocktails. Others come to the party unprepared.”

The neo-fascists hail the rioters as defenders of liberty against health restrictions. The Forum for Democracy tweeted its support for the rioters: “This is the second night that Rutte has locked up the Netherlands. #FvD continues to resist. We will stay up every night against this unacceptable restriction on our freedom.” They added: “More and more people are turning against the #curfew. We will only get our freedom back if we work together. Vote FvD on March 17.”

The PVV of Geert Wilders declared: “People who peacefully protest against curfews are quite right.” At the same time, while broadcasting videos it claimed were of immigrant rioters, it called them “scum” who “must be dealt with very hard.”

Commenting on the riots, Green Left Party leader Jesse Klaver said Dutch neo-fascists are imitating former US President Donald Trump: “First you try to discredit the news and science, then you call on people to disregard the rules, and finally you blame other people. The PVV and FvD are working off Donald Trump’s playbook. This type of rioting and vandalism is exactly the result of such behaviour.”

Klaver impotently appealed to Wilders to intervene and criticize the very riot Wilders was busy inciting: “Do not forget that PVV Urk incited this violence. Unacceptable, undemocratic, and downright dangerous. Intervene, Geert Wilders!”

Predictably, Klaver’s appeal to the PVV to act only encouraged Wilders. He denounced Klaver’s remarks as “far left incitement” and called on PVV supporters to “deal with him politically on March 17,” that is, in the upcoming elections.

The Dutch neo-fascists are in fact imitating Trump’s policy on both COVID-19 and elections. Trump pursued a murderous “herd immunity” policy on COVID-19 and launched an attempted fascist coup on January 6 aiming to seize the Capitol, block the certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 US presidential elections, and dictate terms to the Democrats. The Democrats’ feeble response—they have appealed for “unity” with Republican backers of the coup and downplayed the coup’s significance—is now emboldening neo-fascists in Europe.

The Dutch neo-fascists are inciting riots to impose the most hard-line version of the European Union’s (EU) “herd immunity” policy and boost their vote on March 17. They are manifestly calculating that, if the election campaign is carried out against the backdrop of riots and heavy police deployments, their appeals to law-and-order and anti-immigrant hatred will win broader support. Above all, they are counting on the political complicity of the Rutte government and the bankruptcy of middle-class parties like the SP and Green Left.

Anger is mounting in the European working class at the EU’s politically criminal handling of the pandemic, and polls show that 58 percent of the Dutch public do not trust Rutte or his curfew policy. Rutte has kept workers at work including in non-essential industries and students at school throughout the pandemic. As a result, the virus has continued to spread even when Rutte applied limited social distancing measures, including the current curfew.

Comparisons circulating online between the EU and the Netherlands, on the one hand, and China and Taiwan on the other, utterly expose the EU’s “herd immunity” policy. Aggressive confinement and social distancing measures in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan’s effective contact tracing system limited the contagion and prevented the economic collapse caused by EU “herd immunity” policies.

While the People’s Republic of China confirmed 89,326 cases and 4,636 deaths, Europe—with less than half the population—has had 30 million confirmed cases and will pass 700,000 deaths this weekend. Over 100,000 Europeans die of COVID-19 every three weeks. Taiwan, population 23.5 million, has seen 895 cases and seven deaths. In comparison, the Netherlands, population 17.3 million, has seen just under 1 million cases and 13,816 deaths. Ten times more people die of COVID-19 each day in the Netherlands than have died in Taiwan during the entire pandemic.

The entire Dutch political establishment is committed to the EU’s policy of keeping non-essential production industries and schools open, so profits never stop pouring into the banks. From the Rutte government to the SP—which has opposed calls for lockdowns and instead proposed to weaken the curfew by starting it an hour later—all treat the far right with kid gloves, impotently lecturing them while Wilders whips up riots. They are afraid, above all, of growing anger in the working class.

And so, even though riots have only involved a few hundred individuals in each city, Dutch officials are calling for a major police build-up, requesting that German and Belgian riot police deploy to the Netherlands. Wilders replied on Twitter by calling to deploy the army against the population: “Stop this and intervene before it turns into a partial civil war. Deploy the army. Now.”

There is deep and powerful opposition in the working class internationally to the catastrophe imperialist governments have created during the pandemic. The only progressive way to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic is to mobilize the working class internationally, independently of the entire capitalist state machine, in struggle for a scientifically-guided policy. This also necessarily entails opposing and exposing the accelerating turn toward authoritarian and fascist rule in a struggle to transfer state power to the working class on a socialist perspective.

Clinic closures in Germany continue despite pandemic

Markus Salzmann

With coronavirus deaths averaging around 1,000 per day and many hospitals on the verge of collapse, the downsizing of the German health care system continues unabated. More and more clinics are working at full capacity, medical and nursing staff are exhausted and increasingly subject to infection from the virus. In some cases, the virus is spreading out of the clinics across entire regions with a number of such cases reported last weekend.

In Herne, North Rhine-Westphalia an outbreak occurred at St. Anna Hospital. Officials confirmed that 40 members of staff have tested positive so far. Due to the high number of infections, tracing of the transmission chains is no longer possible. The hospital has suspended operations except for emergencies and births and all scheduled surgeries were postponed.

Sana Clinic in Lübeck (Photo: sana.de)

At the Sana clinics in Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein 79 staff had tested positive for the virus by Saturday. Two COVID wards care for 41 patients and two of the patients are undergoing intensive care.

At the Red Cross Hospital in Bremen, a freeze on admission and discharges has been imposed following a COVID-19 outbreak. Thirteen patients and 24 employees tested positive for the virus, according to a spokeswoman for the hospital.

