New York Times weaponizes youth suicides to push for school reopenings

Dominic Gustavo

As the 2021 spring semester begins in the United States, the corporate press, spearheaded by the New York Times, is seeking to justify the criminal policy of school re-openings on the grounds that school closures are leading to an increase in student suicides. In so doing, the media is deliberately obscuring the true origins of the mental health crisis affecting young people, while at the same time providing a pseudo-moral justification for homicidal policies that have led and will continue to lead to countless infections and deaths from the coronavirus.

Teachers and staff protest outside Franklin D. Roosevelt High School as they call for more and better COVID-19 testing and precautions, Friday, Oct. 2, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

On January 24, the Times published an article highlighting the spike in youth suicides since the start of the pandemic. The article focused on Clark County, Nevada, the fifth largest school district in the US, encompassing Las Vegas, which saw 18 student suicides between March and December. By comparison, there were nine suicides in the district during the whole of 2019.

In one instance, 18-year-old Anthony Orr drove to a parking lot in August and shot himself in his car, just months after graduating. His mother, seeking to provide an explanation, told the Times, “Our kids are feeling hopeless. They’re feeling like there’s no future for them. I can’t see how there’s any other explanation.” The youngest suicide victim in the county was just nine years old.

The tragic experience of Clark County is mirrored throughout the country, in what has become an alarming trend. Baltimore County teen Michael Myronuk, Jr. was just 14 when he ended his life in October. His mother told WBFF Fox45 News: “He didn’t have any hope. He just gave up.” In another case, an 11-year-old Sacramento boy shot himself in December during his Zoom class.

The devastating increase in youth suicides and mental health issues is being utilized by the Times and other media outlets to serve as a justification for reopening the schools in the midst of the surging pandemic. Jesus Jara, the Clark County superintendent, told the Times: “When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the COVID numbers we need to look at anymore. … We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.” Jara subsequently took to Twitter to proclaim that schools “must reopen to help all students.”

There can be no doubt that the mental health crisis in the US has worsened dramatically since the eruption of the pandemic, particularly among adolescents and youth, whose underdeveloped psyches are especially vulnerable to psychological stress. An August 2020 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that rates of depression and anxiety had tripled since the previous year. According to the same report, 26 percent of young adults ages 18–24 had thought about suicide during the previous month.

A November report based on data collected throughout the year in nationwide surveys found that October was even more devastating, with 47.7 percent of young adults reporting symptoms of depression, and 36.9 percent reporting thoughts of suicide or death. It is clear that the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic include an epidemic of despair among young people.

There is a close connection between the Times ’s cynical attempt to utilize the suicides of young people to justify the reopening of schools and the Biden administration’s repeated statements of support for the financial oligarchy’s back-to-school drive. The article was published just four days after Biden declared “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”

Biden was signaling his intention to pursue the full reopening of the economy and de-facto continuation of Trump’s herd immunity policy, which has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. The efforts of the Times and other bourgeois outlets to shore up support for this criminal policy now assumes the form of feigned concern for the youth, in this case by utilizing the suicides of youths to proclaim that reopening the schools is an urgent necessity.

However, the establishment mouthpieces that proclaim such concern for the mental well-being of youths fail to explain how students’ mental health will be improved by herding them into unsafe classrooms to witness their teachers, their peers and possibly themselves falling ill to a deadly pathogen, not to mention the risk that they might pass the virus on to their parents, grandparents or other loved ones.

Moreover, they ignore the fact that the refusal of the government and both big business parties to implement policies that would contain the virus and save lives, because these policies—including the shutdown of non-essential production—would cut into the profits of the corporations and banks, is responsible for the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, which makes the safe reopening of the schools impossible. It is the ruling class and its political servants that are responsible for the increasing mental anguish of young people, not teachers.

Now, under conditions where the pandemic has been allowed to spread exponentially, where serious scientific studies show that youth are susceptible to developing long-term complications from the virus, and where a deadlier and more contagious variant of the virus is known to be spreading, it is most certainly not in the best interests of students to be sent into schools with hundreds of other students, teachers and staff.

There is little doubt that the isolation imposed by the pandemic has had a negative impact on mental health, but it is far too simplistic to assert that the crisis is merely the result of loneliness caused by school closures. More to the point, this argument deliberately obscures the true causes of the epidemic of mental distress, which are deeply rooted and systemic in character.

Mental health in the US, especially among young people, has been steadily worsening for at least the past two decades. According to a 2019 report by the National Center for Health Statistics and the CDC, suicide rates among youth aged 10 to 24—which had been relatively stable between 2000 and 2007 at 6.8 deaths per 100,000—began steadily rising after 2007 to reach a rate of 10.6 deaths per 100,000 by 2017, an increase of 56 percent in just one decade. Suicide has been the second leading cause of death within that age bracket at least since 2017.

In this context, it is deeply misleading to state that the pandemic shutdowns are the cause of the spike in mental illnesses. Rather, the pandemic has accelerated a mental health catastrophe that has been long developing.

Mental health is a social phenomenon that cannot be considered apart from the broader political, economic and social structure of society.

The youth of the new millennium have come of age in an era of staggering social inequality. They’ve grown up in a nation that has been continuously at war for nearly three decades, with the youngest unable to remember a time when the United States was not engaged in armed conflict.

They have come to age in a society where school shootings and other outbreaks of homicidal violence are regular occurrences and are treated with indifference by the ruling class; a society in which suicide, drug overdoses, and other deaths of despair are tragically common; a country where the threat of brutal violence by the armed enforcers of the capitalist state—the police—always lies just beneath the surface; a culture that promotes the most backward values, such as greed and self-centeredness, as virtues.

Add to this the devastating impact of the pandemic, during which the most vulnerable members of society—the elderly, the infirm and the poor—have been ruthlessly sacrificed to satisfy the insatiable greed of the financial oligarchy. Countless youth have undoubtedly seen loved ones die of the virus. They’ve witnessed their parents struggling to cope with the economic difficulties caused by the pandemic depression. Many are either facing or have already been evicted due to a cutoff or decline in family income.

The pandemic has revealed more sharply than ever the brutality, incompetence and moral depravity of modern capitalist society. Under these conditions, the growing despair and anguish of the youth comes as a surprise only to the bourgeois writers of the New York Times et al., who are both blind and deaf to the realities that face the working-class majority.

The bourgeois press presents workers and youth with a Catch-22: either reopen the schools for in-person learning in classrooms that are clearly unsafe, or have the youth stay home to wallow in loneliness and despair.

