Surging Delta variant already dominant in several European states

Robert Stevens

The highly transmissible Delta coronavirus variant is spreading rapidly across the European continent. The mutation initially emerged in India and is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. It is already the dominant strain of Covid-19 in the UK, Portugal and Russia.

The main B.1.617.2 strain of Delta first detected last October is one of several strains of Covid-19. It has now been identified in at least 74 countries according to a World Health Organization survey of local reports.

Public Health England (PHE) has identified all three Delta variants—the original first spotted in India, as well as Delta-AY.1 and Delta-AY.2 as variants of concern. By June 18, PHE had detected 36 confirmed and two probable cases of Delta AY.1 infection in England. Delta-AY.2 has not yet been detected in Britain.

In this Feb. 11, 2021 file photo, a nurse prepares medication in a COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at the Curry Cabral hospital in Lisbon. Portugal is witnessing a surge in new daily cases not seen since February. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

Within weeks of being detected, the main Delta strain became dominant in the UK. According to latest figures it is responsible for at least 98 percent of new cases. Over the last seven days there have been around 10,000 new daily cases of Covid announced in Britain, with the virus allowed to surge due to the government reopening most of the economy on May 17. The number of new cases in the last week (68,449) marked a 31 percent increase on the 52,077 cases in the previous seven days.

On Tuesday, another 11,625 new COVID cases were recorded, the highest number since mid-February and up nearly a thousand cases on Monday. Deaths are also edging up with Tuesday’s 27 coronavirus-related deaths comparing with five on Monday.

The spread in Britain is being particularly fueled by infections among school children and young people; only a tiny percentage of whom are vaccinated. On Tuesday, the Department for Education reported that nearly 250,000 children in England missed school over the last week for Covid-related reasons, including 9,000 children who have contracted the disease.

According to epidemiologists, Delta is around 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha variant (originally named the Kent variant—which itself became dominant in Britain within a few months in the autumn and rapidly spread globally. Initial data compiled in Britain confirms that the Delta variant increases the risk of hospitalisation by 2.2 times compared with Alpha.

Europe recorded a further 5,770 Covid deaths last week with the vast majority of these (3,000) in Russia, where the Delta variant is already rife. In the last seven days to Tuesday only Russia with 111,796 infections on the continent recorded more Covid cases than Britain. This was a 29 percent increase on the week prior. Last Friday alone a record 9,056 new infections were logged in Moscow.

The largest percentage increase in cases was recorded in Portugal which had 7,734 cases in the last week (compared with a 5,038 the week before)—a 54 percent increase.

A major factor for the spread in Portugal is again the reckless reopening of the economy including its sizeable tourism sector. Portugal’s resort are popular with holidaymakers from the UK and it was initially placed on the green list of countries from which people do not need to quarantine on their return. With Covid resurgent in Portugal, the UK placed it on the amber list on June 8 requiring quarantine—though travel continues.

In France, a further 16,444 new cases were recorded last week, in Italy 7,683 and in Belgium 3,077.

These are all being driven by the Delta surge. On Sunday, the Financial Times published a report of the spread of the Delta variant across Europe based on an analysis of global genomic data from the Gisaid virus tracking database (Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data). The FT noted that Delta “accounts for 96 percent of sequenced Covid-19 infections in Portugal, more than 20 percent in Italy and about 16 percent in Belgium…” It added, “In Portugal, community transmission of the variant has been detected in the greater Lisbon area, where more than 60 percent of the country’s new coronavirus cases in the past week have been identified.”

Clusters caused by the Delta variant are springing up across the continent. The FT reported, “French authorities are currently trying to contain an outbreak in the Landes region, near the Spanish border, where 125 cases of the Delta variant have been confirmed by genetic sequencing and another 130 are suspected, representing about 30 percent of recent infections in the area. Clusters of the Delta variant have also been identified in recent weeks in the southern suburbs of Paris and an art school in Strasbourg.”

The Delta infections reported by governments in mainland Europe are no doubt a significant underestimation. Hardly any genomic sequencing of COVID cases has been carried out. The UK is a world leader in genome sequencing and has completed over half a million genomes. In contrast, as the FT notes, “Germany, France and Spain have sequenced about 130,000, 47,000 and 34,000 respectively.”

Modelled estimates of Delta’s share of all sequenced cases found that up to June 16, 98 percent of UK Covid cases were Delta, where 30 percent of all Covid cases are sequenced. In Russia, the figures were 99 percent of Covid cases being Delta, based on 1 percent sequencing. In Portugal, 96 percent were Delta based on 5 percent sequencing. In Italy, 26 percent of cases were Delta based on 2 percent of cases sequenced and in Belgium 16 percent Delta based on 6 percent sequenced. Germany’s rate was 15 percent Delta based on 8 percent sequenced (compared to the Robert Koch institutes’ “higher end” estimate of Delta cases reaching 6 percent). In France, where the Health Ministry calculates that the rate of Delta cases is between 2 and 4 percent, the Gisaid data found that almost 7 percent of cases are Delta based on just 1 percent of cases being sequenced.