At Helios Klinikum in Nienburg, Lower Saxony, 40 employees and patients have tested positive so far. “Fifty to 60 percent of the infections are currently taking place at Helios and in the nursing homes,” district spokesman Cord Steinbrecher told NDR.

At the Deister-Süntel Clinic in Bad Münder, 21 of the 140 staff and 13 patients recently tested positive for COVID-19. The increased infection numbers in the district are due in part to the outbreak at the clinic, an authority spokeswoman in Hamelin said.

The situation could worsen dramatically with virus mutations detected with increasing frequency. According to recent research, these mutations are significantly more contagious than the original variant.

Last Friday, for example, the Humboldt Clinic in Berlin-Reinickendorf was placed under quarantine by order of the health department to prevent the spread of the mutant stain B.1.1.7. By Saturday, routine tests in the internal medicine and cardiology wards confirmed 14 cases among patients and six staff. The Berlin-Reinickendorf health department expects more cases of infection as further tests are conducted.

According to a report in the Tagesspiegel newspaper, members of the hospital staff are also likely to have been infected. Reinickendorf public health officer Patrick Larscheid said the outbreak at the hospital “has reached a scale we can hardly survey at the moment.”

According to the news magazine Focus, the first case at the Humboldt Clinic was officially confirmed on January 14. An admission freeze was imposed last Friday with no emergency cases to be admitted until further notice. Employees continue to work despite the risk of spreading the disease, operating on a “shuttle quarantine” system between home and clinic.

The pandemic, which has now been raging for a year, urgently requires an expansion of health care, but the exact opposite is taking place. Last year, 21 clinics across Germany were closed down. In dozens of other hospitals, unprofitable departments were shut down and in some regions comprehensive obstetric care is no longer guaranteed. Another 30 clinics are due to close, or are threatened with closure.

Experts assume that there could be many more closures, as smaller hospitals in particular are losing revenue as a result of the pandemic. At the end of last year, the DKI’s “Krankenhaus Barometer 2020” reported that the economic situation for German hospitals was dramatic. Almost every second hospital (44 percent) was indebted in 2019 and less than a third of hospitals expect positive figures for 2020.

This destructive policy of placing profits above health and life is not new. In 1991 there were more than 2,400 hospitals throughout Germany now down to around 1,400 in 2020. Even in the current crisis leading economic representatives persist in calling for the further dismantling of the country’s health care system to maintain the flow of profits to a narrow elite.

In 2019, a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation called for a reduction in the number of clinics to 600. This proposal received support from all political parties, led by the federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (Christian Democratic Union) and health expert Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party). Last fall, when the pandemic once again spread rapidly, the Bertelsmann Foundation, together with the Barmer Institute for Health Research and the Robert Bosch Foundation, saw an opportunity to use the crisis to press ahead with the plans to close those clinics which were in financial difficulties.

It also became clear that business and political leaders were not just keen to close clinics. They plan to completely “reorganise” the hospital landscape, as they titled their project. In addition to closing hospitals, they are seeking to push ahead with their privatisation.

According to the “Transaction Monitor Healthcare,” drawn up by management consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, about half of all clinics sold went to financial investors who are interested solely in increasing profits. They often convert the clinics into medical care or rehabilitation clinics, which generate more profit than inpatient treatment in hospitals.

To date, around 40 percent of German clinics are in private hands. This represents more than a doubling of this figure over the past 30 years. In Germany, Asklepios clinics are now among the largest private operators, alongside Helios and Sana. In its interim report for this year, the company states that 2020 was “one of the most successful years in the history of Asklepios.”

Politicians of all stripes continue to urge privatisation in the hospital sector, even during the pandemic. In the district of Oberspreewald-Lausitz in Brandenburg, the district council decided to sell a majority stake in Klinikum Niederlausitz to Sana-Kliniken, despite criticism and protests from staff. Here, too, the clinic had slipped into the red in recent years—a fact which is now being used to justify privatisation.

The privatisation and closure of clinics and their transformation into pandemic hotspots are the result of a policy that places profits above lives. The federal and state governments are not prepared to provide adequate health care facilities and personnel for the broad masses of the population.

All hitherto privatisations and cuts in the health sector, the consequences of which are now becoming apparent, must be reversed. Clinics and other health care facilities must be transferred into public ownership and democratically controlled by the workforce.

In Hamburg, five homeless people die in the first week of 2021

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The homeless, the poorest section of the population, are also seriously affected by the coronavirus crisis. The current coronavirus-related restrictions in Germany, combined with a lack of aid from federal, state and local governments, amount to a death sentence for many homeless people in midwinter. In Hamburg alone, five homeless people died in the first eight days of 2021. In the last six weeks, there have been a total of eight fatalities in the city.

The Hamburg street paper Hinz&Kunzt reports that a 48-year-old homeless man died near the Landungsbrücken bridge on New Year’s Eve. The next day, walkers found a 59-year-old dead on his sleeping mat in Schanzenpark. A little later, a 65-year-old died as a result of the harsh living conditions on the street. On the night of January 4, a 45-year-old man was found dead after seeking shelter under the roof of an apartment building.

A homeless person’s belongings

On the morning of January 8, a passerby found the fifth victim, a 66-year-old man, lifeless on the city’s central Reeperbahn. “The deaths on Hamburg’s streets continue. It is yet another preventable death that leaves one speechless,” Hinz&Kunzt commented.

Advocates for the homeless have demanded that the Senate, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, open up hotels that have been closed due to the coronavirus crisis and thereby provide safe accommodation in single rooms. The Senate has refused to do so, declaring that the city’s three emergency shelters are sufficient.

Many homeless people do not feel safe in these shelters. The rooms with up to six beds provide no adequate protection against infection with COVID-19 nor any privacy. Many homeless people therefore avoid them and try to find an alternative on the streets, often with fatal consequences under the current, dangerous conditions.