Meanwhile, the mega-fortunes of the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezoses continue to soar, driven by a stock market fueled by endless supplies of free money from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Socialists reject with contempt this false dichotomy. Under socialism, the resources of society would be rationally and scientifically organized to meet the social needs of the population.

Guided by humanity and reason, a socialist society would provide resources for the spiritual and cultural nourishment of the youth, along with the mobilization of all available technology to provide education and communication during the pandemic.

Mental health treatment and therapy would be available to all workers and their children to help them cope with isolation until the pandemic was brought under control. In the meantime, workers and their families would receive full compensation.

This is far from a utopian dream. The material resources exist to build a just and humane society. However, only the conscious struggle of the whole working class can bring about this transformation.

Australian government sets course to impose pandemic debt crisis on working class

Mike Head

After pouring billions of dollars into corporate pockets as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit profits, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government is now moving to slash unemployment benefits and other critical social spending, threatening widespread impoverishment.

In his first major appearance for 2021, billed as a “headland speech” at the National Press Club, Morrison declared: “You can’t run the Australian economy on taxpayers’ money forever.”

Scott Morrison speaking at the National Press Club (Facebook/Scott Morrison)

This is a complete fraud. The vast majority of the $251 billion that Morrison boasted of providing in “COVID-19 economic support measures” went to prop up and subsidise big companies—including Qantas, Virgin, Toyota, Crown Resorts, Star Entertainment Group and Qube Holdings—even as they laid off thousands of workers and cut workers’ wages and conditions, while pocketing profits and paying executive bonuses.

In his speech, Morrison outlined the government’s intent to try to extract the cost of the escalation of its debt burden, expected to exceed $1 trillion within several years, from the working class, especially the jobless and lowest-paid.

The prime minister said his government’s task now was to stick to its “economic recovery plan” and exercise “fiscal discipline” to reduce the debt. “We are not running a blank-cheque budget,” he insisted, after a year of handing the corporate elite virtual blank cheques.

This places the Liberal-National Coalition government and the political establishment as a whole on a collision course with the working class as the economic and social crisis fueled by the pandemic intensifies.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg went on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Insiders” TV program on Sunday to give the clearest indication so far that the government will cut unemployment benefits back to their pre-pandemic below-poverty level of about $40 a day for a single adult, when its slightly higher JobSeeker payments are terminated at the end of March.

While he refused to yet announce a definite decision on the payments, Frydenberg said the government had made a point during the pandemic of not “baking in” such “structural spending” that would continue into the future.

In reality, the sole reason for imposing such financial and social hardship on the three million workers who remain unemployed or “underemployed” is to coerce them into poorly-paid work on super-exploited conditions. That is the thrust of the government’s “economic recovery plan.”

For the same reason, Frydenberg also ruled out any extension of the government’s JobKeeper wage subsidy program beyond March 31, even though employers are still using the scheme to pay the wages of about 1.5 million workers, and many are likely to be retrenched as a result.

By contrast to the treatment of those worst-affected by the economic impact of the pandemic, the treasurer highlighted the government’s ongoing handouts to business. These include a $27 billion Business Investment Allowance, a reduction in the small and medium company tax rate from 30 percent to 25 percent, loss carry-back tax write-off provisions and “JobMaker” payments to employers for hiring workers aged under 35.

Morrison and Frydenberg flatly defended the obvious double standard involved in hounding and punishing welfare recipients for alleged over-payments, as exposed in the $1.2 billion robodebt harassment scandal, while permitting employers to retain overpaid JobKeeper subsidies that they received despite recording bumper profits.

Morrison said anyone who criticised this was displaying an “envy narrative.” Frydenberg offered a cynical circular argument. He said businesses that had managed to improve their profitability during the public health crisis were not required to pay back the wage subsidies, because the government had not mandated repayments.

In addition, Morrison and Frydenberg foreshadowed further “support packages” for businesses in certain sectors, such as travel and tourism, that have lost revenues because of global travel safety restrictions.

The Labor Party, which backed all the corporate handouts, has essentially continued to mirror the government’s position by suggesting a continuation of JobKeeper subsidies for those particular industries, while feigning concern about cutting the dole all the way back to $40 a day.

Interviewed yesterday by right-wing radio host John Laws, Labor leader Anthony Albanese said Labor wanted to “make sure we restore confidence in the government of the day.” He added: “One of the problems, and you know this, John, there’s a whole lot of cynicism out there.”

These remarks point to the anxiety in ruling circles, including the Labor and union apparatuses, about the discontent mounting in the working class.

While still supporting the government, the financial oligarchy is demanding that it go far further and faster to gut social spending, cut business taxes and restructure workplace relations.

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) editorial on Monday said Morrison was “right to signal that the year of big spending is over and the economy can’t run on taxpayers’ money indefinitely.” But it accused him of missing the chance to use his opening set piece speech of 2021 to “prepare the political ground for the supply-side tax, workplace and other regulatory reforms needed for the economy to grow back better.”

Last year, the editorial recalled, “Morrison suggested that a Hawke-Keating scale economic reform agenda was required to repair the COVID-19 damage; and Mr Frydenberg invoked the supply-side inspiration of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”

The Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 imposed the Reagan-Thatcher agenda on workers in Australia with the essential assistance of the trade unions. The editorial’s call for another such assault is a warning of the readiness of the Labor Party and its associated unions to again enforce the dictates of the ruling class.

Already, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and its affiliates, as well as Labor, have played a central role in the pro-business response to the pandemic.

The ACTU helped devise JobKeeper, which funneled billions to major corporations as they were laying off workers, and has overseen the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, wage cuts and reductions in conditions. Labor rushed the main aspects of the government’s October budget through parliament, including massive tax cuts for wealthy individuals and big business.

The AFR editorial expressed fears over the implications of Labor’s deepening crisis, including moves to unseat its federal leader Anthony Albanese. It complained: “The Prime Minister and Treasurer are under little pressure to seize what should be a burning platform for a supply-side agenda due to the state of the federal Opposition. As Anthony Albanese’s frontbench reshuffle of the climate portfolio from the left to the right wing of the party showed, federal Labor is still preoccupied with the internal fall-out of the traumatic 2019 election loss.”

This reference to the Labor Party crisis confirms that the financial elite is concerned that Labor continues to be so discredited in the working class that it is unfit to reliably back the government in such an offensive and to suppress the social unrest that will be ignited.