The lack of such genome sequencing again points to the deadly impact of the principle adopted by all the major powers at the outset of the pandemic that profits and the economy must come before the health and lives of the population. Commenting on the lack of sequencing by some of the richest countries on the planet, the FT cited Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva who said, “It’s costly, it’s time consuming and it was neglected.”

In Sweden, where the government took the decision to let coronavirus run rampant with the goal of reaching “herd immunity” causing more than a million people to be infected from a 10 million population and over 14,200 deaths, the Public Health Agency confirmed last Thursday a “community spread” of Delta with 71 cases of the variant. Agency director general Johan Carlson told a news conference, “There are some dark clouds on the horizon and I think mainly of outbreaks of the delta variant. It is found in Europe and also locally in Sweden.”

Huge swathes of Europe’s population remain unvaccinated, allowing the virus to spread and mutate. Even in Britain, which has vaccinated the highest percentage of its population in Europe, only around half of the population has been fully immunised with two doses. As the FT notes, “vaccination rates in most countries in mainland Europe are hovering at between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. About 26 per cent of the population in France has been fully vaccinated.”

Europe’s governments have all barely altered their agendas to fully reopen their economies to ensure the profits of the corporations and banks.

In Portugal, the authorities sealed off the capital, Lisbon, preventing travel in and out, but only for last weekend only.

In the case of the Conservative government in Britain, having been forced to delay ending all final restrictions from June 21, it has declaring July 19 “Terminus Day” and announced a raft of super-spreader events. On Tuesday, the latest announcement was that 60,000 soccer fans will be allowed into London’s Wembley Stadium for the semi-finals and final of Euro 2020 on July 7, 8 and 11—the most allowed at a UK sporting event in 15 months. The upscale in fans watching was agreed between London and Europe’s governing soccer body, Uefa.

On Tuesday, Scottish National Party First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that moving to the lowest level of restrictions will be delayed until July 19 and that all major legal Covid restrictions will be ended in Scotland on August 9.

Lebanon’s social crisis deepens amid internal political turmoil and imperialist scheming

Jean Shaoul

Shops, government offices, businesses, and banks, largely controlled by Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni elites, closed their doors in a general strike last Thursday.

Protesters set up roadblocks in Beirut and other towns and cities, burning tyres and bringing traffic to a standstill, including the road to Beirut airport.

While workers joined the strike to protest the horrendous social conditions and endemic corruption that have destroyed their livelihoods, Lebanon’s corrupt political parties seized the occasion to call for a new government to be installed forthwith.

Protesters block a main highway by burning tires and garbage containers, during a protest against the increase in prices of consumer goods and the crash of the local currency, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, June 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Their pose of support for the strike was widely ridiculed on social media, with one Twitter user writing, “Let me get this straight. The same corrupt government, criminal ruling class that blew up this city are actively protesting against themselves...? In what world is this acceptable?”

On the previous Friday, pharmacies went on a two-day nationwide strike over the failure of the central bank to supply them with dollars at a preferential exchange rate as was previously the case. This has made it impossible to import goods at an affordable price, amid a severe shortage of medicines and baby formula as hospitals struggle to cope with the coronavirus pandemic while criminal gangs hoard or smuggle medicines out of the country.

The economic crisis has been intensified by the pandemic, the default last year on Lebanon’s sovereign debt to international lenders and the Beirut port blast last August that killed 211 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed much of the northern part of the city.

More than half of the population has been thrown into poverty as a result of the pound’s plummeting purchasing power and the soaring unemployment rate that rose from 28 percent in February last year to 40 percent in December. While the government said it would set up a financial support system to help those most in need, it has failed to do so, leaving the political parties to provide food and other aid to their clients.

A World Bank report published this month branded Lebanon’s economic crisis as one of the world’s worst in over 150 years. Lebanon’s GDP crashed from nearly $55 billion in 2018 to around $33 billion in 2020, a 40 percent drop in GDP per capita. Its currency has lost 90 percent of its value since late 2019 and is now trading at 15,100 pounds to the US dollar, with soaring inflation expected to worsen this year.

According to the Lebanon’s statistical service, as of last December, food prices had risen fourfold in a year, clothing and shoe prices rose fivefold and hotels and restaurants more than sixfold, while the minimum wage had fallen in real terms to just $67 a month, down from about $450 a month two years ago.

There are now food, fuel and electricity shortages. Turkey’s Karpower recently shut down two floating power barges that supply a quarter of the country’s electricity due to payment arrears. Basics like oil, flour, rice and sugar have vanished. Meat is unaffordable, while people are forced to queue for hours to buy petrol.

As the World Bank pointed out, “Such a brutal and rapid contraction is usually associated with conflicts or wars.” It warned, “The dire socio-economic conditions risk systemic national failings with regional and potentially global consequences.” This was a reminder that what happens in Lebanon has ramifications beyond its borders, particularly Syria, whose economy, financial system and people are inextricably linked to that of Lebanon.

The economic crisis has been compounded by political paralysis. After mass protests erupted in October 2019 over rising poverty, social inequality, and rampant government corruption, demanding an end to the sectarian political system and elections to form a new government, Hassan Diab, an engineering professor from the American University of Beirut was tapped to form a “technocratic” government. He replaced the government of Sa’ad Hariri, the billionaire Sunni client of Saudi Arabia and France, early last year.