Hamburg is one of the German cities with the highest proportion of rich and super-rich individuals. In 2017, 42,000 millionaires lived in the city. Some 2,000 earned more than €1 million [US$1.2 million] a year. According to the Federal Statistical Office, Hamburg is the German city with the most millionaires.

On the other hand, at least 50,000 children subsist on miserable Hartz IV welfare payments and homeless people are left to die on the streets. In March 2018, a census concluded that 2,000 Hamburg residents were homeless, almost twice as many as 10 years earlier. Since then this number has undoubtedly increased further due to high rents, rising unemployment and short-time work.

Homeless people have also died in many other cities this winter. In Augsburg, a 54-year-old homeless man died in the city centre in the first week of January. A man froze to death on a park bench in Wolfsburg, and in December, a 72-year-old homeless woman was found dead near the university hospital in Mainz. According to a police report, she had also frozen to death. In November, a 58-year-old woman died of hypothermia in the city of Freiburg.

Last weekend, a homeless man was found dead by a passerby on the Mauritiuswall in Cologne. He is also likely to have been a victim of the winter cold. The man reportedly came from Ukraine and had been officially registered in the city in 2019. In 2020, this was no longer the case. It could be that the victim avoided further contact with city officials due to the threat of deportation. This is often one reason why homeless people avoid all contact with officials, including even street workers.

By last spring and summer it was already clear that the situation for the approximately 678,000 people officially considered homeless in Germany had worsened considerably. Many emergency overnight shelters, soup kitchens and facilities offering access to basic medical care were closed down or only in emergency mode due to the coronavirus. Long lines formed at the few food banks still open, and frequently not all those seeking help could be fed, as the World Socialist Web Site reported.

With the second COVID-19 wave and the winter cold, the situation for the homeless has deteriorated once again. While the German government hands out billions of euros to large companies and banks, no provision has been made to protect the poorest of the poor from the pandemic and ensure their bare survival.

Many initiatives to support the homeless have expressed concern about the lives and health of the poor and homeless. The National Federation of Service Providers for the Homeless (Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Wohnungslosenhilfe e.V., or BAG W) documents cold deaths nationwide using systematic press evaluations. However, many deaths are not reported and therefore not recorded because there is no nationwide recording system. This means that a high number of unreported cases is likely.

According to the statistics of the BAG W, at least 320 cold-related deaths have occurred in Germany since 1991. This figure does not include the victims from the last weeks and the BAG W fears that the number of victims will rise this winter to exceed last year’s figure.

Fiji wins presidency of UN Human Rights Council

John Braddock

Fiji has won the recent diplomatic contest to become the first Pacific island nation to take the presidency of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The body this month elected Fiji’s chief diplomat in Geneva, Nazhat Shameem Khan, as its 2021 leader with 29 of the 47 member nations voting for her.

The UNHRC was formed in 2006, purportedly to promote and preserve human rights around the world, as well as to investigate possible violations by UN member states. Its members are elected every three years by the UN General Assembly. It has become another arena for nation-state rivalries, with participating countries seeking to cover up their own abuses while denouncing their rivals over “human rights” at the same time.

Nazhat Shameem Khan (left), Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama and Australian Foreign Minister Payne at UN Human Rights Council, 25 February 2019. (Photo credit: DFAT/ Christian Bonzon)

US President Trump, as part of his “America First” program, quit the organisation in 2018—denouncing it as “a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” The move came after outgoing UNHCR head Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a Jordanian diplomat, warned against the rise of “chauvinistic nationalism,” sharply condemned Trump’s immigration policy, and voiced concern over the US-backed Saudi Arabian war against Yemen.

US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, had flagged the withdrawal a year earlier, justifying it in the name of defending Israel and the failure of the UNHRC to bow to Washington’s demands that it serve as an instrument of US diplomatic aggression. Chief among the “reforms” Haley demanded of the council was the abolition of Agenda Item 7, which makes the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied territories” a permanent part of the UNHRC’s agenda.

In reality, the world’s chief source of abuses and atrocities is US imperialism, which over the last quarter century of uninterrupted wars has killed and maimed millions and laid waste to entire societies, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay remain symbols of torture and abuse. At home, Washington’s brutal anti-immigrant policies have resulted in the torment of thousands of children and their families.

Khan assumes the UNHRC presidency amid intensifying global conflicts, driven in particular by the aggressive US confrontation against Beijing. China and Russia are returning to the body this year for three-year terms, just as the US is promising to renew its global offensive under President Joe Biden, who is determined to escalate Washington’s anti-China campaign.

Khan’s election followed a secret ballot after a diplomatic stand-off blocked, for the first time in the UNHRC’s 15-year history, the usual consensus decision. The presidency rotates each year between the five geographic regions represented on the council, and the candidate is typically agreed upon by consensus within each regional group.

This year the Asia-Pacific group, due to take over the leadership, failed to agree on a candidate, or even on holding a vote within the 13-member group—which includes China and several countries closely aligned with Washington including Japan, Indonesia and India. As a result, the council began the year with no president and was forced to hold the unprecedented vote among all 47 members.

Khan faced last-minute challenges from Bahrain’s ambassador, Yusuf Abdulkarim Bucheeri, and his Uzbekistan counterpart, Ulugbek Lapasov. The two were reportedly backed by China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. As against Khan’s 29-vote majority, Bahrain’s envoy received 14 votes and Uzbekistan’s four. There were no abstentions.

According to the Guardian, unnamed sources “close to deliberations” said China, Russia and Saudi Arabia baulked at Khan’s expected appointment, and orchestrated the opposing candidacies. These countries, it was claimed, “appeared to be trying to install a friendly candidate country as president to avoid having their own human rights records scrutinised.”

