Recurring Political Crisis in Haiti Connects with US Racism

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Haiti faces serious political crisis. The country has experienced great political difficulties ever since gaining independent nationhood in 1804. Impaired governance stems in large measure from U.S. meddling over many years.  We examine the current crisis and the basis for U.S. zeal to curtail Haiti’s future.

Mass demonstrations have continued intermittently since mid-2018, when two million Haitians were in the streets. At various times, protesters have called for: (1) relief from high prices for oil and gas, the result of IMF austerity decrees; (2) relief from shortages of basic supplies; (3) punishment of government officials who embezzled billions in funds from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program of low-cost oil for Caribbean peoples (President Jovenel Moïse stole $700,000); (4) Moïse’s resignation.

Demonstrators targeted Moïse aggressively after he closed down Haiti’s parliament in January 2020. He’s ruled since by decree.  A general strike took place prior to February 7, 2021, which, according to lawyers and judges, marked the end of Moïse’s presidential term. He remains.

Moïse’s 2015 election victory was fraudulent. A transitional president served for one year. Moïse took office in early 2017 after winning a second election weeks earlier. Only 18 percent of Haitian adults voted.

Moïse recently appointed his own electoral council and his own committee for amending the constitution. He cemented ties with President Trump by supporting U.S. regime-change plans for Venezuela. His new National Intelligence Agency looks to one observer like “a new Gestapo-like force of armed spies.” Moïse has disregarded the suffering of Haitians, the most poverty-stricken population in the Americas.

Opposition elements recently named Supreme Court Justice Joseph Mécène as a transitional president replacing Moïse. Moïse responded by arresting 23 officials of whom three were Supreme Court justices. He replaced them.

Haiti’s opposition is divided between center-right political parties, headed loosely by lawyer André Michel, and protesters in the streets. Many of these belong to social movements and labor unions making up the new Patriotic Forum.

Violence is rampant. Some “150 criminal bands” have carried out murders and massacres. According to Argentinian Lautaro Rivara, active in Haiti, “Most of these groups have been organized and financed by senators, ministers, and presidents – when they are not directed fomented by the imperialist powers.”  Some gangs have united under government auspices as the “G9 and family”.

These various problems reflect political norms from Haiti’s past. On display then and now have been: ineffectual, corrupt, undemocratic governance; governmental inattention to people’s basic needs; persistent, if unsuccessful, popular opposition; and politics mediated through violence. Submission to foreign masters has been less obvious recently than is usually the case. None of these failings operate against U.S. expectations for Haiti.

Setting the stage

The many foreign NGOs active in Haiti function autonomously, rarely collaborating with Haiti’s government. The “Core Group” of nations involving the United States, France, Canada, and others make strategic decisions for Haiti on their own.

The U.S government does likewise. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton inserted singer Michel Martelly into Haiti’s 2010 presidential elections. He won, and named banana tycoon Jovenal Moïse as his successor.

Haiti has long had to cope with burdensome foreign-debt obligations. Between 1825 and 1947, Haiti sent payments to France as compensation for Haiti’s slaves having liberated themselves. Said one observer recently, “the constant of financial needs forces all Haitian governments to take on even more debt with North American and European Banks.”

Bill Quigley, a close observer, notes that, “The US and the US dominated world financial institutions forced Haiti to open its markets [allowing] millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti – undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture.”

Held in Check

The United States has long had its way with Haiti. It withheld recognition of Haiti’s national independence until 1862, and embargoed trade with Haiti until 1863. A U.S. naval squadron arriving at Môle Saint-Nicolas in 1889 sought to occupy the port permanently to block access to Haiti by ships of other nations. The effort failed, partly due to the intercession of U.S. ambassador Frederic Douglass, the famous abolitionist.

U.S. military units occupying Haiti between 1915 and 1934 encountered armed resistance. Some 15,000 Haitians were killed. U.S. officials wrote a new Haitian Constitution, collected taxes, controlled customs, administered sections of Haiti’s government, and forced payments on loans held by U.S. banks.

The plundering, murderous Duvalier dictatorship, father and son, ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1986. The U.S. government cited anti-communism as justification.

CIA personnel collaborated with Haitian military officers to plan the coup that in 1991 removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That he returned to power in 1994 by means of a U.S. invasion typifies Haiti’s subservience to decisions made in Washington.

Paramilitaries trained and funded by the United States removed President Aristide in 2004. Canada and France helped out. A U.S. plane conveyed Aristide to the Central African Republic. The three nations arranged for United Nations troops to occupy Haiti. They would remain until 2019.

Particular reasons

“There was hell in Hayti (sic) in the red waning of the eighteenth century … while black men in sudden frenzy fought like devils for their freedom and won it … the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas.”  (W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown, 1907)

Reports of the “tempest created by the black revolutionaries … spread rapidly and uncontrollably.” A maritime proletariat brought news to places like Charleston, South Carolina; “Afro-North Americans … derived inspiration from the example of Haitian freedom,” recalls historian Julius Scott. (Common Wind, 2018)

The U.S. slavocracy had much to protect. “Between 1775 and 1825 … a slave-labor large farming system [developed]. There was a close and indissoluble connection with the world’s cotton market.”  (DuBois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade,1896) The labor of enslaved people generated wealth and enabled debt repayment. Slave ownership represented 20 percent of private U. S. wealth.

Fearful slaveowners had Haiti on their minds, more so when slaves were unruly. Slaves conspired, sometimes were discovered, and rebelled. That Denmark Vesey, leader of a failed slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, had been enslaved in Haiti was hardly reassuring.

The enslavement of Black people in the United States eventually ended; racism did not.  Haiti manifested a new orientation that would by no means mollify U. S. animosities against its people.