Military seizes power in Myanmar

Peter Symonds

Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw, yesterday seized control of the country in a coup and arrested the top leaders of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), including Aung San Suu Kyi. A state of emergency has been declared for a year, handing far-reaching powers to the armed forces. The military’s commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has taken power.

The military took over the media and telecommunications. Reports from the commercial centre of Yangon and other cities indicated that the services of four of the country’s telecom companies had been cut off, as were some internet services. TV broadcasts were restricted to the military’s Myawaddy TV channel. Troops and armoured vehicles had already been on the streets.

Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi addresses the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

The pretext for the coup was alleged irregularities in the November 8 national election, in which the NLD won 83 percent of the vote and took 396 out of 476 seats in the combined lower and upper houses of parliament. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development party won only 33 seats. The new parliament was due to convene yesterday.

The military refused to recognise the result of the election and in mid-January claimed that more than 90,000 cases of election fraud had taken place. No proof was provided publicly. Last week, military spokesman General Zaw Min Tun warned of a coup if allegations were not addressed. Last Thursday, the election commission dismissed claims of irregularities, which have been largely rejected by international observers.

Last Friday, the US and its allies, including Britain, Australia and New Zealand, issued a statement warning Myanmar’s military against a coup. Responding on Saturday, its commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing did not deny that the army was planning a coup but declared it would abide by the constitution.

A military spokesperson yesterday insisted there were “huge discrepancies” and “terrible fraud” in the election results, which the country’s election commission had “failed to settle.” The military invoked article 417 of the constitution, which allows for the declaration of a state of emergency in conditions that threaten to “disintegrate the union or disintegrate national solidarity.” It declared that new elections would be held but provided no timeline.

The previous military junta drew up the 2008 constitution to ensure that it continued to hold key levers of power. A quarter of seats in both parliamentary houses are reserved for military appointees, ensuring that it can block any constitutional amendment. The military also remains in control of powerful ministries, including defence and home affairs, and is thus excluded from any civilian oversight.

Suu Kyi, who was freed from house arrest in 2010, and her NLD agreed to this democratic charade, which was part of the military’s shift away from China and toward the US. The NLD represents sections of the country’s ruling class who regard the military’s domination as a barrier to their business interests. They oriented to the West for support. For the Obama administration, Myanmar’s turn toward Washington was regarded as one of the successes of its confrontational “pivot to Asia” against China. Washington ended Myanmar’s pariah status, dropped economic sanctions and proclaimed it to be a “developing democracy.”

The NLD won the 2016 elections and formed a government. Suu Kyi, the supposed “icon of democracy,” became a roving ambassador for what in effect was a military-backed regime, seeking foreign investment and defending the military against charges of gross human rights abuse as it conducted its murderous operations against the Muslim Rohingya minority that drove hundreds of thousands to flee the country.

The military’s decision to take back full control of the country is no doubt conditioned in part by the turn to authoritarian and fascist forms of rule internationally amid the deepening crisis of capitalism triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic—not least in the United States. Significantly, Myanmar’s military has followed the playbook of Trump, who on the basis of lies about electoral fraud and a “stolen election” attempted to engineer a fascist coup by storming the Capitol on January 6.

Myanmar is confronting a worsening economic and social crisis as a result of a surge in COVID-19 cases since mid-August. Between late March to early August, Myanmar recorded just 360 cases and six deaths. However, those figures have risen dramatically to the current level of 140,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths, putting huge strains on the country’s limited health care system. Economic growth for the financial year 2019–20 (starting on October 1) is projected to be 3.2 percent, sharply down from 6.8 percent in the previous year. Growth for 2020–21 is expected to be just 0.5 percent.

Lockdowns have contributed to major job losses and a dramatic rise in poverty. A poll by the International Food Policy Research Institute last September found that 59 percent of 1,000 households surveyed in urban Yangon and 66 percent of 1,000 households surveyed in the country’s rural dry zone earned less than $US1.90 a day—a commonly used benchmark for extreme poverty. Only 16 percent of respondents in a similar survey in January 2020 were in extreme poverty.

“That level of poverty poses huge risks for food insecurity and malnutrition,” Derek Headey, lead author of the study, commented. “Though necessary to control the virus, lockdown periods have resulted in disastrous impacts on poverty and need to be accompanied by larger and better targeted cash transfers if Myanmar is to successfully contain the economic destruction of COVID-19’s second wave.” Since that September survey, the plight of the urban and rural poor has undoubtedly worsened, fueling sharp social tensions.

In comments to the media about the coup, Myanmar historian Thant Myint-U warned: “The doors just opened to a different, almost certainly darker future. Myanmar is a country already at war with itself, awash in weapons, with millions barely able to feed themselves, deeply divided along religious and ethnic lines… I’m not sure anyone will be able to control what comes next.”

The new Biden administration had previously signalled a hard line toward Myanmar. During his congressional confirmation hearing, incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would oversee an inter-agency review to determine whether Myanmar’s atrocities against Rohingya constituted genocide. Myanmar’s top generals, including Min Aung Hlaing, are already facing hearings in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which started last year, over their human rights abuses.

In response to yesterday’s coup, Biden warned of the re-imposition of sanctions on Myanmar. “The United States removed sanctions on Burma over the past decade based on progress toward democracy,” he said, invoking Myanmar’s traditional name. “The reversal of that progress will necessitate an immediate review of our sanction laws and authorities, followed by appropriate action.”

Like Obama, Biden is not motivated by any genuine interest in defending human rights. Rather the US is driven by renewed concern of growing Chinese influence. The failure of Myanmar to attract significant foreign investment, along with growing international criticism of the treatment of the Rohingya, compelled Suu Kyi, her government and the military to increasingly turn back to Beijing for financial and diplomatic assistance.

Myanmar’s dependence on Beijing deepened with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including for a free supply of vaccines developed in China. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi visited Myanmar last month to discuss closer collaboration on its Belt and Road Initiative, which includes strategic transport routes and pipelines through Myanmar to southern China. For Beijing, an alternative to the US-controlled sealanes through the Strait of Malacca is vital to ensure supplies of energy and raw materials as tensions with Washington continue to rise.

China’s response to the coup has been decidedly muted. Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said only: “We hope that all sides in Myanmar can appropriately handle their differences under the constitution and legal framework and safeguard political and social stability.”

The prospect of a renewed “human rights” offensive and economic sanctions by US imperialism and its allies could have been a significant factor in prompting Myanmar’s military to take power directly, rather than relying on the potentially unreliable support of Suu Kyi and the NLD. Suu Kyi has now called for protests against the coup. Despite her much tarnished image as a democracy symbol, she will undoubtedly turn to Washington for backing.