The Economist, in a December article headed “Proxy War,” explained that the so-called “democratic” members of the UNHCR, hoping Biden would “soon send America to join them,” regarded the diplomatic battle as an important contest and supported Fiji.

Australia, whose term on the UNHRC expired at the end of 2020, would likely have strongly supported Fiji. Australia and New Zealand, Washington’s main allies in the Pacific, are determined to ensure their continued dominance in what they regard as their neo-colonial backyard.

While Canberra has not commented on the election, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta tweeted: “Congratulations on Fiji’s election as President of the UN Human Rights Council. This is the first time a Pacific Island country has held this role and will see Pacific voices represented in this important global forum #HRC.”

Following the election, the New York Times, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, portrayed Fiji’s win as a victory for human rights. “The result puts the small, remote island nation, which has a record of support for human rights initiatives, into a leadership position at a time of intensifying competition between states over holding rights abusers to account,” the NYT declared.

The paper praised Fiji for having backed investigations into reported abuses in Venezuela, the Belarus, Syria and Yemen, countries targeted by US imperialism, and suggested that with Fiji in the presidency it will be easier for the US to use the UNHRC to pass resolutions critical of China.

In fact, Fiji, far from being a champion or arbiter of “human rights,” has an extensive list of breaches of media freedoms, police brutality and oppressive legislation, such as the sedition provisions in its Crimes Act. Khan, a former chief prosecutor and high court judge, is closely allied to the Bainimarama regime, which seized power in a military coup in 2006.

The government rests on the military, despite elections in 2014 and 2018 fraudulently hailed as “democratic” by Australia and New Zealand. Harsh austerity measures are accompanied by intimidation of opposition parties and the working class and rampant violence by the police and military. The Guardian has revealed 400 charges of serious violence were laid against police officers in Fiji between 2015 and 2020, including for murder, manslaughter, rape, and aiding prisoners to escape.

Bainimarama has used the COVID-19 pandemic to tighten his rule. A senior military officer, Brigadier-General Jone Kalouniwai, told the Fiji Sun last July that the emergency gave the country’s leaders “good reasons to stifle criticism of their policies by curtailing freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” The fight against COVID-19, he warned, was “likely to end up violating the individual rights and rule of law that are at the heart of any liberal society.”

Macron government denounces scientists for “intervening” in pandemic response

Will Morrow

In a press conference yesterday afternoon, French Health Minister Olivier Véran announced that the government would likely be compelled to announce stricter lockdown measures to face a continued acceleration in the spread of the pandemic. Véran admitted that the nationwide curfew from 6 p.m. had failed to reverse the spread of the virus, and the more contagious variants of the virus, principally the one first identified in the UK, have become established across France.

Macron’s spokesperson, Gabriel Attal, stated yesterday that a decision will be taken by “the end of the week.” The curfew was implemented to prevent a national lockdown that would impact upon corporate profits through the closure of schools and non-essential workplaces. For weeks, the Macron government has rejected demands from the scientific community and health care professionals for a lockdown.

French President Emmanuel Macron (Image Credit: AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Macron had been due to speak on Wednesday, in what had been widely reported to be an announcement of a limited lockdown in which schools and workplaces would all remain open. The speech was cancelled on Wednesday afternoon, with reports that he would not speak before at least Saturday.

This week, Macron has released a series of increasingly open denunciations of scientists’ calls, including from his own chief scientific adviser Jean-François Delfraisy, for lockdowns. “The president has had enough of this automatic and robotic manner of managing the crisis. He wants new solutions,” a top legislator in Macron’s party told RTL radio anonymously on Wednesday.

The same day, Le Monde published comments of Macron adviser Stéphane Séjourné, who denounced what he called the “uncontrolled and suffocating—because sometimes contradictory—interventions of scientists” into the debate on coronavirus policy. “This permanent escalation in the media makes the public debate hysterical,” he added.

Séjourné said that “scientists are not there to make policy. They must clarify the decisions of the public powers, not clarify themselves. This mixing of roles has to stop.”

In other words: the role of scientists is not to warn the public about dangers they face and outline a scientifically-based response. It is to provide advice to the government, and, when the government proceeds to ignore scientific warnings in defence of the interests of the corporate elite, to be quiet and acquiesce to everything.

Four days earlier, Macron denounced in a press conference “this kind of incessant tracking of errors; we have become a nation of 66 million prosecutors. That is not how we face a crisis or move forward.”

Séjourné’s comments were more immediately in response to Delfraissy, who had announced in a television interview with BFMTV on Sunday evening that the UK variant was identified in “7-9 percent” of positive cases examined “in the Paris region, and possibly other regions.” He said, “we will probably have to go to a new lockdown.”

By Tuesday, after being lectured by Macron, Delfraisy gave an interview to Libération, stating that there was no immediate rush to impose a lockdown, and that a decision could be delayed until the end of the week.

The government’s attack on scientists is a conscious and deliberate effort to promote right-wing anti-lockdown forces. It takes place as far-right riots spread in the Netherlands against COVID-19 restrictions, and the attempted coup d’état by American fascists instigated by US President Trump on January 6, whose promotion of fascists had been concentrated on attacks on even the most minimal restrictions against the pandemic.

Macron himself, who praised the fascist dictator Pétain as a “great soldier” in 2018, is continuously working to promote the extreme right by whipping up of anti-Muslim hysteria. At the beginning of January, Le Monde revealed that his adviser, Bruno Roger-Petit, had met with the neo-fascist Marion Maréchal Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen.

In his press conference yesterday, Véran was forced to admit that the government’s policy has failed to stop the virus’ spread. There are now more than 20,000 cases each day, while this figure has risen by 10 percent each week. “The last two weeks, there have been more urgent cases at the hospital than the number of people able to leave,” Véran said.