Historian C.L.R. James explains that, “Haiti had to find a national rallying point [and] discovered ‘negritude’ [involving] “substitution of Africa for France.” Until then, “Mulattos who were masters had their eyes fixed on Paris.” At work was the influence of pan-Africanists Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, regarding whom, says James, “it is Africa and African emancipation that he has in mind.” (Black Jacobins, 1989)

As a kind of African extension in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti solidified its place within the orbit of U.S racism. That showed in 1898 when U.S. troops intervened in Cuba’s war for independence from Spain. Later Cuba would become a U.S. protectorate of sorts. U.S. justification for both endeavors, according to statements, was to prevent “another Haiti,” a “second Haiti.”

Indeed, Cuba’s rebel army was full of Black soldiers. African-descended General Antonio Maceo led rebel troops. Maceo at the time was a favorite in the U.S. Black community.

Much later, U.S. imperialists were alert to real or imagined socialist stirrings in Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1965), Indonesia, (1965-66), Chile (1973), Cuba perennially, and Haiti. There, anti-communism competed with racism as motivation.

Maybe with the advent of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, whispers were heard in U.S. government circles of “another Cuba” in the making. After all, Haitians are poor, they suffer, they die young, and they are heirs of a revolution.

Aristide was new. His 1991 election victory with a 67% plurality was Haiti’s “first successful democratic election ever,” according to the  conservative National Republican Institute.  Aristide gained reelection in 2000 with 91% of the vote.

An observer notes that, “In the period of governance by Fanmi Lavalas, the party founded by President Aristide, more schools were built than the total constructed between 1804 and 1994. Twenty percent of the country’s budget was mandated for education.  Women’s groups and popular organizations helped coordinate a literacy campaign …The minimum wage was doubled. …  Health clinics were established in the poorest communities.  The government also launched an aggressive campaign to collect unpaid taxes owed by the wealthy elite.”

Haiti waits. Maybe Haitian President Moïse will be removed and maybe Haiti’s parliament will reopen. Maybe the new Biden administration will go along with a new array of officeholders.  His representatives may pull strings selectively, or give a nudge to favorites. What the U.S. government does in the short term, however, won’t matter much to masses of Haitian people who are victims.

What would matter for them is certainty of their independence, of being able to take charge of their own existence. Movement in that direction depends on change in the United States, forced by popular mobilization there, toward a politics that embraces the notion of human equality.

CEOs and Poisoning

Rosamma Thomas

In 2016, when CEO Ata Safdar of Reckitt Benckiser, a UK-based firm, offered an apology to all those who had been affected by a toxic product that his firm sold in South Korea, an angry relative of one of the victims slapped him – an act caught on camera. RB’s toxic humidifier disinfectant had caused over 1,500 deaths, many of them babies. The product was banned in 2011, after having been marketed for several years. RB may not be a name that rings a bell in India. Products the firm manufactures however, like disinfectants Dettol and Harpic – are widely used in urban households.

In all these years, victims of the poisoning await justice in South Korea. The topmost officials of the firm who are wanted by South Korean prosecutors have not complied with the law. Humidifiers are never used in India – in South Korea and other cold countries as indoor moisture is reduced in winter, a device is used to keep moisture levels in rooms pleasant. This device sprays water into the air. To keep the water in the device free of bacteria and fungi, a disinfectant was added – that was the source of the poisoning, it was later discovered.

Among those wanted by prosecutors for the deaths from humidifier disinfectant poisoning is Indian Gaurav Jain, who served as CEO of RB in South Korea at the time the poisonous substance was sold. Jain has flatly refused to join the process of investigation.

“We protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner and healthier world,” says the website of RB. This bid for an unnatural ‘cleanliness’, however, endangers not just bacteria and fungi but human life as well. Oxy Humidifier Sanitizer (HS), which this firm sold, took at least 1,500 lives over several years. Over 7,000 people were affected, according to the website ‘Healthrelief”. (Available here in Korean: https://www.healthrelief.or.kr/home/content/stats01/view.do)

The disinfectant was first introduced in 1994. A local firm called Oxy which manufactured it was acquired by RB in 2001. The humidifier disinfectant caused tiny nano particles to be released into the air, inducing lung disease.

Eunjoo Ahn, among those affected, said, “I was a professional volleyball player. I used Oxy ‘Ssakssak’ at home and grew short of breath. It grew so bad in 2008 that I collapsed. As my condition worsened, I needed lung transplant – I have been through surgery twice, in 2015 and 2020. Despite long spells in hospital, the breathing difficulties continue. RB destroyed my life and my family. My wife left. My two children now do not have the protection of a mother.”

Domyung Paek, professor of public health at Seoul National University said, “Humidifiers pump water droplets into the air and nothing should be added to the water. Regardless of whether it was ignorance, negligence or greed, RB’s decision to sell such products should be reviewed and judged, so this kind of disaster is never repeated anywhere in the world.”

Although RB has acknowledged “how tragic this situation is” and has vowed to work towards putting things right in South Korea, it has done little to abide by the law and stand trial.

At the time of the introduction of the humidifier for the first time in the 1990s, there were few tests to examine whether it was safe. The market for the product grew rapidly, and as many as 43 different South Korean and international brands were marketing these disinfectants by the year 2011.

Between 2006 and 2011, there was an outbreak of severe lung disease among children in South Korea – a probe into the probable cause of the disease led to the discovery of the toxicity of Polyhexamethylene guanidine (PHMG) which was used for its potent action against bacteria and fungi in humidifiers. When it is inhaled, however, it causes harm to human lungs too, especially children’s lungs, inducing pulmonary fibrosis. It was clear that the children’s health was affected by an “environmentally induced disorder”.

By the spring of 2011, doctors alerted authorities to several cases of atypical lung injury among young, pregnant women. An environmental threat was suspected. Studies showed that regular addition of disinfectant to the water tanks of room humidifiers significantly increased the risk of such lung disease. Infants were more susceptible to lung damage through it, and the disease spiked in winter, when humidifiers were more commonly used.

Other toxic chemicals Chloromethyl isothiazolinon (CMIT/MIT), Benzylammonium chloride (BKC) and Oligo (2) ethoxyethoxyethyl guanidine hydrochloride (PGH) were also found in the humidifier disinfectants. One brand held about 80 per cent of the market share for these products in South Korea, RB.