As the new government sought to impose the cost of Lebanon’s financial losses on the banking sector, and thereby on the corrupt Sunni and Christian politicians with banking interests, including the Hariri family, the financial elite and their political allies moved to undermine the government’s economic programme.

As it became clear that it would be held responsible for the last August’s explosion in Beirut’s port—despite being the first to raise the alarm about the explosives being held at the port since 2014—Diab’s short-lived government resigned. Once again, President Michel Aoun fell back on the widely discredited Hariri to form a government, but with the two men unable to agree a new cabinet that would include their different patronage networks—Aoun backing the Free Patriotic Movement, led by his son-in-law Gebran Bassil, and the Shia party Hezbollah—no new government has been sworn in and Diab continues in a caretaker role.

The country’s foreign reserves that are used to fund the subsidies of basic goods including fuel, medicine and wheat are running out. Lebanon, whose health care system has collapsed, has suffered nearly 8,000 deaths from the coronavirus, if official figures are to be believed. Some hospitals are refusing to carry out anything except emergency services to preserve remaining medical supplies, while desperate citizens are turning to the Internet to trade belongings and barter for medicines.

Earlier this month, Hassan Nasrallah, who heads the Hezbollah movement that together with its allies has a majority in the parliament, said that Lebanon might soon have to rely on fuel imports from Iran if shortages continue.

Lebanon, a tiny country whose population has swelled to six million following the influx of Syrians fleeing the decade-long proxy war to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad orchestrated by US imperialism, has long been at the mercy of the rival regional powers and their more powerful backers. Caught in the crosshairs of the escalating conflict between the US, Israel and the Gulf petro-monarchs on the one hand, and Iran and its allies, including Syria on the other, it has been hung out to dry as Washington steps up the pressure on Iran.

The Gulf states have made any aid dependent upon a government that excludes Hezbollah, while the Western banks and institutions have refused to stump up $11 billion pledged at a 2018 conference until the government implements the free market reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund. This is an anathema to Lebanon’s corrupt financial elite that are dependent upon government succor.

Should the talks in Vienna over the resumption of the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran succeed, with a partial lifting of the sanctions targeting oil exports that have crippled Iran’s economy, this would release Iranian funding for Tehran’s regional allies. This would allow Hezbollah to partly fill Lebanon’s financial and economic vacuum, and thereby align the country more closely with Iran, and by implication Russia and Syria.

It was for this reason that the US State Department announced last week that it would grant the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) an additional $15 million in foreign military funding. This brings the total for the year to $120 million, including to support Lebanon’s “border security and counterterrorism operations” that are poised to receive an additional $59 million. This would include operations in Syria, supporting the counter-Islamic State offensive, as well as maintaining “internal stability.”

Warning of a “critical” situation, LAF chief Gen. Joseph Aoun told a French-led virtual meeting of the major powers and some Gulf Arab states last Thursday that the country’s economic crisis would lead to a collapse of all state institutions. He said he had not enough money to adequately pay his 80,000 troops, who were earning the equivalent of just $90 a month. Military personnel were moonlighting to augment their incomes, going absent without leave or quitting. His warning came after the LAF’s recent receipt of ammunition from Russia and some 100 light duty vehicles from China.

Aoun said the army was the “sole guarantor” of Lebanon’s security and its “most trusted institution domestically and globally… Therefore maintaining the cohesiveness and supporting the LAF to carry out its mission are of paramount importance.”

“Witness K” convicted for exposing Australia’s illegal bugging in East Timor

Mike Head

A former senior Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, known publicly only as “Witness K,” was sentenced to a suspended jail term last Friday. His “crime” was to blow the whistle on the Howard Liberal-National government’s use of ASIS to plant a listening device in East Timor’s cabinet room in 2004 during crucial oil and gas negotiations.

While “Witness K,” now 70, was spared immediate imprisonment after pleading guilty to breaching his secrecy obligations as an intelligence official, the current Liberal-National government and the magistrate presiding over the case insisted that he had to be punished to “send a message” on “national security.”

Meanwhile, the real criminals remain free—those responsible for bugging the East Timorese government in order to help retain Australian corporate control over the multi-billion dollar energy resources beneath the Timor Sea between the two countries.

Moreover, the government is pushing ahead with the closed-door trial of Witness K’s lawyer Bernard Collaery, who has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with the intelligence officer and could face years of imprisonment if convicted.

Bernard Collaery, Witness K's lawyer, who also faces national security charges (Credit: AP Photo/Rod McGuirk, File)

The government, through former Attorney-General Christian Porter, personally signed off on the prosecutions, invoking section 39 of the Intelligence Services Act, which criminalises the communication of any information acquired by ASIS, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

A wall of secrecy has been retained around the Timor bugging case for many years because it is so politically and ideologically damaging to the Australian ruling class and its intelligence apparatus. It lays bare the reality that behind the cloak of “national security” stands the plundering interests of Australian imperialism throughout the region, from the underwater riches of the Timor Sea to South East Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The dirty operations of ASIS, the overseas surveillance service, and other Australian intelligence agencies must be hidden from public view all the more because they are always conducted in close collaboration with their US counterparts, reflecting Australian capitalism’s dependence on Washington for military and intelligence protection.