Chinese fishing vessels seized in the Pacific

John Braddock

Two Chinese fishing vessels were seized by authorities in Vanuatu in late January for allegedly fishing illegally in the south west Pacific island nation’s territorial waters.

Authorities claimed the Dong Gang Xing 13 and Dong Gang Xing 16 were fishing in Vanuatu’s northern waters near the remote Torres islands. Vanuatu’s department of fisheries, the police maritime wing, and a French naval reconnaissance plane from New Caledonia had monitored the ships before they were detained by a Vanuatu patrol boat. The crew is facing investigation after undergoing quarantine in Port Vila.

US Coast Guard cutter participating in Operation Kurukuru in October 2019, an annual operation targeting "illegal" and unregulated fishing, in waters off Palau. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

New Zealand journalist Michael Field described the incident as “murky,” chiefly because of the nature and origin of the vessels. There are currently 200-300 Chinese longliners and purse seine tuna fishers legitimately operating in Vanuatu’s 663,251 square kilometre exclusive economic zone, from their base in Fiji.

The arrested boats, owned by Zhuhai Dong Gang Xing Long Distance Fishing, were operating closer in-shore for grouper and sea cucumber. Beijing had given the company permission to fish in Mauritania, Africa, and Vanuatu under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Vanuatu currently maintains diplomatic relations with China and, along with Tonga, signed up to the BRI in 2018.

According to Field, the company says it has permission under the BRI to build a base in Vanuatu, a claim that has not been acknowledged by Vanuatu. Field speculated the boats may have believed they were operating under a deal between Port Vila and Beijing and asked: “Is Vanuatu heading for a diplomatic row with China?”

Pacific island nations have in recent years sought to clamp down on illegal and unregulated fishing. In 2015 Palau burned four Vietnamese fishing boats caught off its coast and arrested the captains. During coordinated maritime sweeps in 2017, several Vietnamese boats were detained in the territorial waters of the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia.

However, driven by the US diplomatic, economic and strategic offensive against Beijing, Pacific states are now being drawn into fierce geo-strategic rivalries. Washington has seized on claims of illegal fishing to boost its military presence across the region. Armed US Coast Guard cutters are currently being deployed to American Samoa and Guam to counter “Chinese activity.”

The incident in Vanuatu came just a month after Palau, a former US Pacific territory, detained a Chinese-flagged vessel and its 28 crew, also for allegedly harvesting sea cucumber in its waters. In December, Palau’s president-elect Surangel Whipps Jr announced he would oppose Chinese “bullying,” declaring the small archipelago nation would stand by its “true friends,” the US and Taiwan. Palau is one of only four of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies in the region after the Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 2019.

The Chinese fishing vessel and six auxiliary boats were intercepted at Helen Reef, in Palau’s northern waters, and escorted to the main island of Koror by a naval patrol boat donated by Australia, as part of its own anti-China Defence Cooperation Program. The ships and crew were ultimately released after being detained for several weeks, accompanied by official complaints from Palau to the Chinese government over its “intransigence” on illegal fishing by “their people.”

Beijing has not commented on either of the recent incidents. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying had earlier declared China was “a responsible fishing country,” with “zero tolerance for violations of relevant laws and regulations committed by distant fishing vessels.”

Palau’s actions were hailed by US Ambassador John Hennessey-Niland, who said Washington “steadfastly support Palau’s efforts to protect its territorial sovereignty and prevent People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged vessels from engaging in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.”

Last October, US National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien accused China of encouraging fishing violations, building illegal military outposts, dumping garbage and harassing commercial vessels. O’Brien told Radio NZ that China was “threatening the rules-based order that’s kept the peace since World War II.” Coast Guard vessels would “enforce US laws,” while partnering with other Pacific nations, O'Brien declared.

Last year, Palau’s outgoing President Tommy Remengesau Jr wrote to US Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite saying Washington should look at setting up military facilities in Palau as a bulwark against “destabilizing actors.” Palau’s demands included port facilities, secondary airfields, law enforcement training grounds and maritime enforcement and surveillance facilities.

China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet, with nearly 17,000 vessels. Its expansion into the Pacific is raising the ire not only of the US, but also its close ally and regional imperialist power Australia. A Papua New Guinean (PNG) regional governor, Toboi Awi Yoto, last month sharply criticised Australia’s hostile response to a plan to establish a $200 million Chinese fisheries park on Daru Island in PNG.

Canberra raised concerns late last year about “national security” and “potential overfishing” and dispatched officials to Daru for “discussions.” Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne told the Australian parliament that the government had contacted the PNG government to ensure Australian interests are “fully safeguarded.” She warned the Australian Border Force would patrol the Torres Strait to ensure that “traditional-only” fishing rules were enforced. “Commercial-scale fisheries would not be considered a traditional activity under the Torres Strait Treaty and would not be permitted,” Payne declared.

Yoto hit back on Facebook at the overt bullying, saying Australia had no counter-offer to the Chinese plan and he was “not satisfied with their intentions for my people to remain the same,” i.e. living in poverty. “It’s regrettable that all they want is for us to be subsistence farmers and fishermen and maintain our current status quo,” he added.

Regional geo-strategic and political tensions have further escalated due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has decimated the Pacific’s tourism industry. Many Pacific island nations have reached out to Chinese-led agencies to prop up their budgets after exhausting financing options from traditional sources.

Indian government presents budget amid economic crisis, swelling social opposition

Kranti Kumara & Keith Jones

India’s Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government yesterday tabled its budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year, which begins April 1.

India’s economy is beset by multiple crises—all of which have been greatly exacerbated by the government’s calamitous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. These include: a banking system that is mired in bad loans; a massive unemployment and underemployment crisis; falling consumer demand and shrinking capital investment.

The Minister of State for Commerce & Industry (Independent Charge), Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman addressing a press conference, in New Delhi on October 14, 2016 (Wikimedia Commons)

No less troubling for India’s far-right BJP government and ruling class is a groundswell of popular opposition to the raft of pro-big business measures Modi has implemented since August 2019 in a desperate bid to revive investment and capitalist growth.

Tens of millions of workers across India joined a one-day general strike on Nov. 26 to protest the government’s class war policies, including a labour law “reform” that would illegalize most strikes and further casualize the labor force. A more than two-month long mass agitation by farmers has disrupted implementation of the three pro-agribusiness laws the government rushed through parliament last September at the same time as it amended the labor code.