Experiments showed that rats exposed to these disinfectants died in seven weeks. In the winter of 2011, the South Korean government banned the use of the humidifier disinfectants. Even though RB has accepted the enormity of the problem and apologized, its top management has so far dodged the law.

Research into this poisoning was conducted in 2013 by a team of scientists attached to the Korean Centre for Disease Control, whose work was later published under the title ‘Nationwide Study of Humidifier Disinfectant Lung Injury in South Korea, 1994-2011’.

The scientists traced 433 cases; 307 of the affected persons studied were alive, they noted also cases of 126 who had died and spoke with families of the deceased. The earliest case they found was from 2002, and they noted in their paper that the cases then “increased exponentially” until 2011. Frequency of use of the disinfectant, and the quantity of it used each time had a clear link with the severity of the impact on the lungs.

While the infants who were exposed had the highest mortality rate, the adults exposed too had long-term health effects that continue to be monitored. There was also improved lung function in some of the affected though it not yet clearly understood why in some cases the damage could be reversed.

South Korea government studies established that the humidifier disinfectants caused about 10 different health impacts, from severe respiratory disease to fetal damage. As of November 2020, over 6,900 cases were registered, and over 1,570 have died. Over 80% of all registered cases have used RB products. (Source – https://www.healthrelief.or.kr/home/content/stats01/view.do)

In 2015, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Toxics, Mr Baskut Tuncak investigated this matter and noted that RB held 80 per cent of the market share for this product in South Korea, but failed to ensure safety.

Health concerns: Product not sold in Europe

What was striking was that the toxic product was not sold in Europe, on account of safety concerns. With regulations being rather more lax in South Korea, the product was allowed to affect the population.

UN’s Tuncak noted the need for a comprehensive global framework to protect human health from a toxic environment, and observed also that injustices resulted from divergent standards adopted in different parts of the world.

Even as the then CEO of RB has escaped the law, other officials who served RB in South Korea at the time are currently serving out jail sentences. Even in November 2019, South Korean officials involved in the probe sought to meet Jain in India; he refused. In November 2020, a small group of victims protested, carrying photographs of Jain and seeking justice.

Humidifier Disinfectant Victim outside RB headquarters in Seoul demanding investigation against Gaurav Jain on November 26, 2020

LG Chemical: Korean nationals wanted in India for Styrene gas leak deaths of May 2020

Jain is not the only CEO to have escaped the law. Korean national Rho Kuk-rae is wanted by Indian law enforcement agencies. He was the head of the support team of LG Chemical from where the leak of toxic styrene gas on May 7, 2020 caused 15 deaths at Andhra Pradesh’s Vishakapatnam. Rho Kuk-rae returned home after this tragedy; Shin Hak-cheol, CEO of LG Chemical, never visited India after that tragedy.

A high power government committee submitted its probe report in this case in July 2020, blaming the firm for negligence that caused the leak. Civil society groups have called for the South Korean firm’s management to be held responsible, but no action has yet been taken against them.

Countercurrents wrote an email to RB seeking a response on why Gaurav Jain was not cooperating with prosecutors in South Korea. No response was received. Activist Yeyong Choi, director of Asian Citizens’ Centre for Environment and Health, who has also served as a member of the government team that investigated RB, said, “RB should have Gaurav Jain attend the South Korean government’s investigation and express sincere apology. Otherwise, we will organize a campaign to boycott RB products.”

UK government advocates for murderous “learning to live with the virus”

Thomas Scripps

The ending of the Britain’s lockdown is witnessing the most open embrace of “herd immunity” in ruling circles since the pandemic began.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the lifting of restrictions on February 22 while admitting this would mean “more infections, more hospitalisations… more deaths”.

Johnson and scientists close to the government have since spelled out the grisly details.

Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty speaking during a Covid-19 press conference in Downing Street (Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street-FlickR account)

Speaking to the House of Commons science and technology committee Tuesday, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said a new surge of the virus was inevitable:

“All the modelling suggests there is going to be a further surge that will find people either that have not been vaccinated, or where the vaccine has not worked, and some of them will end up in hospital and sadly some of them will go on to die, and that is the reality of where we are.”

The day before, Professor Calum Semple, of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told BBC Breakfast that the reopening of schools meant it was “inevitable that we will see a rise in cases” of COVID-19.

Johnson himself wrote in the Daily Telegraph Wednesday, “We can see the signs of a surge of Covid among some of our European friends, and we remember how we in the UK have tended to follow that upwards curve, if a few weeks later… Monday’s successful return to school will inevitably add to the budget of risk.”

In defence of this criminal policy, the Conservative government and its supporters have launched a relentless propaganda campaign insisting that the population must “learn to live with the virus”. On February 12, Health Secretary Matt Hancock gave an interview to the Telegraph titled, “We hope to live with Covid like flu by end of the year”.

This line was endorsed by the BBC’s health correspondent Nick Triggle who wrote the same day, “This is simply about being realistic. Covid isn’t something that can be eradicated like smallpox was… Thousands will still die in winters to come. But each year this should lessen until it gets near to the levels of mortality we see with flu—something which society readily accepts.”

Triggle followed this comment with an article on February 16, “Why goal is to live with the virus—not fight it”.

Speaking alongside Whitty at the Commons science and technology committee Tuesday, Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance was explicit:

“I do not think that zero Covid is possible. I think there’s nothing to suggest that this virus will go away, at least any time soon. It’s going to be there, circulating. It may be a winter virus that comes back over winters with increasing infection rates during that period.”

SAGE member Andrew Hayward told Times Radio Wednesday that the UK would “be talking in the tens of thousands of deaths, and hopefully in the low tens of thousands of deaths. And that sounds terrible. But actually, that’s not so dissimilar to what we put up with every year for flu and other respiratory infections. And so, I think, as a society, we need to really think what trade-offs we’re willing to make in terms of restrictions.”