The Australian spy services are an integral component of the US-led “Five Eyes” global network that conducts mass surveillance on the world’s population and monitors other governments whose interests could potentially conflict with those of Washington.

East Timor, a statelet on half an island in the sprawling Indonesian archipelago, is also a key strategic location in the intensifying US economic and military drive to combat the rise of China and reassert the hegemony over the region that Washington established via its victory in World War II.

To maintain absolute secrecy, the ex-ASIS officer Witness K stood behind a wall of black panels, invisible to the packed courtroom, as he was handed a three-month suspended term of imprisonment and a 12-month good behaviour order.

In return for his guilty plea, first entered two years ago, the government did not seek an immediate jail term. However, Richard Maidment, the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions, opposed Witness K’s application for a non-conviction order. Maidment said Witness K’s case should be used as a vehicle to deter others from engaging in similar acts.

Witness K’s lawyers had urged the court to show the former highly-decorated naval and intelligence officer “judicial mercy,” saying he suffered from numerous mental health afflictions—post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety and hyper mania.

Magistrate Glenn Theakston nevertheless agreed with the government. He declared that Witness K had violated “strict and absolute” proscriptions regarding ASIS. Even though Witness K had been motivated by considerations of justice and a “rules-based order of international relations,” he had compromised the agency’s effectiveness, safety and security and jeopardised Australia’s relationships and reputations.

Theakston insisted the offence was “not trivial.” It was an “express, deliberate breach of the defendant’s obligations to maintain the secrecy of the operations of ASIS.” Nor was it any excuse that Witness K made no attempt to hide his actions from the Australian government.

Witness K made the “illegal” disclosures in two affidavits in 2013, which were intended to be used at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, where East Timor had accused Australia of failing to negotiate in good faith by spying on its impoverished supposed ally.

Witness K’s home was raided in 2013 and his passport seized to prevent him from going to The Hague to testify for East Timor in its bid to overturn the unfavourable oil and gas deal secured by Australia. Despite the raid, conducted by the internal spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), no charges were brought until 2018, after the conclusion of a treaty with the East Timorese government.

Confident of the opposition Labor Party’s support, Prime Minister Scott Morrison personally endorsed the trials of Witness K and Collaery in September 2018. Morrison told reporters “justice will be served” by the prosecutions. Labor’s shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, made clear his party’s backing, telling the Guardian: “The charges are serious and it is important to let the judicial process take its course.”

Both the Coalition and Labor uphold the use of the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act, passed in 2004, supposedly to assist the “war on terrorism,” to conduct Collaery’s trial behind locked doors.

The government is also demanding closed-door proceedings in the trial of an ex-military lawyer, David McBride, who exposed a cover-up of civilian killings and other war crimes conducted by Australian Special Forces units during the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

These are not the only secret trials. In 2019, it was revealed that an ex-soldier and intelligence officer, known only as “Witness J,” had been convicted and imprisoned in Canberra for 15 months via a criminal trial that was completely hidden from public knowledge.

This assault on basic legal and democratic rights matches the brutal methods being used against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. With the backing of the Australian government, he remains incarcerated in a maximum-security UK prison, facing extradition to the US on “espionage” charges for exposing the war atrocities and anti-democratic conspiracies of the US government and its allies, including those in Canberra.

Collaery, a former Liberal Party attorney-general in the Australian Capital Territory, has described Witness K as a “patriot” who raised criticisms of the ASIS bugging mission through the proper channels.

Collaery’s comments indicate that his concern is to repair the damage done to ASIS’s credibility. Among other things, the illegal bugging operation further exposed the fraud of Canberra’s claims to have intervened militarily in East Timor in 1999 for the benefit of the long-impoverished Timorese people.

Whatever the motivations of Witness K and his lawyer, however, there is no doubt that the working class must demand the dropping of all the charges. The people who should be on trial are members of the Howard government, such as its foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who was in charge of ASIS in 2004.

Alongside them should be members of the subsequent Labor government, which authorised the raids on Witness K and Collaery in 2013. Labor also refused to renegotiate the 2006 treaty with East Timor, which was secured with the help of ASIS’s spying and retained the lion’s share of the oil and gas revenues for Australian imperialism and the conglomerates it favoured, including Shell, Woodside and ConocoPhillips.

First round of French regional elections marked by record abstention

Kumaran Ira & Anthony Torres

The first round of regional elections in France took place on Sunday. They were marked by a historic abstention rate, while the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National-RN) of Marine Le Pen secured the most votes in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region.

The elections took place amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 110,000 people in the country, due to Macron’s actions since the beginning of the crisis to permit the virus to spread. For the political establishment, the elections are used as an indicator in advance of the presidential elections next year.

Far-right leader Marine le Pen attends a press conference in Toulon, southern France, June 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Early estimates put the national turnout at just 32.8 percent, with abstention at 67.2 percent, a record high for a two-round election under the Fifth Republic. In 2015, abstention in the regional elections was 49.9 percent; the highest abstention ever was in 2010, at 53 percent. In contrast, the abstention rate in the 1986 regional elections was 22.7 percent.