In presenting her budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman nevertheless blithely claimed, “India is well well-poised to be the land of promise and hope.”

Having promised a budget like “no other,” Sitharaman attempted a fiscal and political high-wire act. In an attempt to kick-start the economy, she raised government outlays, particularly infrastructure spending, and injected additional funds into the troubled banking sector. At the same time, she tried to appease the international credit-rating agencies, which have threatened to reduce India’s rating to junk bond status, by slashing subsidies and pressing forward with other pro-investor policies, long demanded by international and domestic capital.

To the delight of big business, despite the government’s rapidly deteriorating fiscal position it announced no tax increases for business or the rich. This included dropping plans to introduce a “pandemic cess”—what would have been a temporary charge to fund measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 10 million Indians and killed over 150,000.

Underscoring the budget’s sharp right-wing thrust, the government also did not (as had been suggested in many press previews of the budget) introduce any measures to mollify farmers’ anger, and it ignored the unemployment crisis altogether. In fact, it is slashing spending on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee in the coming budget, which is supposed to provide 100 days of menial, minimum wage work per year to one member of any rural household that needs it. For years, the program has been massively over-subscribed, meaning millions go hungry because they cannot access the “guarantee.”

Indian big business, which is itself hobbled by debt and has been pleading for some time for the government to increase deficit-spending to pull the economy out of the doldrums, responded to the budget with enthusiasm. India’s principal stock index, the Sensex, surged 5 percent, led by gains in financial, banking and auto stocks.

The overall budget amounts to Rs. 34.8 trillion ($473 billion). This is a modest increase from the Rs. 34.5 trillion that the government now projects it will spend in the 2020-21 fiscal year, which ends March 31. Because of the pandemic, the government was compelled to announce multiple new emergency spending measures, but most of this went to bailing out the elite, with the hundreds of millions of workers and toilers who lost their jobs and/or income offered little more than famine-style relief.

However, if the government’s fiscal deficit for 2020-21 surged from the 3.5 percent of GDP estimated last February to the 9.5 percent of GDP now projected, it was more due to a massive drop in revenue than to increased spending. Relative to most major economies, India’s emergency spending measures were in fact quite small, due to the BJP’s hostility to social spending and fear of the international credit rating agencies.

According to the budget, borrowing will account for Rs. 18.4 trillion ($250 billion), or 54 percent of total expenditure in the 2020-21 fiscal year, more than double the original budget estimate of Rs. 8 trillion ($109 billion).

Sitharaman is projecting that the deficit in the coming year will be 6.8 percent of GDP.

Highlights of the budget include:

• A 34 percent increase to Rs. 5.5 trillion ($75 billion) in capital spending on highways, bridges and other infrastructure.
  
  
• A more than doubling of health care spending to Rs. 2.23 trillion ($30 billion). This, however, is far less than meets the eye. First, at less than 1.5 percent of GDP, India’s current health care spending is among the lowest in the world. Second, the government has included in the health budget the one-time cost of vaccinating the population against COVID-19, as well as funds indirectly related to health care, such as spending on clean water and the environment. Shorn of these, healthcare spending will only go up from Rs. 721 billion ($10 billion) in 2020-21 to Rs. 796 billion ($11 billion) in 2021-22, meaning per capita health care spending is being increased by about $1.
  
  
• A massive program of selling off (disinvestment and full privatization) of state-owned enterprises to the tune of Rs. 1.75 trillion ($24 billion). Apart from “four strategic sectors,” Sitharaman said the government now aims to divest itself of all public sector undertakings.
  Already last December the Modi government sent instructions to the managements of all state-owned enterprises that they had to focus on increasing the share values of their companies and raising their dividend payment to shareholders. These marching orders have been given so as to sweeten the pot sufficiently for profit-hungry giant financial investors who have previously shunned the BJP government’s attempt to sell off Air India and other government enterprises.
  
  
• For the first time the government will privatize two public sector banks and a life insurance company.
  
  
• Draconian cuts are being made to subsidies on food, cooking gas and kerosene. Total expenditure is to fall steeply from Rs. 6.5 trillion ($88 billion) in the current financial year to a mere Rs. 3.7 trillion ($50 billion) in 2021-22.
  
  
• Expenditure on armaments is to increase by 20 percent to just short of $20 billion in 2021-22. In the course of the current fiscal year, the Modi government spent an additional, unbudgeted 200 trillion rupees ($3 billion) on emergency weapons purchases due to the ongoing border standoff with China.

Since 2010, India’s military spending has surged, raising it from the world’s ninth to the third largest military spender.

India’s growth rate has been falling sharply for several years. In fiscal year 2019-20, it fell to 4.2 percent, its lowest level in eleven years since the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial meltdown.

In August-September 2019, shortly after winning re-election and presenting a new budget, the Modi government was forced to reverse course after coming under heavy criticism from big business for failing to recognize the urgent need for measures to boost growth. It announced corporate tax rates would be slashed to bring them in line with those in East Asia and a massive acceleration of its privatization drive.

The pandemic and the government’s ruinous response to it resulted in an unprecedented economic contraction that has plunged tens of millions of additional Indians into absolute poverty. Between April and June, India’s GDP fell by 23.9 percent.

According to the Modi government’s Ministry of Statistics, the economy will contract by 7.7 percent during the whole of fiscal year 2021. Others, such as the International Monetary Fund, are projecting a double digit contraction for the full financial year.

The Modi government has responded to the crisis roiling Indian capitalism by doubling down on the two central axes of the strategy India’s venal ruling class has pursued for the last three decades: the imposition of socially incendiary pro-market, pro-investor reforms aimed at making India a cheap labor haven for global capital; and the forging of ever closer ties since 2005 in a “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism.

Prior to announcing the budget, Sitharaman and a slew of other senior cabinet ministers interacted closely with Indian and foreign big business leaders during last December’s CII Partnership Summit 2020. Hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the summit exemplified the intimate relations between big business and the corrupt, autocratic, and communalist Modi government.

In her address at the summit, Sitharaman implored the assembled capitalists to essentially dictate the budget. She said she could not craft the budget “unless I get your inputs and wish list... Without that, it is impossible for me to draft something which is going to be that budget like never before, a budget which is being made after a pandemic.”