These ghoulish arguments are an endorsement of another terrible wave of infections and death. By its own admission, the government’s reopening policy means at least multiple tens of thousands more fatalities in the next year. The most cited number in the media is 30,000 by summer 2022. But this is a minimum figure based on “the most optimistic set of assumptions modelled”, according to the researchers involved.

In early February, scientists from Imperial College London, together with the University of Warwick, presented a range of modelled reopening scenarios to SAGE. The scenario closest to that set out in the government’s “roadmap” (the government reopens faster) predicted between 33,200 and 81,200 COVID-19 deaths between February 12 and June 30, 2022.

Much worse can happen, according to the modelling. If infection rates are higher than expected once lockdown measures are lifted—due to ineffective test, trace and isolate systems, for example—then the range of predicted deaths is between 58,900 and 143,400. The coming death toll could exceed the two waves of COVID-19 already suffered. By comparison, flu kills roughly 12,000 people a year in England and Wales on average.

Hundreds of thousands more people will also be struck down with the debilitating effects of long COVID.

Disease will fall overwhelmingly on the poorest sections of society. Infection rates remain higher in more deprived regions, thanks to crowded, sub-standard accommodation, a growing number of people unable to work from home, and lower vaccine take-up rates.

There is nothing inevitable about any of this. A disaster is being prepared even as multiple highly effective vaccines are deployed, creating the potential, in a rationally organised global society, for the suppression of the virus to extremely low levels.

The ruling class does not view vaccines primarily as a tool to save lives, but as a means of enforcing its back-to-work strategy. Johnson hopes that partial vaccination will keep a lid on daily hospital admissions, removing the threat of a complete collapse of the National Health Service, while allowing the infection rate to rise. The deaths along the way of those left unprotected will be written off as the necessary costs of a return to “normality”, doing business and accumulating profits.

Under these conditions more dangerous variants of the virus will be allowed to develop. A study published in the British Medical Journal Wednesday found that the “UK variant”, already dominant, is between 30 and 100 percent more deadly than previous strains. It was already known to be 40 to 70 percent more transmissible.

In addition to the UK variant, the UK is currently monitoring three other “variants of concern”—the South African, Brazilian and Manaus—and four “variants under investigation”.

The serious risk is that the virus will develop mutations that helps it evade current vaccines, producing another huge surge of the pandemic. Allowing the number of infections to rise rapidly while placing the virus under selective pressure through vaccination is the perfect recipe for this deadly outcome.

Whitty and Vallance, et al., have made a deal with the devil. When they speak of “trade-offs” they are rationalising the deadly consequences of putting profits before lives. The reopening is taking place so quickly to satisfy the demands of big business and the competitive needs of British capital against its international rivals.

This was the government’s intended policy, signed-off on by its advisers, since the beginning of the pandemic. The first comments made by Johnson, Whitty and Vallance last March were about the need to prepare for large numbers of deaths—with Vallance promoting “herd immunity” explicitly. Now the same arguments are made from atop a mountain of corpses.

Only resistance in the working class forced three lockdowns in the last year. In declaring for the “irreversible” end of the “last lockdown,” Johnson is seeking to ram the programme of herd immunity down people’s throats, rebranded as “learning to live with the virus”.

This will provoke widespread opposition in the working class. Telegraph columnist Ross Clark asked nervously last month, “Matt Hancock may be ready to ‘live with the virus’—but is Britain?”, warning that over the last year, “Death has become less tolerable.”

Opposing the policy of herd immunity requires a socialist political programme. The basic desire of workers to save lives at the expense of capitalist profits necessitates effective lockdowns until the virus is under control, allowing vaccination programmes to be safely completed. Workers and their families must receive full income and social support, including quality online education, paid for out of the fortunes of the billionaire pandemic profiteers.

Switzerland votes to ban the burqa

Peter Schwarz

Swiss voters on Sunday narrowly approved a Verhüllungsverbot (veiling ban) that prohibits Muslim women from covering their faces in public and wearing a niqab or burqa.

A total of 1.43 million voted in favour of the ban. That is only one in six of the country’s 8.7 million inhabitants, of whom 2.2 million do not hold a Swiss passport and 1.7 million are minors. But with a turnout of just over 50 percent, this was enough for the ban to be accepted with 51.2 percent of the vote.

Swiss Parliament Building (Photo: Wikipedia)

The constitutional initiative and the campaign for it has served to fuel racist and anti-Muslim sentiments. According to research, only 30 women wear the niqab in the whole of Switzerland. Also, there are several hundred female tourists from Arab countries. There are no female burqa wearers at all.

The referendum was launched by the so-called Egerkingen Committee, in which politicians of the right-wing populist Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) and blatant fascists set the tone. The committee, which according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) has over 4,500 sympathisers, was already successful in 2009 with a legal initiative banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

The managing director of the Egerkingen Committee, 31-year-old Anian Liebrand, describes himself as a “man of conviction.” He had joined the SVP at 16 and pursues the goal of breaking the alleged “left-wing mainstream” in the country. “To influence society in such a way that the trend turns back to the right: that is one of my greatest goals,” he told the NZZ.

Liebrand was convicted of multiple counts of defamation for publishing photos of young left-wing politicians on an SVP website and denouncing them as “cowardly slobs,” “wretched creatures” and perpetrators of violence. He is also active in initiatives against same-sex marriage and sex education in schools. His greatest fear, writes the NZZ, is “‘that the Swiss are dying out.’ Because of foreign infiltration and too few births of Swiss children.” He has called Holocaust Remembrance Day a “guilt inculcation programme” meant to “re-educate” the Swiss in schools.

Liebrand is not the only leading member of the Egerkingen Committee to espouse fascist ideas. Twenty-four-year-old Nils Fiechter, also a member of the SVP, was convicted of violating the Racial Discrimination Act for designing an inflammatory poster that read: “Millions in costs for construction and maintenance, dirt, faeces, noise, theft, etc. We say no to transit places for foreign gypsies!” In the campaign for the burqa ban, he appeared dressed as a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt under the burqa.