This points to the widespread disillusionment with and hostility to the established political parties, as well as a distrust of Macron’s handling of the pandemic, which has been tacitly backed by parties such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise (LFI).

The regional elections appoint 1,767 regional councillors for six years in France’s 12 metropolitan regions. In the first round, if a list obtains an absolute majority of the votes cast, it gets a quarter of the seats to be filled. The remaining seats are distributed by proportional representation among all the lists that obtained at least 5 percent of the votes cast.

The Republicans (LR) won in Hauts-de-France (43.1 percent), Grand Est (31.5 percent), Normandy (35.1 percent), Pays de la Loire (34.1 percent) and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (43.8 percent), and in Ile-de-France (34.2 percent of the vote). The PS came out on top in five regions: Centre-Val de Loire (25.6 percent), Nouvelle-Aquitaine (28.6 percent), Occitanie (39.6 percent), Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (26.2 percent) and Bretagne (20.8 percent).

Le Pen’s far-right National Rally leads with 34.8 percent in the PACA region.

In Corsica, the autonomist Inseme per a Corsica is leading with 28 percent of the vote.

With no party obtaining an absolute majority of the votes cast, a second round of elections will be necessary in all regions next Sunday. Parties that obtained at least 10 percent of the votes cast can stand in the second round, and possibly merge with lists with at least 5 percent of the votes.

At a national level, according to an Ipsos/Sopra Steria estimate, the results of the first round by political party are: LR and its allies, 27.2 percent; the RN, 19.3 percent; the PS and its allies, 17.6 percent; Europe Ecology-the Greens and allies, 12.5 percent; Macron’s Republic on the Move (LREM) and its allies, 11.2 percent; Mélenchon’s LFI and allies, 4.2 percent.

Several commentators have highlighted the widespread discrediting of the political class that the election reveals. In its weekend edition, Le Monde wrote, “this desertion of voters is a sign of a sick democracy, of a political disillusionment, where the feeling that ‘voting is useless’ is taking root.”

Frédéric Dabi, the director of Ifop Opinion, said on LCI this Friday that this abstention rate will be “the major lesson of this election night” and an “earthquake that will have consequences, because an electoral balance of power is primarily the result of participation and a differential of mobilization between camps that vote and camps that do not vote. But when we reach such a level, for whom does the bell toll? It rings for all political parties, all segments of the population.”

Macron’s LREM is discredited and failed to win in Hauts-de-France, Auvergne Rhône Alpes and Occitanie.

The first round was a disappointment for Le Pen’s RN. Previously, polls and media outlets predicted that it would come first in six or seven regions, and win the Grand Est, the Centre-Val de Loire and PACA in the second round. In reality, the RN vote has declined compared to the 2015 regional elections, in which it won almost 28 percent of the vote in the first and second rounds, or 6.8 million votes. In 2015, the RN did not win any regions in the second round, but it did win 358 regional councillors, three times more than previously.

However, despite the drop in its vote in the first round, the RN remains a major established political force in France, largely thanks to the legitimisation of its policies by Macron and by the former Socialist Party government of President François Hollande before him.

For LFI and Mélenchon, who received just under 20 percent of the vote in the 2017 presidential elections, the vote of 4.2 percent was a clear blow. In the midst of the greatest health catastrophe in over a century, LFI did not present any real alternative to the disastrous and politically criminal management by the government in the interests of the financial aristocracy.

In the second round, LFI is aligning itself with the other bourgeois parties, allegedly in order to block the Rassemblement National. Mélenchon called for no region to be left to the RN, stating: “We call for not adding one more blow to the misfortunes of our democracy. We will do what it takes to convince everyone that no region should be given to the National Rally.”

Macron and the entire political establishment have largely contributed to the rise of RN by legitimising the politics of the far right in recent years. While he has led attacks on workers in collaboration with the unions, Macron has continued to promote the far right.

After his victory in 2017, Macron made the “Republican salute” to Marine Le Pen and her supporters. Forces within his Ministry of Culture attempted to have the works of Charles Maurras, the 20th-century anti-Semitic leader of Action Française, a pillar of the Vichy collaborationist regime who was convicted as a traitor after the Liberation, published. In 2018, as he sent riot police against the “yellow vests,” he hailed the collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the Macron government has provided billions of euros to banks and big business while pursuing a policy of “herd immunity” that has cost more than 110,000 lives in France and more than a million in Europe. During this period, the richest have increased their fortunes enormously, while the majority of the population have seen their standard of living fall.

In the wake of the pandemic, Macron has adopted much of the RN’s agenda in an attempt to permanently undermine democratic rights. This includes the anti-Muslim anti-separatism law, which scuttles the 1905 law on secularism and the separation of church and state, and opens the way for the arbitrary dissolution of cultural and political organisations. He has also passed the “global security” law, which expands police powers against protesters and the population.

Brazil’s Workers Party seeks right-wing electoral alliances as generals warn of “breaking point”

Miguel Andrade

Last Saturday’s massive demonstrations against fascistic President Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic have deepened the crisis of the Brazilian ruling class, which fears mass social opposition may turn against the entire capitalist order.