“The lessons we have drawn from the countries where the variants have circulated earlier and harder than here are that they have caused a strong epidemic wave, stronger than the preceding ones, given the contagiousness of these variants. The fact that they are spreading in our country leads one to think that the curfew and the totality of restrictions were useful but probably not sufficient.”

In Britain, where the more contagious strain is dominant nationally, the seven-day rolling average of daily deaths is more than 1,200. In France, more than 300 people are dying every day. The number of intensive care patients is at more than 3,000, the same level as at the end of October when a limited lockdown was announced.

In an interview on Sunday, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer insisted that the government would seek to keep schools open as long as possible, even if a third lockdown is announced. Schools are being used as holding pens, so that parents can continue to work. The trade unions have opposed any action by teachers for the closure of schools.

Macron’s policy effectively has the support of the entire French political establishment. To the extent that they have said anything at all, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Republicans (LR) have focused their criticism of the government on its failure to confer with them in its decision-making. None of the parties or trade unions are opposed to the de facto “herd immunity” policy Macron is pursuing, allowing the virus to spread so that corporate profit-making can continue.

Nitrogen leak kills six at Gainesville, Georgia poultry plant

Cordell Gascoigne

A nitrogen leak Thursday morning at the Foundation Foods plant in Gainesville, Georgia led to the deaths of six workers, five on site and one later in the emergency room. Several others were taken to the hospital for treatment, according to press reports.

Zach Brackett, Hall County Fire Department Division Chief, reported that firefighters had responded to the leak just after 10:00 a.m. “Once the units arrived, they found a large contingent of employees that had evacuated, along with multiple victims that were in that crowd that were also experiencing medical emergencies around the facility,” he told reporters.

Aerial view of the Foundation Food Group plant in Gainesville, Ga. (screenshot/11Alive.com)

Local firefighters, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the State Fire Marshal were investigating the cause of the leak, the Hall County fire chief said. “It was a leak of unknown cause that has occurred in the system here,” Brackett said. “We still have a lot of information we’re trying to gather from the scene.”

Nearly 130 workers were taken by bus to a nearby church where examinations for injuries were conducted. At least four firefighters were injured by the vaporized nitrogen. They were taken to the hospital for “respiratory complaints,” according to Brackett.

Sean Couch, a spokesperson for Northeast Georgia Health System, said that of the nine additional injured patients at the hospital, three remain in critical condition, five were being treated in the emergency room and were in fair condition, and one was being sent to the emergency room.

Local authorities implemented a shelter-in-place order for the surrounding area, including at a nearby elementary school. However, the order was later lifted when the toxic gas was determined not to have left the facility.

In September, the Foundation Foods Group acquired two Gainesville-based poultry companies—Prime Pak Foods and Victory Processing—and merged them, adding four plants with 1,200 workers, registering annual revenues of $200 million. The plant where the fatal gas leak occurred, previously run by Prime Pak, had a record of serious safety violations.

According to the OSHA, the Prime Pak plant had been the subject of four cases opened by state and federal investigators and cited for 15 violations over the past five years. This includes a 2017 incident in which a worker had two fingers partially amputated while clearing a jam from a cuber machine. The company was fined $12,548 for the incident.

Describing the conditions at the Prime Pak plant last year, a forklift operator posted a review on the website Indeed.com, saying, “They expect you to do everyone else’s job, but you barely get paid to do your own. And they cut overtime. Half of the time management didn’t know their butt from a hole in the ground. Half of the time they were looking for shipping to solve the problem, and last time I checked we don’t get paid enough.”

It is not known if cost-cutting or manpower shortages contributed to the deadly accident. The Foundation Foods Facebook page currently has hiring ads for workers, including maintenance and refrigeration techs. There are also ads for full-time and part-time workers, offering a “training wage” of $12 an hour for 10- to 12-hour shifts.

Poultry plants are reliant upon refrigeration systems that may include liquid nitrogen and other potentially toxic substances. Last October, a manager at the Texas Packing Company pleaded guilty to misleading federal regulators in 2018, over the storage of an illegal quantity of anhydrous ammonia, a refrigerant, exposing workers to the hazardous chemical.

Exposure to the refrigerant may cause convulsive coughing, painful breathing, pulmonary congestion, blindness or even death. According to OSHA’s website, “Refrigerant grade anhydrous ammonia is a clear, colorless liquid or gas, free from visible impurities.”

Unlike anhydrous ammonia, gaseous nitrogen is odorless under normal conditions. While nitrogen, which makes up 78 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, is inert and noncombustible, exposure to concentrated levels of the gas can cause asphyxiation. Given the fairly common use of nitrogen in industrial settings, deaths due to nitrogen leaks are not uncommon. Between 1992-2002, 80 workplace deaths and 50 injuries were caused by asphyxiation from nitrogen leaks, according to the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB).

Inhalation of nitrogen gas in excessive amounts gives only a few seconds’ warning—dizziness, nausea, and vomiting but may also lead to loss of consciousness and death within seconds. Oxygen concentrations below 19 percent cause almost immediate impairment, according to the CSB. This poses extreme hazards not only to those who are initially exposed but to rescuers as well.

In 2005, a nitrogen leak led to the deaths of two contractors at Valero Energy Corporation”s Delaware City, Delaware oil refinery. The workers were working in a confined space when they were exposed to deadly concentrations of nitrogen.

Gainesville, which bills itself as the “Poultry Capital of the World,” is the center of Georgia’s poultry industry, which in turn produces more chicken than any other state. Hall County, the county in northcentral Georgia where Gainesville is located, has a population of 204,000. There are more than a dozen meat processing plants in Hall County and several others in surrounding counties.