The campaign posters were also reminiscent of Nazi propaganda in style, form and content: two dangerous-looking eyes behind a niqab, black on a red background, with the words “Stop extremism!”

The Egerkingen Committee also includes many veterans of earlier xenophobic campaigns by the SVP and its environs. Its president is National Councillor (member of the lower house of the Swiss parliament) Walter Wobmann, who is on the right wing of the SVP. The SVP has been initiating plebiscites against immigrants, refugees and Muslims for many years and has had some success with them.

The last time it succeeded was seven years ago with the so-called mass immigration initiative, which was adopted by an extremely narrow majority. It obliged the Swiss government to renegotiate the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons with the EU within three years. Since then, corresponding initiatives have failed, and the SVP’s influence has declined somewhat. The fact that the burqa ban initiative has now succeeded again is mainly due to the support of some liberals and feminists who made common cause with the far-right.

For example, a women’s committee was formed for the burqa initiative. Writer Gisela Widmer explained in the Tages-Anzeiger that she had no sympathy for the initiators but would vote yes. It was not about the political agenda, but “only about the question: ‘Ban the veil, yes or no?’” she said. And a left-liberal would have to answer this question in the affirmative. Because the niqab was “the habit of political Islam.” Regina Probst, former staff member of Terre de femmes, also told Der Spiegel that she would vote yes.

The German feminist Alice Schwarzer, who had already been agitating against Muslim men in the refugee crisis, spoke out in the NZZ and supported the initiative, saying, “Is this what we want after 200 years of enlightenment and 50 years of fighting for equal rights? Conditions in which a woman has to be invisible to protect herself from male gaze?”

However, there were many other voices denouncing the racism of the campaign and condemning the ban as an attack on the democratic right to freedom of religion and expression, which discriminates against Muslim women, who are the only ones who would be punished if they violate it, whether voluntarily or under duress.

Even if not everyone who voted for the burqa ban is a convinced right-wing extremist, the adoption of this undemocratic and discriminatory initiative shows that even Switzerland is not immune to the return of fascist currents, as they are making themselves heard in the US (Trump and his followers), Germany (Alternative for Germany, AfD), Spain (Vox) and numerous other countries.

Switzerland is often portrayed as having always been an oasis of democracy immune to fascism and Nazism. But this is not true. Around 1930, an extensive Frontenbewegung (Front Movement) developed in Switzerland as well, advocating völkisch (Swiss-ethnic), anti-Semitic and fascist goals. It gave rise to the National Front party, which reached its peak in 1935 with 9,000 members and was represented in the Swiss parliament with its own deputies.

A direct line leads from the National Front to the Egerkingen Committee. Ulrich Schlüer, the political supporter of Anian Liebrand, who co-founded the committee and was in charge of the minaret initiative, had worked as a secretary for James Schwarzenbach in the 1970s. Schwarzenbach, a member of the Swiss National Council, launched the “National Action against the Alienation of the People and the Homeland” in 1968, which sought to limit the proportion of foreigners in each canton to a maximum of 10 percent. A corresponding initiative was rejected by 54 percent after a bitter referendum campaign. If it had been accepted, 300,000 to 400,000 people would have had to leave Switzerland.

Propaganda poster of the burqa ban initiative reads: Stop Extremism!

In his youth, Schwarzenbach had admired Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and had been a member and later even party leader of the National Front. In November 1934, he was recorded as having taken part in a raid on the Cabaret Pfeffermühle. The cabaret had been founded in Munich by Erika and Klaus Mann, the children of the famous writer Thomas Mann, and had moved to Zurich because of Nazi persecution. Schwarzenbach justified the raid by saying that it was time to show emigrants and Jews that there was no place for them in Switzerland if they abused the right of hospitality.

The return of these fascist forces is a reaction to the deep crisis of capitalism, which has not spared Switzerland either. Measured by GDP per inhabitant, the country may be one of the richest in the world, but it is also, more than almost any other country, dependent on the world economy. The oversized banking sector, tourism for the upper class and highly specialised industry respond extremely sensitively to economic fluctuations.

Added to this is the sharp social polarisation—ranging from a filthy rich upper class to seasonal workers without permanent residency status—and an underdeveloped welfare system. The coronavirus crisis has exacerbated these contrasts. Despite high infection rates, the government puts the interests of the economy above the lives of the people. Ski resorts, hotels and restaurants have remained mostly open, as have factories. As a result, 565,000 people have been infected with COVID-19, more than twice as many as in Germany in terms of population. More than 10,000 have died.

As everywhere else in the world, the ruling class is preparing for fierce class struggles in Switzerland by promoting fascist forces.

Biden administration detains over 3,000 immigrant children daily

Eric London

As Wall Street, the political establishment and corporate media celebrate Joe Biden’s pledge to bring about a “return to normalcy,” the US government is committing a social crime of unprecedented dimensions against thousands of immigrant children at the US-Mexico border.

On any given night this week, over 3,200 immigrant children were sleeping on cold cement slabs under police floodlights, far from their parents and their homes. Nearly 1,400 children—many younger than 13—have been jailed for over three days in blatant violation of US law, held in cages that immigrants refer to as “ice boxes” or “dog kennels.”

Immigrants await word on their status (Source: Democracy Now!)

In the midst of a deadly pandemic, crowded tent camps set up by the previous Trump administration are now full to capacity. The number of children presently detained is 25 percent higher than at the peak of the Trump administration’s 2019 crackdown on immigrant children.

More than 10,000 immigrant children have been detained in the weeks since Biden declared at his inauguration that his administration would “restore the soul of America” and “make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.”

This ongoing crime exposes the rot at the core of the entire capitalist system and all its institutions and political representatives, from right to so-called left.

Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a media favorite for her “responsible” criticisms of Trump, scapegoated immigrant children for the coronavirus and blamed Democrats for “deciding to open the border and to let in thousands of people, potentially, who have got COVID.” Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbot, who just ordered all schools and businesses to open and repealed the state’s mask mandate, said officials “refused to test” immigrant children and “put these people on buses and sent them” across the country to spread the disease.