Twice in less than a month, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have taken to the streets with hand-painted signs bearing the names of loved ones lost to COVID and calling Bolsonaro a mass murderer and genocidal. As last Saturday’s last demonstration took place, the country surpassed the 500,000 mark for COVID-19 fatalities—the second worst death toll in the world, trailing only the United States, which has a 50 percent larger population. This toll has more than doubled in the first half of 2021 alone, and leading health experts now project that, following the same trend of doubling deaths every six months and amid a slow vaccine rollout that has so far immunized only 10 percent of Brazilians, the total number of dead could reach one million by 2022.

The demonstrations were a sharp, albeit only initial demonstration of the deep anger of workers already expressed in hundreds of strikes against the herd immunity policy of the Brazilian and international ruling classes, particularly among manufacturing, health, transportation and education workers all across the country.

Mass protest in São Paulo on June 19 (Credit: @midianinja)

While these strikes and struggles have been suppressed and isolated by the media, the corporatist unions and the Congressional opposition led by the Workers Party (PT), the eruption of mass demonstrations has definitely placed Brazil on Latin America’s expanding map of massive social unrest now engulfing countries from Paraguay to Colombia. It has also blown to pieces the narrative promoted by Brazil’s petty-bourgeois “left”—that the working class and impoverished sections of the middle class are dominated by social conservatism and passive subordination to the fascistic Bolsonaro.

This demoralized and false narrative has never been taken seriously by the government itself, with Bolsonaro consistently declaring that Brazil faces the specter of a mass social revolt like the one that shook Chile in 2019, and that such an eruption would force him to assume dictatorial powers to “restore order.” Bolsonaro has repeatedly warned his opponents not to “push it” (“esticar a corda”), that is, not to fundamentally oppose him, in order not to “provoke” a coup.

Such warnings have now been taken up by the head of the Supreme Military Court (STM), active-duty Gen. Luis Mattos, who claimed bluntly in an interview with the right-wing Veja magazine that “all of those opposing the government” were “pushing it” by attributing to the president “everything that was wrong” and “not letting him rule.” This situation, he warned, would lead to a “breaking point.” The government leader in the Brazilian House, Deputy Ricardo Barros, also declared on June 8 that “we will reach a point where judicial decisions will not be followed,” referring to the defeats suffered by the government in the courts, which Bolsonaro has accused of “overstepping” their authority.

Gen. Mattos made his threats during the same week in which the Army, Navy and Air force legal offices joined Bolsonaro’s Solicitor General (AGU) in defending, in the Brazilian Supreme Court, a statute declaring that civilians—including journalists—who “slander” the Armed Forces should be prosecuted in military courts. The law is part of a 1969 military criminal code enacted during the so-called “lead years” of barbaric political repression by the 1964-1985 US-backed military dictatorship.

Popular anger over the half-million avoidable COVID deaths, record levels of unemployment, mass impoverishment and skyrocketing social inequality are deepening divisions within the ruling class over how to deal with the explosive Brazilian social situation. This is highlighted by the increasingly open declarations by senior figures within the political and military establishment recognizing that Bolsonaro may not accept the 2022 presidential election results if he is not re-elected.

Within military circles, these warnings have been ever more vocally expressed by Bolsonaro’s former government secretary, retired Gen. Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz. Under the former PT governments, Santos Cruz had been a commander of UN “peace-keeping” troops in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as former PT President Dilma Rousseff’s strategic affairs secretary. He was interviewed by Veja magazine and, in unusually blunt terms, compared the Brazilian situation to that of so-called “failed” states where he had commanded UN troops. He charged the Bolsonaro government with “sponsoring fanaticism, spectacle, populism. That is the process behind every authoritarian regime.” Ultimately, he declared, “in a divided society, this criminal fanaticism we are living under ends in violence.”

Santos Cruz doesn’t make his warning based on a principled opposition to social inequality or dictatorship, but out of fear that the Brazilian ruling elite, in continuing its support for Bolsonaro, will sleepwalk into a revolutionary situation, with the outpouring of social opposition getting out of the control of the so-called opposition led by the PT.

Under these conditions, the most pressing task of those factions within the ruling class opposed to Bolsonaro is to chloroform public opinion regarding the objective incompatibility of democratic forms of rule with pervasive explosive levels of social inequality. Those factions aim to single out Bolsonaro and his closest allies as fanatical aberrations, speaking for no one but themselves, and thereby directing social opposition behind traditional forces within the political establishment which are ostensibly opposed to Bolsonaro’s “fanaticism.”

This operation was accelerated after the unexpected mass outpouring in the protests of May 29. It has at its center the cobbling together of electoral alliances for the 2022 general elections, in which the presidency, the House, a third of the Senate and all state governments and legislatures are at stake.

The electoral maneuvers were kicked off in Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro’s political base, with the June 11 announcement by Rio Deputy Marcelo Freixo, a star of the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), that he was leaving the party he helped found in 2005 as a PT dissident, and entering the Socialist Party (PSB), the ninth largest party in the Brazilian House. Freixo declared on the same day in a Veja interview that the next elections would not be about “left versus right, but civilization against barbarism.” He said his switching parties was necessary to attract right-wing figures unwilling to side with the PSOL, while adding that the PSOL would ultimately join a broad coalition with the anti-Bolsonaro right.