Hall County is also home to one of the most concentrated COVID-19 outbreaks in the state. According to statistics compiled by the state government, it has had over 22,300 infections, more than one-tenth of the county’s population, and 306 deaths. The testing positivity rate in the county is an astronomical 16.5 percent, almost double the national average, suggesting that the official figures are significant undercounts of the real total. With 862,000 cases and 13,222 deaths, the state of Georgia is rapidly approaching one million cases.

This is the result of continuation of production, the lack of social distancing and adequate PPE in the meatpacking industry, which have served as the key drivers of infections in rural and semirural communities. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network, at least 56,300 meatpacking workers have been infected nationwide and 277 have died.

This trend is particularly pronounced in Georgia, where less populous counties with large concentrations of meatpacking plants, rather than major cities such as Atlanta, were the main centers of the disease in the early part of last year. A study by Facing South, published in September, found that Hall County and other counties with large meatpacking workforces had, on average, 30 percent higher infection rates than other rural counties in the state. In the early part of the pandemic, these counties had 55 percent more infections than other rural counties.

A major element in the continuation of production in meatpacking was the invocation of the Defense Production Act by former US President Donald Trump on April 28 to keep the industry open, effectively preventing state and local officials from intervening to contain outbreaks. The action was taken after a series of wildcat strikes and protests by workers against the deadly conditions. OSHA also moved to reinterpret regulations to effectively shield corporations from any liability for workplace-related COVID deaths.

Throughout the entire pandemic, OSHA has issued only 310 citations for COVID-related violations and eight in the entire state of Georgia. The agency has issued slightly more than $4 million in total fines, or less than $13,000 per citation.

Another critical factor in the ability of the meatpacking companies to maintain production has been their collusion with the unions, including the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, to cover up infections and pressure workers to remain on the job. The UFCW did nothing to oppose, or even alert the public, about major outbreaks at plants such as Tyson’s Waterloo pork plant in Iowa and Rochelle Foods in Illinois. In Waterloo, the union even collaborated with the company to implement incentive bonuses for perfect attendance, while management covered up hundreds of infections and took bets on how many workers would get sick.

The policy of forcing workplaces to remain open retains broad bipartisan support. The Biden administration, which has not revoked Trump’s order, has rejected calls for a national lockdown, instead directing OSHA to enact minimum guidelines, such as requiring workers to wear masks. Biden has also declared the reopening of all the country’s schools by April as one of his top priorities in order to allow parents to return to work.

Even before the pandemic, one worker died every 99 minutes from a work-related injury, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released last month. There were 5,333 fatal workplace injuries recorded in the US in 2019, a two percent increase over the 2018 count of 5,250. This was the largest fatal case count since 2007.

The rush to maintain and ramp up production, cut costs to boost profits and shareholder returns, along with the expanded use of temps and less experienced workers to replace more experienced workers, who are sick or caring for their children during the pandemic, can only lead to more tragedies like the one that occurred in Gainesville on Thursday.

Report finds $158 million in payments to Jeffrey Epstein by billionaire Apollo CEO Leon Black

Alex Findijs

Billionaire Leon Black, cofounder of the finance giant Apollo Global Management, announced on Monday that he would be stepping down as CEO after an investigation by the company discovered $158 million in payments to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein between 2013 and 2017.

The investigation was ordered by Black himself following the publication of an article by the New York Times last October reporting that he had paid Epstein at least $50 million during this period.

Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black

The allegations against Black threatened to cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Investors, including the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, one of the largest in the country, told the company it was freezing new investments. Apollo handles hundreds of billions of dollars in private equity and could have faced an exodus of prominent investors hoping to avoid any association with Epstein themselves.

Seeking to settle the issue on its own terms, Apollo hired the law firm Dechert to review Black’s dealings with Epstein.

According to the Dechert report, Epstein was paid by Black for consulting services that ranged from estate planning and taxes to his extensive art collection. Black defended his financial relationship with Epstein by claiming that he was paid proportionate to the services rendered—Black believed that Epstein’s services resulted in a savings of $1-2 billion.

However, the report also found that “the compensation paid by Black to Epstein far exceeded any amounts Black paid to his other professional advisors.” It also noted that Black paid far less to his advisors, who had actually implemented Epstein’s ideas, and that Epstein was often more of a nuisance and disruptive force than a creative one.

Epstein’s work for Black began just two years after Epstein was released early from an 18-month sentence for soliciting sex from an underaged girl. Black claimed that Epstein had served his time and that he had simply mistook the underage girl as being of age.

This justification by Black is fairly weak, though. Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution, but that was merely a plea deal to avoid prosecution along a much broader host of charges. As early as 2005, Epstein was facing credible accusations of sex trafficking, and in 2007, a federal investigation resulted in a 53-page indictment.

While the investigation by Dechert did not find any evidence that Black had been involved in any illicit activities relating to Epstein, there are serious questions regarding how aware Black was of the extensive accusations against him.

This extends to several billionaires and politicians around the world. Notable people with close personal and financial ties to Epstein include Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Leslie Wexner of L Brands, Barclays CEO James Staley, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

None of these individuals has been found guilty of participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking, but the very thought of being associated with Epstein in any manner has clearly cut a deep current of fear amongst the wealthy and powerful of the world.

Following the revelations of Black’s financial connections with Epstein, Apollo was quick to take action out of concern for its reputation. In order to protect the firm’s public image, Black decided to step down from his position as CEO “on or before July 31” and take the less public position of board chairman.

The financial impact on Apollo is yet to be seen. Even with Black supposedly cleared of illegal connections to Epstein, many Apollo clients may still see a safer option in purging themselves of any association with the firm.

This will certainly have political consequences as well. Black was an avid political donor before this scandal, donating nearly $600,000 to both Republican and Democratic Party candidates and super PACs in the 2016 election cycle alone, according to CampaignMoney.com. During the 2020 election cycle, he only donated $89,000 in total, likely stepping back amid the allegations and investigation into his Epstein connections.