The Democratic-controlled Senate and House have refused to even convene hearings to address the mass detention of immigrant children. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and supportive of the Democratic Party, published an editorial board statement March 7 calling the mass detentions “a humane and decent approach” to address what it called the “surge of illegal border crossings.”

Biden’s attack on immigrant children exposes the cynical role of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose leading representatives urged workers and youth to vote for Biden as the “lesser evil” and now justify his actions.

In 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traveled to the border for a photo-op and wept in front of what turned out to be an empty parking lot. But now that a Democrat occupies the White House, Ocasio-Cortez justifies child detention. On February 23, she refused to call for closing the concentration camps, instead saying they should be “licensed” and there should be oversight as to “contracting” at what she cryptically called “influx facilities.”

The DSA-aligned Jacobin magazine similarly published an article February 10 praising the Biden administration for repealing Trump-era immigration restrictions, claiming “even for the most cynical leftist, there’s a lot to like in the Biden agenda so far.”

The proponents of racial and gender politics are also silent on the crimes being carried out at the border. The fact that the head of the Department of Homeland Security is a Latino immigrant has not improved the fate of detained immigrant children, nor has the fact that the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) happens to be black.

The New York Times opinion section—the moral compass of the affluent upper-middle class—has also not published any recent statement on the matter, though it has featured numerous articles promoting racial politics and moralizing about the alleged transgressions of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The hundreds of thousands of Central American immigrants of all ages who are presently immigrating to the US are fleeing countries devastated by decades of crimes carried out by US imperialism.

Perhaps no active American politician is as personally complicit in these crimes as Biden himself. After US-backed dictators killed hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers in a wave of reactionary violence throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Biden became the self-proclaimed architect of Plan Colombia, a brutal militarization campaign carried out by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. In January 2020, Biden bragged, “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia.”

Under the program, the US poured billions of dollars into arming and training the Colombian military, which made seven million Colombians homeless and from 2003 to 2007 killed thousands of civilians, falsely claiming they were guerrilla soldiers in the “false positives” scandal.

Plan Colombia was combined with a brutal regime of IMF-backed austerity measures that slashed pensions and wages and transformed Colombia into one of the world’s most unequal countries. Drug production only increased, fueling violence and strengthening gangs throughout the Central American and Mexican trafficking routes.

This became the model, and then-Vice President Biden oversaw similar policies across Central America in the mid 2010s, when the US deployed $750 million to train and arm the militaries and death squads of US-backed regimes in Honduras (where the Obama-Biden administration carried out a coup in 2009), Guatemala and El Salvador.

The numeric strength of the flow of immigrants testifies not only to the historic destruction of Latin America by US imperialism, but also by the catastrophic response of the global ruling class to the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Latin America harder than any other region in the world.

Though Latin America contains only eight percent of the world’s population, it accounts for a third of COVID-19 deaths—over 750,000 people. In Central America, food prices are soaring as a result of the pandemic and last year’s hurricanes, and starvation is a reality for millions. Mass unemployment is coupled with a near total lack of social support for workers, farmers and small business owners.

For months, the American pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer has been extorting Latin American governments, refusing to sell vaccines unless they put up embassy buildings and other sovereign assets as collateral, leading to a three-month delay in vaccine deployment, according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The desperate exodus from Central America is a sign that social tensions across the world are at the breaking point.

In the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, former Colombian Ambassador to the US Luis Alberto Moreno points to the mass protests that swept Latin America in 2018 and 2019 and warns of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on the consciousness of masses of people:

If nothing is done, Latin America will become an even greater source of instability, from which no one—neither its elites nor the United States—will be immune. The idea of a stagnant region awash in street protests, political instability, and organized crime is not some nightmarish vision of a lost decade ahead; it is the reality many Latin American countries are now confronting.

In other countries, the protests have died down, but most observers believe that is mainly because of the need for social distancing due to COVID-19. Indeed, the pandemic may have cooled the protests in the short term, but observers expect that over time, it will make the underlying grievances, and the pervasive inequality itself, dramatically worse.

Aware of profound social anger to inequality and death and fighting desperately to maintain its privileged position under capitalism, the financial aristocracy is attempting to scapegoat immigrant children for the mass deaths that were a deliberate outcome of the ruling class’s own parasitic policy.

Only a class that lives as a cancer on society could make such depraved arguments. The international working class must activate its profound social power and transform society on an egalitarian socialist basis. This requires the conscious political struggle for the unity of workers of all races and nationalities, regardless of immigration status.

European COVID-19 vaccination program produces a debacle

Will Morrow

While COVID-19 spreads internationally, increasingly dominated by more contagious variants, the distribution of vaccines in Europe is mired in delays.

The situation is particularly stark in France, where approximately 6 percent of the population have received a single dose, and only half of these the required second doses. In Germany, only 6.6 percent of the population has received a single dose. Three percent or less of the population has been vaccinated in Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

A man wearing a face mask walks past the Corona Center in Duisburg, Germany. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

In Britain, where vaccination has proceeded significantly further than in Europe as a whole, less than two percent of the population has received the required second dose of their vaccines, while some 23 million people have received a first dose. In comparison, the number of people vaccinated in Israel surpassed 4.9 million this week, more than 50 percent of the population.

The vaccination campaign in Europe has been chaotic from the outset. Governments had no real plan for a coordinated international distribution of a vaccine, while key infrastructure has been undermined by decades of austerity cuts to health systems that financed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In Germany, for example, the online portal for booking vaccination appointments for months only allowed users to book a first appointment, for a single dose, providing no means for users to go on a waiting list to be notified when more doses became available.

A major factor in the slow pace of vaccination, at least since the end of January, was the shortage of available doses. After cut-throat negotiations of contracts worth tens of billions of euros with European governments, the giant pharmaceutical corporations failed to supply enough vaccines.