Questioned why he didn’t rejoin the PT, he declared that joining the PSB was actually the PT’s recommendation, due to the popular rejection of the party in Rio after its sponsoring of successive state governments in the state that were brought down by corruption. On the following day, the highlight of Freixo’s announcement of his campaign for governor was to name as his chief law enforcement advisor the former minister of Defense and Public Safety in President Michel Temer’s right-wing government, Raul Jungmann. Jungmann declared he would collaborate with Freixo in order to “articulate a wide democratic front to free Rio from violence and corruption.”

Jungmann’s record leaves no doubt about the fraud of Freixo’s claim that his candidacy will represent “civilization against barbarism.” As Temer’s Public Safety minister, Jungmann was the senior civilian figure behind a year-long and unprecedented military intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which saw the virtual overthrow of civilian authority and the installment of Gen. Walter Braga Netto at the head of Rio’s law enforcement. In the first months of the intervention, the PSOL’s city councillor Marielle Franco, who was tasked by the city as a human rights ombudsman, was brutally murdered by a death squad. For three years, Freixo and the PSOL have charged that the murder was carried out by Rio’s vigilante-style police gangs known as “militias,” to which the Bolsonaro family has multiple financial and political ties.

The crime remains unsolved, and Freixo, who had politically sponsored Franco’s career, had railed against Jungmann for using her death to strengthen the military intervention. Gen Braga Netto went on to become Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, and then defense minister in May 2021, when the president fired the entire military high command in order to consolidate his grip over the armed forces.

As with other senior military officials who joined the “barbaric” Bolsonaro government, Braga Netto has been cast by the PT and PSOL as a “modern” and “constitutionalist” general, despite the explosion of human rights violations during the Army’s rule over Rio de Janeiro. Jungmann went on to found and lead Brazil’s first integrated civilian-military think tank, CEDESEN, which promotes the illusion that the military is committed to constitutional rule.

The path promoted by the PT and its bourgeois and pseudo-left allies, of subordinating opposition to Bolsonaro to the divisions among the most reactionary architects of Brazil’s brutal repressive apparatus, can only lead to catastrophe. The violent swing to the right embodied in Marcelo Freixo’s turn to figures like Raul Jungmann expresses the immense objective pressures towards authoritarian rule that have inevitably accompanied the insoluble crisis of Brazilian and world capitalism. The role of such pseudo-left forces is to politically disarm workers and prepare the conditions for a dictatorship, conditions which significant sections of the bourgeoisie and its military command believe are not yet in place.

COVID deaths rise among Brazil’s Petrobras oil workers

Brunna Machado

The uncontrolled spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil has had particularly catastrophic effects on the working class. While the capitalist class affirms, through the statements made by each company, that it “follows the protocols” and that workers get infected when they are off duty, the role of the workplaces as centers of transmission of the virus—and, consequently, as strategic places to fight the pandemic and defend the lives of the population—has become increasingly clear.

Similar to what has been seen in factories, transport and other workplaces, refineries and oil platforms have an infection rate above the national average. In the month in which Brazil surpassed the grim milestone of half a million COVID-19 deaths, the workers of the state-run energy giant Petrobras are seeing the deaths of their colleagues skyrocket.

According to monitoring by the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), there was a 125 percent increase in Petrobras workers’ deaths in the last two months, from 20 deaths as of April 5 to 45 deaths by June 15. A 27 percent increase in total infections among these workers was registered over this same period. So far, of the 46,416 direct workers at Petrobras, 7,205 (15.5 percent) have been infected with the virus, a proportion above the national average (approximately 8 percent).

Striking workers at the Landulpho Alves refinery (RLAM) in Bahia, Brazil (Twitter)

This survey, however, does not even include outsourced workers, which in many Petrobras units correspond to half or even most of the workforce. The government’s records also do not disclose information per production unit, which makes it difficult for workers to check and control this data. According to the accounting of the Unified Federation of Oil Workers (FUP), there are actually more than 80 workers, who have died of COVID-19 at Petrobras since the beginning of the pandemic.

Even in the face of rising infection and death rates, the company is preparing a return to on-site work for the approximately 20,000 employees of its administrative sector, who have been working remotely. The return is planned to happen gradually starting in July, coinciding with the peak of a third wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Brazil, according to leading scientists’ projections.

In addition to the exposure of workers to infections and the lack of data on the real impact of the pandemic, Petrobras is being accused of promoting quack treatments for COVID-19, recommending drugs such as Ivermectin to its employees. The FUP says it has received reports from workers denouncing this practice and has lodged an official complaint through one of its local unions, the Sindipetro of Northern Rio de Janeiro, presenting as proof a prescription given to a worker.

The company denied having given this guidance, but in a press report it defended the “autonomy” of the doctors and did not condemn the prescription of the medicine, which, besides being ineffective for COVID-19, poses serious risks to those taking it. Doctors from COVID-19 treatment centers in São Paulo, such as the Clínicas and Emilio Ribas hospitals, warned about the side effects of drugs such as Ivermectin, which are jeopardizing the treatment of severely ill patients.