Apollo may also be affected by this change. According to OpenSecrets.org, Apollo Global Management has been involved in spending $16 million on political contributions since 1990 and $34 million on lobbying since 1998.

Understandably, politicians and political machines will likely not wish to consort with an organization linked to the Epstein scandal. Moving money to and from an organization whose former CEO and acting chairman paid suspiciously large sums to a convicted sexual predator is not particularly conducive to protecting a public image.

This has also had a considerable impact on the internal politics of Apollo. Cofounder Marc Rowan, who led the firm’s creation of a $300 billion credit platform during the 2008 financial crisis, will take the position of CEO after Black. The firm will also appoint two co-presidents and four new members to its board, as well as scrap a “dual-class share structure” that would have granted extra voting rights to its founding members.

The scandal around Leon Black is the latest in the Epstein saga, which promises to produce further revelations in the future and raise additional questions about the knowledge and involvement of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people in Epstein’s crimes.

Sri Lankan stock market hits record high amidst rising COVID-19 infections

Saman Gunadasa

Over the past four weeks, Sri Lanka’s wealthy have become 739 billion rupees ($US3.8 billion) richer through a 25 percent rise in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE).

Last week alone, major players in the CSE amassed 318 billion rupees, an increase that dwarfs the 109 billion rupee rise for the whole of 2019.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The spike in Sri Lanka’s small share market occurs amidst an exponential growth of COVD-19 infections. As of yesterday, confirmed cases have increased 20-fold since October, to more than 60,000, and deaths by 26 times, to almost 300. The CSE rise has been accompanied by growing poverty, rising unemployment, wage cuts and a higher cost of living.

Jubilant over the ballooning share market, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, who is also the finance minister, tweeted: “It’s also among the best performing indices in the world so far in 2021. I thank investors for having faith in the Sri Lankan companies. The GOSL [government] is committed to fulfilling its mandate to revive the Sri Lankan economy.”

The CSE bubble, however, is the direct result of massive amounts of “free money” provided as part of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s pandemic stimulus package for big business last July. The package involved the Central Bank releasing 230 billion rupees and reducing bank rates by 2.5 percent to between 4 and 4.5 percent. Last year, the government also printed 650 billion rupees.

Most of this year’s share value increases were recorded by LOLC (Lanka Orix Leasing Company), which is involved in leasing, hire purchase, insurance and other financial activities, and the Hayleys conglomerate, which is engaged in the import-export industries related to rubber production and managing plantations. The country’s two top billionaires—Ishara Nanayakkara and Dammika Perera—head these respective companies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a CSE regulatory body, issued a second cautionary note about share market manipulations by top businessman, including Nanayakkara and Perera, on Tuesday. The note warned that “all investors and the general public are hereby advised/cautioned not to rely on such unsolicited stock tips/investment advice circulated through bulk SMS, websites and social media platforms.”

Big business is reaping windfall benefits and profits from Colombo’s measures to boost foreign investment. Apart from providing cheap money, this year’s budget reduced tax rates to 14 and 18 percent, the lowest in South Asia, and big investors were given staggering 15-year tax exemptions.

The Colombo share market increases are a small reflection of the massive rises on the US, EU and Indian stock markets. Since last March, the US Federal Reserve has pumped out $120 billion per month or more than $1.4 trillion a year, pushing up the share market. Warnings have already been issued that the Wall Street share bubble may burst.

While Colombo’s share market boom continues, the country’s economy faces an unprecedented crisis that has been deepened by the global pandemic.

Last year, the Sri Lankan economy contracted by 3.9 percent. The country needs $23 billion for debt servicing payments up to 2024, including $7 billion due this year. Foreign currency reserves have fallen to about $5 billion, which is only sufficient for four months of imports, and last year export earnings fell by 17 percent.

Global rating agencies, such as Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch, have downgraded Sri Lanka’s credit rating to the “substantial risk” level Caa1, CCC+ and CCC respectively, which adversely affects the country’s ability to borrow. Angered by the downgrades, the government and the Central Bank rejected those reports, claiming they were “false.” The massive debts and the decline in economic growth make clear that the current CSE share market bubble is extremely fragile.

While Rajapakse’s policies are massively benefiting the rich—workers and the poor are bearing the burden of the deepening social crisis.

Responding to corporate demands, Rajapakse began reopening the economy in late April, after a short-lived lockdown. The government directed employees to return to their workplaces, but with negligible safety measures, and most schools were opened.

In line with his counterparts around the world, Rajapakse declared that the people had to “live with pandemic” as the new normal. As a result, tens of thousands of COVID-19 infections have been reported since September.

Colombo also allowed companies to retrench workers, impose wage cuts and slash conditions, including through increased workloads. Informal sector workers, who make up around 70 percent of the total workforce, have been the most heavily impacted.

The Rajapakse administration, using a variety of excuses, has also slowed the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers wanting to return home. Many have lost jobs, income and are stranded abroad. Some are homeless. Thus far, 89 Sri Lankan migrant workers have died from COVID-19.

The cash-strapped Colombo regime is cynically discouraging still employed migrant workers from returning home in order to maintain the flow of foreign exchange. Last year, immigrant workers sent back $7 billion in remittances, a growth of 5.8 percent over the previous year.

Domestic living expenses are soaring due to increased taxes on essential food items and other goods and the ongoing devaluation of the currency. Since the beginning of the year, the rupee has fallen between 185 and 200 rupees to the US dollar.

By the end of 2020, the official food inflation figure had climbed to 10 percent. Over the last few months, the market price of basic foods, such as rice, dhal, onions, sprats and sugar has drastically increased, dragging sections of the working class and the peasantry towards starvation.

According to World Bank estimates, the number of Sri Lankans living on less than $US3.2 per day has increased from 8.9 percent in 2019 to 13 percent last year. These figures show that 890,000 more people have been driven into poverty over that period.