This exposes the bankruptcy of European capitalism. Since last spring, EU and UK authorities have distributed trillions of euros and pounds in bank and corporate bailouts. Stock markets have surged, and individual multi-billionaires like France’s Bernard Arnault have added tens of billions of euros to their personal wealth. Yet there has been no public works program to massively increase vaccine production capacity, produce the infrastructure and equipment needed to distribute them, or increase health budgets. Instead, billions went to the very private corporations reaping profits from the crisis.

There is an urgent need for a global policy of social distancing and mass vaccination. However, it was blocked by corporate profit interests and the national interests of competing capitalist powers. As governments and trade unions herded workers back to work and youth back to school, in a “herd immunity” policy costing hundreds of thousands of lives, the capitalist market produced a debacle.

Last October, the EU, UK and US vetoed requests by India and South Africa to allow the generic manufacturing of a vaccine, which would threaten the interests of European and US corporations and to their ability to use a vaccine monopoly as a diplomatic weapon. For the same reason, they were hostile to international distribution of vaccines manufactured by China and Russia.

In December, Pfizer/BioNTech announced that it would not meet its promised quota of 12.5 million doses to the EU by the end of 2020. It pledged to increase production in Europe, but made clear this would be subject to the outcome of its negotiations with manufacturers in the continent.

In January, Moderna announced supply cuts to both Italy and France of more than 20 percent.

The only other vaccine approved for use by the European Medical Agency, Oxford-AstraZeneca, has announced continual delays and cuts in projected supplies. On February 23, Reuters reported, citing an anonymous EU official, that AstraZeneca will be down on its second-quarter shipments by more than 50 percent, providing 90 million of a pledged 180 million for April to June. On March 6, the Financial Times reported that the EU is seeking access to AstraZeneca vaccines made in the US.

AstraZeneca had been aware of production shortfalls in early January, but only announced at the end of that month that it would deliver 40 million out of 90 million doses for the first quarter. The shortage of available vaccines compelled France to postpone all vaccination appointments in the Île-de-France region for weeks, while Spain also had to push back its campaign.

AstraZeneca’s announcement triggered a bitter nationalist conflict between the EU and the UK. The EU demanded that a portion of the vaccines produced in two UK-based plants be diverted to meet AstraZeneca’s EU commitments, which the British government rejected. For several hours on January 28, the EU announced a ban on vaccine exports to Ireland, stating that they could be used to send vaccines to the UK. It only overturned the decision after Johnson called EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen to express “grave concerns” over the action.

The same week, several European countries announced restrictions on the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, claiming this was motivated by scientific concern over its efficacy. European governments and news publications citing government sources initiated an irresponsible propaganda campaign to undermine trust in the AstraZeneca vaccine.

French President Emmanuel Macron stated on January 29 that “today we think the [AstraZeneca] vaccine is practically inefficient for those aged over 65,” without citing any evidence for this claim. The German daily Handelsblatt cited an unnamed German government source to claim that the “AstraZeneca vaccine apparently has an effectiveness of only 8 percent in the elderly.”

These statements were not based on any scientific fact. The eight percent figure was in fact the portion of participants in the AstraZeneca vaccine trials aged from 56-69. Most participants were aged between 18 and 55, while less than 1,500 were aged over 55, and 450 were aged over 70.

The European Medical Agency had taken note of the relatively low number of elderly trial participants when it approved the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in January. It stated that because an immune response had been seen in this age group, and based off the experience of other vaccines, a similar effectiveness could be predicted among elderly patients, and that further data should continue to be gathered and analyzed.

The initial analysis of clinical trials of AstraZeneca, based on a regimen of two doses separated by four weeks, estimated it prevented all symptomatic cases with an efficacy of 62 percent. A more recent article published by the Lancet on March 6 claims that this figure rises to approximately 81 percent if the two doses of the vaccine are delivered further apart in time.

Moderna’s and Pfizer’s clinical trials both recorded estimated efficacies of 94 to 95 percent.

Recent English and Scottish studies show that—if a single dose of the vaccines is given, in violation of manufacturers’ protocols but in line with UK government policy—the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines are about as efficient at eliminating symptomatic COVID-19 cases (around 60 percent), and at lowering hospitalization rates of elderly patients (by around 80 percent).

After the publication of these studies, the German government approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for individuals aged over 65. The French government announced a similar abrupt turn, declaring that the AstraZeneca vaccine is as efficient as Moderna and Pfizer, except for the oldest age groups. It is advising that it be used for all patients aged under 75, including those aged 65-74 with pre-existing co-morbidities. Older patients are still being administered Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Yesterday Denmark, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg all suspended use of AstraZeneca vaccines from a 1 million-dose batch sent to Europe. A woman in Denmark and a 49-year-old nurse in Austria died from blood clots after receiving an AstraZeneca vaccine shot. Health authorities in Denmark stressed it was only a pause in the use of the vaccine, and the Spanish government issued a statement that it was not discontinuing use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) stated that “there is currently no indication that vaccination has caused these conditions, which are not listed as side effects with this vaccine.”

What is clear is that health policy including the distribution of vaccines must be conducted based on the scientific views of medical professionals, freed from the influence of the corporate profit and state strategic interests that have prevailed up to now. Above all, it is critical to ensure social distancing, including through lockdowns, to limit the spread of the virus, give time for the production of vaccines, and limit the emergence of new variants. This would save millions of lives.

Yet a vaccine program that has barely begun in Europe is being used by governments as a rationale for ending even the most limited measures of social isolation that had been in place. This criminal policy would ensure that the virus can spread unchecked and threatens to lead to countless unnecessary deaths. Moreover, scientists have warned repeatedly that the continued spread and mutation of the virus only raises the possibility that future mutations may be more resistant to current vaccines and the antibodies they stimulate in the human body.

Thus, the French daily Le Monde recently hailed Macron’s refusal to implement a lockdown and supported “the quasi-consensus that now exists to reject this radical solution.” Calling to promote the AstraZeneca vaccine against a lockdown, it concluded: “We must, urgently, change attitudes on vaccines, to consider them our main way to get out of the crisis. From this standpoint, unfortunately, the government’s messaging is far short of what is required.”