Don’t be Fooled that Corporations’ Motives are Moral

Leonard C. Goodman

The second impeachment of President Trump, this time for inciting a riot, got a big boost when dozens of large corporations endorsed the effort. Amazon, American Express, Blue Cross Blue Shield, BP, BlackRock, Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs, and other major companies announced their support for impeachment by stopping donations to Republicans who refused to certify the Electoral College vote. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook have banned Trump from their platforms, while his lender Deutsche Bank has reportedly cut off funding to his golf courses and hotels.

These moves by major corporate donors helped convince 10 House Republicans to join the Democrats in voting for impeachment, even though their defection from Trump will likely invite challengers in future GOP primaries. Trump’s impeachment now moves to the Senate for trial. The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to convict a president, meaning at least 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats and independents in the new Senate.

According to a January 13 Associated Press article, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke to “major Republican donors last weekend to assess their thinking about Trump and was told that they believed Trump had clearly crossed a line.” McConnell now sees the “House Democrats’ drive to impeach Trump as an opportune moment to distance the GOP from the tumultuous, divisive outgoing president.”

All this is more proof that the big corporations control the levers of power in D.C. And in case you think that these corporations are taking a moral stand against Trump or to protect our constitutional democracy, don’t be fooled. These companies have purchased our representatives outright, destroying democracy. They are enemies of working people and the environment. Amazon busts unions and pays poverty wages, forcing its workers to rely on food stamps to survive while its head, Jeff Bezos, has increased his net worth by nearly $70 billion since last March. BP is one of the world’s biggest polluters; its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which covered 68,000 square miles, killed 11 people and inflicted untold ecological damage. BlackRock is the world’s biggest financial backer of fossil fuel companies and has worsened the global climate crisis exponentially.

The sole objective of these corporations is stability, which they expect President Joe Biden to restore. They already got their tax cuts, deregulation, and bailouts from Trump. Now they want him to leave the stage. They don’t care if the president is a Democrat or Republican. They own and control both of those parties. They just want someone less erratic and disruptive.

In 2003, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney told outright lies to convince Americans that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and was seeking nuclear weapons. All to justify a war that killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. When proof of this deception came out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected calls to impeach Bush. No one was held accountable for this monstrous war crime, nor for the regime of torture used to cover up the fraud. To the contrary, CIA Director George Tenet, who helped the president perpetrate the fraud and the coverup, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

The failure to hold war criminals to account guarantees that their crimes will be repeated by future leaders. Indeed, in 2011, the Obama administration again told lies to convince Americans that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was supplying his soldiers with Viagra to encourage mass rape, and that he was planning to massacre civilians in Benghazi. These official lies spurred the NATO bombing campaign that killed thousands of innocents and transformed Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

War is incredibly profitable to the weapons manufacturers and Wall Street. Thus our major corporations will never support impeachment hearings for war crimes. The corporate donors demand that future presidents be free to lie us into disastrous (but profitable) wars without fear of impeachment.

Trump may well deserve to be impeached for inciting a riot, even though his trial in the Senate will be largely symbolic as it won’t take place until after he has left the White House. But the focus on Trump as the villain will allow other culprits to avoid scrutiny. For example, the assault on the U.S. Capitol was planned for weeks out in the open on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen were encouraged to come to the Capitol on January 6 and stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president-elect. Yet our well-funded Department of Homeland Security and 17 intelligence agencies somehow failed to protect the Capitol.

The Capitol Police has more than 2,000 officers and a nearly half-billion-dollar budget, bigger than the budgets for police departments like Atlanta and Detroit. It has one mission: to defend 2 square miles. Yet observers report that only a fraction of the force was on duty January 6, and that some of those officers may have aided the rioters. When Black Lives Matter protesters were feared to pose a threat to monuments and landmarks last summer, the National Guard was immediately brought in and the protesters were violently suppressed. But this time, requests to bring in the National Guard were denied or delayed.

An investigation into the failures of law enforcement before and on January 6 is critical. Especially since President-elect Biden has already announced plans to pass a new Patriot Act to combat “domestic terrorism.” In other words, just like after 9/11, our government wants to reward its own incompetence by expanding its powers. History teaches that agencies like the FBI will use their expanded powers to hunt down and neutralize the left. In the 1960s, the FBI used programs like COINTELPRO to harass civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and to crush the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and the American Indian Movement, all under the guise of weeding out “extremism.”

Congress itself deserves scrutiny for its dismal performance during the pandemic. Most other governments around the world recognized that if you require businesses to shut down, you must take care of workers. Countries like Australia, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Canada are all providing subsidies and support for furloughed workers. But here in the wealthiest country on earth, Congress responded to the pandemic by passing the CARES Act, which protected the profits of the investor class and left most workers out in the cold. Many Americans are understandably feeling desperate and betrayed.

I recently wrote about the growing movement on social media to pressure progressives in the House (aka the “Squad”) to “Force the Vote” on a Medicare for All bill that was introduced nearly two years ago with more than 100 cosponsors. Although the bill has the overwhelming support of the people, Pelosi has refused to bring it to the floor for a public debate and a vote. Why? Because the major donors to the Democratic Party prefer our for-profit health care system in which millions of Americans face bankruptcy when they get sick, even if they have insurance. I wrote that the Squad had the leverage to demand a vote on Medicare for All in exchange for assuring Nancy Pelosi’s reelection as speaker. Indeed, members of the Squad like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got elected promising to stand up to corporate Democrats like Pelosi and to fight for Medicare for All.

On January 3, 2021, Pelosi was reelected speaker of the House. Not one member of the Squad withheld their vote for Pelosi or made the demand of a floor vote for Medicare for All a subject of protest during the proceedings. The speed at which the Squad has collapsed and been co-opted into the fold of the corporate Democrats is demoralizing for the true progressives who supported their campaigns and believed their promises. It shows that people don’t change the Democratic Party; it changes them. It also illustrates why it is time for a People’s Party that is not funded by corporations.

The spectacle of another impeachment trial also lets the mainstream press off the hook for its part in fueling the rage that erupted on January 6 at the Capitol. Once great bastions of unbiased journalism have become partisan tools of the corporate parties. While half of the country is told that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, the other half is told that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and that Trump is a Russian agent.

I do want to kick off the new year with something hopeful. President-elect Biden has nominated a respected and experienced diplomat to be CIA director. William Burns is a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Russia. Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, says, “Burns can be counted on to help Biden resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal—the more so, since Burns played a key role in getting the negotiations with Iran started.” There is also hope that Burns will be able to bring the CIA back toward its original mission of unbiased intelligence collection instead of what the CIA has become—a dangerous paramilitary organization involved in drone targeting and regime-change operations around the globe.