The trade unions are actively collaborating with the government and the major corporations to develop cost-cutting “tripartite agreements.” Colombo’s tripartite task force consists of the unions, employers and the labor minister or his senior officials who regularly meet to discuss how to impose the burden of the deepening crisis.

During the 2008–09 global financial crisis, Sri Lanka’s trade unions rushed to collaborate with employers and the government, overseeing the closure of 500 factories and the retrenchment of hundreds of thousands of workers.

The global catastrophe triggered last year by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, is far worse.

There is deep-seated opposition among broad layers of the population to the attacks on social and democratic rights. The recent strikes by plantation, health and apparel workers anticipate a massive eruption of the class struggle.

Behind the GameStop stock frenzy

Andre Damon

This month, the US stock market was roiled by a wave of speculation in unprofitable or bankrupt companies.

Shares in the Blockbuster movie rental chain, bankrupt since 2010 and valued at just pennies, soared more than 100-fold. AMC, the loss-making movie theater chain, rise from $1 to $20 in the course of two weeks. Shares in Koss, the struggling headphone maker, soared from $2 to over $120.

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

But nothing exemplifies this phenomenon so much as the performance of game retailer GameStop, which saw its share price shoot up from $15 to over $300 during the past week.

The run-up in the shares of these companies far outpaces the broader stock market, which rose by more than 75 percent since its low in March, fueled by more than $4 trillion in cash handouts from the US Federal Reserve. The growth in share values has fueled a vast enrichment of the US financial oligarchy.

The vast majority of the rise in share markets has been concentrated in only a handful of stocks, led by carmaker Tesla, which saw its share price rise from $60 to $835 in the course of just two years, making its CEO, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world.

Over the course of this year, stock market speculation has become more and more unglued from corporate profitability. Tesla, for instance, would need 1,600 years to earn the amount of money that has been invested in it. More and more, the companies with the lowest growth and worst economic prospects are emerging as the best target for financial speculation.

But the latest round of frenzied trading was driven by a new phenomenon: a group of independent day traders, including many former bankers now trading on their own accounts, coordinating their purchases on online forums, particularly the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets.

Their activities have been facilitated by the rise of commission-free stock trading services, such as Robinhood and TD Ameritrade, which allow small investors to trade stocks with no overhead fees, often using funds lent to them by the trading services.

This week’s run-up in the value of GameStop was driven by a coordinated “short squeeze.” The targets of the traders are hedge funds who had placed bets that GameStop’s stock price would drop, that is they were “shorting” the stock. The “short squeeze” operation involved the coordinated purchase of the shares by retail traders on Reddit, resulting in a rise in shares and substantial losses for the hedge funds.

On Tuesday, Musk tweeted his support for the operation, tweeting “gamestonk” and linking to wallstreetbets.

On Wednesday, US stock trading volume set a new record, as the investors expanded the short squeeze to AMC theaters. The next day, Robinhood delisted GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, Bed Bath and Beyond, and other stocks from its trading platform, while also raising margin requirements.

Other trading platforms, such as TD Ameritrade and Schwab, followed suit. At the same time, the Discord chat service temporarily blocked Wallstreetbets, claiming that its content included “hate speech” and “glorifying violence.”

The halt in trading prompted the shares of GameStop and other companies to plunge, incurring significant losses for members of the broader public that purchased the stocks. Tales of individuals losing tens of thousands of dollars were common in online forums.

The actions of Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, and Discord were broadly criticized on both the political right and by sections of the Democratic Party. Day trader and blogger Dave Portnoy, who conducted a fawning interview with Trump last year, tweeted “Robinhood must die,” alleging a conspiracy between the company and hedge funds that held short positions on GameStop.

“It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote Thursday on Twitter. “This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!”

Robinhood’s actions were also prominently criticized by Democrats. “We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit,” wrote congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter.

Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks were embraced by both Donald Trump Jr and Senator Ted Cruz, who replied, “fully agree.”

Robinhood likely came under pressure from major hedge funds to take the action that it did. No doubt, more will come out about this.

However, no one should accept the claim that the GameStop short squeeze is driven simply by a band of independent traders asserting themselves against the powers that be. Major hedge funds, including BlackRock, have made billions from the run-up in GameStop’s share prices.

Economists have warned that GameStop shares, meanwhile, are behaving like a classic pump-and-dump scheme, in which sophisticated investors goad novices to drive up the price of a stock, then sell it, leaving small investors holding the losses.

The main point that needs refuting is the view, often expressed by users on wallstreetbets, that by speculating on a worthless stock, and potentially forcing Wall Street firms to take losses, they are somehow making a progressive protest against the capitalist system.

No doubt many of the people who bought shares of GameStop wanted to register their opposition, to assert their own independent interests in a system dominated by injustice and social inequality. Many just wanted to get ahead in a social order that condemns millions of people to economic desperation.

But the idea that by joining forces with the likes of Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr, and Ted Cruz to hop on the bandwagon of a speculative mania will lead to some sort of progressive social outcome is absurd.

Speculation by over-indebted consumers preceded every major financial disaster in history. Prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929, hundreds of thousands of small investors piled into the stock market, many taking out vast loans on the advice of hucksters claiming that the stock market would inevitably keep rising. In 2008, it was the same thing, only with houses: everyone was urged to buy a house they could not afford, massively enriching Wall Street in the process.

Like with the massive leveraged investing by small shareholders in the past, this will likely end in disaster for small shareholders. But if small traders are successful in their drive to impose losses on hedge funds, what will be the outcome? A small fraction of the population would become wealthier—primarily educated sections of the middle class. The pandemic would continue to rage, wars would remain, and the vast majority of the working class would continue to toil in poverty and oppression.