In line with its entire “herd immunity” policy on the pandemic of allowing the virus to spread while keeping workers at work in order to boost corporate profits, the European bourgeoisie is using the vaccines as a pretext to push for further cuts to critical social distancing measures.

The key question is the political mobilization of the working class across Europe and the world against the failed policies of the ruling class and for a scientifically-based policy. At the center of this struggle is a fight for social distancing and lock-downs to give time for vaccination. The past year of the pandemic has shown that such a struggle cannot be organized in the grip of the trade unions and the political establishment, which all supported the “herd immunity” policy. Workers need their own rank-and-file organizations to prosecute this struggle.

Mounting job cuts in New Zealand

Tom Peters

The global economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is continuing to worsen in New Zealand. Working people are bearing the full burden, through job losses and the soaring cost of living, especially in housing, pushed up by landlords and investor speculation.

In the 12 months to September 2020, New Zealand’s economy shrank by 2.2 percent. While there was a return to growth in the September quarter, some economists believe the country is now in another recession. The tourism, retail and education industries have all been severely affected by the border closure, imposed nearly a year ago.

Victoria University of Wellington (Wikimedia Commons)

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party-led administration responded to the crisis, like governments internationally, by protecting the rich, with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, tax concessions and loans to big businesses. The Reserve Bank in a one-off quantitative easing program is printing up to $100 billion to buy back bonds held by commercial banks.

Officially, unemployment dropped from 5.3 to 4.9 percent in the December quarter, but this is still 25,000 more unemployed people than a year earlier, an increase of about 22 percent. The figures do not reflect the real scale of the crisis. Since March last year, the number of people receiving the main Jobseeker welfare benefit has increased by 63,000. The underutilisation rate, including people not actively looking for work and workers who want more hours, is 11.9 percent.

Stuff reported on March 4 that from September to November 2020, “16,234 businesses closed permanently, compared to 7,154 in the same period in 2019… an increase of 127 percent.” Tourism areas are among the worst affected. Business revenue in the Queenstown Lakes District has collapsed by 23 percent and in the past year 9.1 percent of its jobs, about 2,000 jobs, have vanished.

Other sectors are also being hit with redundancies. On February 23, the Whakatāne Mill, which produces paper and packaging products, announced a plan to close by the end of June, after more than 80 years of operations, destroying 220 jobs. The mill’s parent company, Switzerland-based multinational SIG Combibloc, decided to stop purchasing its products, instead opting for cheaper third-party suppliers.

Whakatane Mill (Source: Facebook)

The closure will devastate the already-struggling district of 35,700 people, which in 2018 had a median income of just $26,300—17.3 percent below the national median. Stuff reported that up to 100 contractors and other businesses are indirectly supported by the mill.

FIRST Union and the E tū union, which have 100 and 40 members at the mill respectively, responded to the announcement by calling on the government to subsidise local forestry businesses and help redundant workers find new jobs. No industrial campaign has been launched to stop the closure and defend every job.

In the retail sector, Australian department store chain David Jones announced last month that its Wellington store, which employs 150 people, will close in 2022. Auckland homeware store Nido is also closing, with 60 redundancies. Consumer spending has declined for five months in a row, with more than half of all retailers reporting a drop in sales in the last month, according to Retail NZ.

Hundreds of bank staff are losing their jobs, even as the banks’ profits are propped up by the state’s money-printing program. The Bank of New Zealand recently announced plans to close 38 branches, mostly in rural areas. Kiwibank, ANZ, ASB and Westpac are likewise closing dozens of regional branches.

The country’s major universities have recently announced around 700 redundancies, in response to the sharp decline in international students, thousands of whom were stranded overseas by the border closure. The total number in the country has halved to around 10,000.

In addition, universities are scrapping many part-time and temporary roles, including tutors, who are usually postgraduate students. A student union spokesperson told RNZ, “dozens if not hundreds of students at some institutions who would be employed in a normal year… now aren’t.” As a result, many undergraduate students are missing out on tutorials.

The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) has accepted the cuts as inevitable and is helping to impose them.

On March 10, Stuff reported that Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) had ruled out “large scale” sackings. The TEU posted the article on Facebook presenting this as a victory, with the comment: “The Vic Uni branch has shown how much is achieved when we stand together.” According to Stuff, branch leader Dougal McNeill, a leading member of the pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation (ISO) “said he welcomed the announcement,” but the union “remained concerned” about staff workloads and called on the government to increase funding.

In fact, as Stuff notes, around 60 staff at VUW are taking “voluntary” redundancies. Vice-chancellor Grant Guildford made clear that further cost cutting is likely, saying: “It will still be necessary to keep a very tight rein on operational costs, including pay levels this year.”

The TEU reportedly advised its members at VUW not to take redundancy. But it provided no alternative way forward. The union has made no attempt to unite staff at all universities and polytechs in a nationwide strike campaign against the cuts.

The University of Auckland has so far signed up 300 permanent staff for redundancy. Massey University aims to sack 74 people, Auckland University of Technology 71, Lincoln University 72, the University of Canterbury 40 and University of Waikato 25.

In the 2017 election, the TEU supported Labour, falsely stating that it offered “a credible and popular alternative” to the former National Party government’s austerity measures. Universities continued cutting jobs in 2018, while Labour froze funding. But the union, and the ISO, again supported Labour and the Greens in the 2020 election.

To defend jobs, as well as conditions for students, requires a political fight against the Ardern government, the unions and their pseudo-left allies. New organisations, rank-and-file committees of students and staff, must be built to oppose the pro-business onslaught. They must link up with workers in factories such as the Whakatāne Mill, and with retail, tourism and workers internationally who are facing the same onslaught of pro-corporate restructuring.

Above all, the fight against austerity requires a socialist political perspective. Why should workers and young people suffer while the government hands over tens of billions of dollars to the banks and big business? This money must be urgently redirected to provide high-paying, secure jobs and well-resourced public services, including free and accessible tertiary education.