Here’s to keeping hope alive and to better times in 2021!

Viral Inequality and the Farmers’ Struggle in India

Colin Todhunter

According to a new report by Oxfam, ‘The Inequality Virus’, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95tn. The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.

At the same time, hundreds of millions of people will lose (have lost) their jobs and face destitution and hunger. It is estimated that the total number of people living in poverty could have increased by between 200 million and 500 million in 2020. The number of people living in poverty might not return even to its pre-crisis level for over a decade.

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and head of Reliance Industries, which specialises in petrol, retail and telecommunications, doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. He now has $78.3bn. The average increase in Ambani’s wealth in just over four days represented more than the combined annual wages of all of Reliance Industries’ 195,000 employees.

The Oxfam report states that lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent. At the same time, 84 per cent of households suffered varying degrees of income loss. Some 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

The authors also noted that income increases for India’s top 100 billionaires since March 2020 was enough to give each of the 138 million poorest people a cheque for 94,045 rupees.

The report went on to state:

“… it would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to make what Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic… and three years to make what Ambani made in a second.”

During lockdown and after, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the cities (who had no option but to escape the country’s avoidable but deepening agrarian crisis) were left without jobs, money, food or shelter.

It is clear that COVID has been used as cover for consolidating the power of the unimaginably rich. But plans for boosting their power and wealth will not stop there. One of the most lucrative sectors for these people is agrifood.

More than 60 per cent of India’s almost 1.4 billion population rely (directly or indirectly) on agriculture for their livelihood. Aside from foreign interests, Mukesh Ambani and fellow billionaire Gautam Adani (India’s second richest person with major agribusiness interests) are set to benefit most from the recently passed farm bills that will lead to the wholesale corporatisation of the agrifood sector.

Corporate consolidation

A recent article on the grain.org website, ‘Digital control: how big tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)’, describes how Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill are cementing their stranglehold.

The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. This system is based on corporate centralisation and concentration (monopolisation).

Grain notes that in India global corporations are also colonising the retail space through e-commerce. Walmart entered into India in 2016 by a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com which, in 2018, was followed by a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon now control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart are using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to lure customers towards their online platforms. According to Grain, when the two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during a Diwali festival sales blitz, India’s small retailers called out in desperation for a boycott of online shopping.

In 2020, Facebook and the US-based private equity concern KKR committed over US$7 billion to Reliance Jio, the digital store of one of India’s biggest retail chains. Customers will soon be able to shop at Reliance Jio through Facebook’s chat application, WhatsApp.

The plan for retail is clear: the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops. It is similar in agriculture.

The aim is to buy up rural land, amalgamate it and rollout a system of chemically-drenched farmerless farms owned or controlled by financial speculators, the high-tech giants and traditional agribusiness concerns. The end-game is a system of contract farming that serves the interests of big tech, big agribusiness and big retail. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to be replaced by large industrial-scale farms.

This model will be based on driverless tractors, drones, genetically engineered/lab-produced food and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils patented and often pirated from peasant farmers.

Farmers possess centuries of accumulated knowledge that once gone will never be got back. Corporatisation of the sector has already destroyed or undermined functioning agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security.

And what of the hundreds of millions to be displaced in order to fill the pockets of the billionaire owners of these corporations? Driven to cities to face a future of joblessness: mere ‘collateral damage’ resulting from a short-sighted system of dispossessive predatory capitalism that destroys the link between humans, ecology and nature to boost the bottom line of the immensely rich.

Imperial intent

India’s agrifood sector has been on the radar of global corporations for decades. With deep market penetration and near saturation having been achieved by agribusiness in the US and elsewhere, India represents an opportunity for expansion and maintaining business viability and all-important profit growth. And by teaming up with the high-tech players in Silicon Valley, multi-billion dollar data management markets are being created. From data and knowledge to land, weather and seeds, capitalism is compelled to eventually commodify (patent and own) all aspects of life and nature.

Foreign agricapital is applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre (in comparison to the richer nations) agricultural subsidies. The public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests.

Such interests require India to become dependent on imports (alleviating the overproduction problem of Western agricapital – the vast stocks of grains that it already dumps on the Global South) and to restructure its own agriculture for growing crops (fruit, vegetables) that consumers in the richer countries demand. Instead of holding physical buffer stocks for its own use, India would hold foreign exchange reserves and purchase food stocks from global traders.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital via foreign direct investment (and loans). The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows. This financialisation of agriculture serves to undermine the nation’s food security, placing it at the mercy of unforeseen global events (conflict, oil prices, public health crises) international commodity speculators and unstable foreign investment.

Current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy, which has led to its recolonization by foreign corporations as a result of neoliberalisation which began in 1991. By reducing public sector buffer stocks and introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of unscrupulous billionaires.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Indeed, a recent piece on the Research Unit for Political Economy site, ‘The Kisans Are Right: Their Land Is At Stake‘, describes how the Indian government is ascertaining which land is owned by whom with the ultimate aim of making it easier to eventually sell it off (to foreign investors and agribusiness). Other developments are also part of the plan (such as the Karnataka Land Reform Act), which will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land.

India could eventually see institutional investors with no connection to farming (pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals) purchasing land. This is an increasing trend globally and, again, India represents a huge potential market. The funds have no connection to farming, have no interest in food security and are involved just to make profit from land.

The recent farm bills – if not repealed – will impose the neoliberal shock therapy of dispossession and dependency, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector. The massive inequalities and injustices that have resulted from the COVID-related lockdowns are a mere taste of what is to come.

The hundreds of thousands of farmers who have been on the streets protesting against these bills are at the vanguard of the pushback – they cannot afford to fail. There is too much at stake.

Switzerland’s Dangerous Turn to the Far Right

Franklin Frederick

On 25 September 2020, the Swiss Parliament passed a revision of the federal anti-terrorism law. This new law provoked many protests, some quite vehement, including the launch of a national referendum. One of the main instruments of direct democracy as practised in Switzerland, the people’s referendum allows the citizenry to vote to approve or nullify laws voted by Parliament. To organize such a vote, 50,000 valid signatures are required (from an overall population of 8.6 million) accompanied by each signatory’s legal address, subsequently certified by the relevant authorities. Owing to the pandemic, the collection of signatures has been done mainly on-line, and the result seems to have already exceeded double the required number.

This popular reaction to the new legislation is very welcome because, according to the website of those who launched the referendum (https://detentions-arbitraires-non.ch/), the new law would abolish the presumption of innocence: “The measures provided for in the law are not to be ordered by a court, but by the police on the basis of mere suspicion (no evidence needed). This violates the European Convention on Human Rights” to which Switzerland is a party.

The website points out further violations of the European Convention: “One can be placed under house arrest for up to nine months without evidence, on mere suspicion. This would make us the first and only Western country to have such arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The only exception: the USA with its camps in Guantanamo.”

Even more disturbing, the new law violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, for its measures allow the imposition of compulsory registration and a ban on minors 12 years and up leaving the country, as well as house arrest from the age of 15. The protection of minors is thus seriously undermined.

Fifty law professors from Switzerland have communicated their concerns to the federal government (the Federal Council):  https://www.amnesty.ch .

And experts from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights itself warned that this new legislation violates international human rights standards in the way that it expands the definition of terrorism, and would set a dangerous precedent for the suppression of political dissent worldwide.

The experts were particularly alarmed that the bill’s new definition of ‘terrorist activity’ no longer requires the prospect of any crime at all. On the contrary, it may encompass even lawful acts aimed at influencing or modifying the constitutional order, such as legitimate activities of journalists, civil society and political activists.

The experts also warned against sections of the bill that would give the federal police extensive authority to designate “potential terrorists” and to decide on preventive measures against them without meaningful judicial oversight.

Under the guise of the ‘fight against terrorism’, many governments seek to suppress any legitimate criticism of the neoliberal economic model. Thus, laws supposedly created to ‘defend democracy’ are actually instruments in defence of a particular economic order: neoliberalism. What is new in this Swiss legislation is the possibility of criminalisation of young people from the age of 12 (!), as mentioned above.

The obvious target of such criminalisation is the climate movement. An increasing number of young people have taken to the streets in various parts of the world with clear and forceful criticism of the lack of effective action by governments in relation to the seriousness of global warming, drawing attention above all to the contradiction between neoliberal capitalism and environmental preservation. This movement has grown exponentially in Switzerland, becoming a political force to be reckoned with.

In September 2018, for example, the largest demonstration ever recorded in the history of the city of Bern occurred: some 100,000 people, mostly young, took to the streets in protest. This movement had a decisive effect on the parliamentary elections that followed in October, leading the Green Party to obtain the largest vote in its history.

On 21 September 2020, the young activists occupied Bern’s Federal Square, in front of the Parliament building. This action produced a considerable stir the international media, and messages of support to the activists came from various parts of the world, including from the Landless Movement (MST) and several parliamentarians from Brazil.

The occupation, which was totally peaceful, was shut down by the police and triggered reactions that were not without overtones of outright hysteria from many members of parliament and a major part of the Swiss media, all of whom condemned the activists’ ‘illegal’ action. Some parliamentarians even asked the intelligence service to investigate the young people. More recently, another Swiss parliamentarian compared the occupation to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by far-right demonstrators!

Under the new law, most of the young people involved in the occupation could be accused of ‘terrorism’ – and punished accordingly. Thus, fighting for the future of the planet has become a ‘crime’ to be punished by the state!

But how was it possible that legislation allowing the criminalisation of children from the age of 12 as ‘terrorists’ was proposed and approved by the parliament of a country as democratic and enlightened as Switzerland?

Such legislation has long been the dream of the extreme right in Brazil, which has fought fiercely for the possibility of criminalising both social movements and young people. Bolsonaro and his supporters would love to enact similar legislation in Brazil and will probably try to follow this Swiss example.

The political forces in Switzerland behind this law have a long history, which is also partly the history of the construction of the neo-liberal order itself.  In an important book, The Road from Mont Pélerin, a collection of essays by several authors on the history of neo-liberalism, Dieter Plehwe wrote in the ‘Introduction’:

The transnational dimension of the local/national history of neoliberalism has been particularly strong in the U.K. and the United States. Switzerland also deserves recognition as a particular transnational neoliberal space because of the hospitality of Swiss neoliberal intellectuals and institutions to Austrian, German, and Italian refugee neoliberals. It was certainly not mere coincidence that the Mont Pélerin Society was founded in this country: only Switzerland provided neoliberal intellectuals the intellectual and institutional space and financial backing needed to organize an international conference of and for neoliberals right after World War II. Until the end of the 1950s, it remained easier for neoliberals to congregate in Switzerland than anywhere else: four of the ten Mont Pélerin Society meetings between 1947 and 1960 took place in Switzerland. It took more than ten years after the war for a meeting to be held in the United States.

Those political and economic forces that made Switzerland so receptive to neoliberal ideology by providing neoliberals the intellectual and institutional space and the financial backing, ahead of any other country, are still very active and are the driving proponents of the new law.

In another essay in The Road from Mont Pélerin Keith Tribe wrote:

What distinguishes neoliberalism from classic liberalism is the inversion of the relationship between politics and economics. Arguments for liberty become economic rather than political, identifying the impersonality of market forces as the chief means for securing popular welfare and personal liberty.

Thus, any criticism of neoliberalism becomes criticism of freedom itself, and should be punished by the State as ‘terrorism’.

And in the same book, Rob van Horn and Philip Mirovsky observed that ‘neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of how to engineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market and its most important participants, modern corporations.’

Many of these large corporations have been the target of the climate movement’s most incisive criticism, causing much damage to their corporate public image. It is not surprising, then, that the market’s ‘most important participants’ are behind the drafting of specific legislation to control these ‘abuses’.

That such an anti-terror law has been passed by the Swiss parliament reveals the power of neoliberal ideology within this country and the ability of large corporations to influence governments and legislation even in a recognized democracy such as Switzerland.  At a time when neoliberalism is failing all over the world, a reaction from the neoliberal establishment is to be expected, for neoliberalism can be sustained only by lying, by force or by a combination of the two. But the neo-liberal lie can no longer hoodwink the world’s peoples, for the failure is too visible, too eloquent. Neoliberalism, for its own survival, is left with the use of violence and repression, by all possible means, including legal ones.

Switzerland’s humanitarian and democratic tradition is now in the hands of its young activists. The climate movement has the potential to transcend borders and generations, to unite the North and South of the planet in a common struggle for our mother Earth against its those who exploit it. But the combined reaction of economic and state power can be overwhelming, and laws like these clearly show the risks and dangers to which these young people are exposed. It is up to each of us now to support this struggle with the creativity, affection and joy that the preservation of life deserves.