In March, the WHO had reiterated its recommendation “not to use Ivermectin for patients with COVID-19, regardless of the level of severity, or duration of symptoms.”

Despite all these warnings, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro encourages the use of Ivermectin, as well as Azithromycin and Hydroxychloroquine, all of which are ineffective against the virus. With propaganda that these drugs offer an “early treatment” to COVID-19, Bolsonaro is leading doctors and companies across the country to adopt what he calls the “COVID kit.”

A BBC News Brazil report, published in March, reported that at least four companies have distributed the “COVID kit” to their employees in São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina. The case of Petrobras, a global and government-run company, is even more grotesque and alarming.

In line with the Brazilian ruling class as a whole, Petrobras has tried to absolve itself of responsibility for the increase in infections and deaths and has blamed the workers themselves for getting sick. “Even with all the prevention protocols adopted in the units and recommendations for individual care regularly issued by the company, employees are subject to risks also during transportation, personal routines, time off or even in telecommuting,” the company declared.

Besides the risk of death from COVID-19 in Petrobras units, the privatization process of the state-owned company is worsening the conditions of workers. According to Sindipetro of São Paulo’s Coast, since 2019, 37,610 jobs have been ended at Petrobras and its subsidiaries, which include the dismissal of 14,311 of its own workers and 23,299 outsourced workers. The workforce cuts have meant longer work shifts, increasing the exposure of workers to infections and the risk of accidents.

In March, workers at Petrobras’s RLAM and Regap units went on strike in response to the sale of these refineries and the outbreaks of COVID-19 in the plants. In late May, workers at three Petrobras Biofuels (Pbio) units went on a two-week strike against the privatization.

Although these strikes developed in Petrobras units across the country, with stoppages and protests in several other units, they have been systematically divided and isolated by the trade unions, even as struggles against infections in the workplaces were developing in different sections of the working class, such as teachers and transport workers.

Anti-China legislation on Taiwan introduced in US House of Representatives

Ben McGrath

A “Taiwan Peace and Stability Act” was tabled in the United States House of Representatives on June 17 in the latest bipartisan effort to intensify pressure on Beijing over the self-ruled island of Taiwan. The purpose is to further challenge the “One China” policy and deepen preparations for war against the mainland.

An F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet is seen on the deck of the U.S. Navy USS Ronald Reagan in the South China Sea, 2018 (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

The leading Democrat and Republican on the Asia subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ami Bera and Steve Chabot, respectively, introduced the legislation, which is of a piece with the anti-China bill that recently passed the Senate with bipartisan backing.

The latest bill states: “In order to ensure the longevity of US policy and preserve the ability of the people of Taiwan to determine their future independently, it is necessary to reinforce Taiwan’s diplomatic, economic, and physical space.” Behind this double-speak, Washington intends to strengthen Taiwan in order to maintain its separation from China.

Taiwan is considered a crucial aspect of Washington’s future war plans against the mainland. Earlier this year, the Pentagon called for the stationing of offensive missiles on Taiwan and other nearby islands.

The legislation accuses Beijing of “coerc[ing] actors into adhering to its ‘One-China Principle.’” It cites countries that have broken off relations with Taipei in favor of Beijing since 2016 as supposed evidence of this “coercion.”

Without openly rejecting it, the bill represents a challenge to the legitimacy of the “One China” policy, which has governed cross-strait relations since Washington formally cut ties with Taipei in 1979 and acknowledged Beijing as the government of all of China.

Last August, the Trump administration announced “significant adjustments” to Washington’s interpretation of the “One China” policy. Since taking office, President Joe Biden, backed by the Democratic and Republican Parties, has continued where the Trump White House left off, taking further steps that chip away at the “One China” policy.

Three sections of the bill call for the US to deepen its involvement with Taiwan. The first instructs the US State Department to develop strategies “to advance Taiwan’s meaningful participation in a prioritized set of international organizations.” In particular, it cites the World Health Organization (WHO) as a potential body for furthering Taiwan’s involvement on the international stage.

Both Washington and Taipei have used the lie that Taiwan warned of the dangers of COVID-19 in a December 31, 2019 email to the WHO, but was ignored, while Beijing attempted to cover up what was taking place. The mention of the WHO is also meant to further the spurious claims that China is responsible for the global pandemic.

The second section calls for developing economic relations with Taiwan, no doubt to take advantage of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, a key element of Washington’s war plans. The US hopes to maintain control of the supply of semiconductors for its own military and economic ends. The push is also aimed at pressuring Taiwanese companies to cut ties with the Chinese mainland, an aspect of the economic warfare being carried out, first by Trump and now Biden.

The third section calls for deepening US military relations with Taiwan. It accuses Beijing of “attempts to intimidate Taiwan, including through high rates of PRC [People’s Republic of China] sorties into air space near Taiwan, and PRC amphibious assault exercises near Taiwan.” It states that the government should evaluate “the feasibility of expanding coordination with US allies and partners to enhance deterrence over a cross-Strait conflict.”

This is a call for Washington to further develop war plans with allies in the region, such as Japan, which occupied Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. In addition, the section calls for increasing Taiwan’s ability to wage “asymmetric” warfare against Beijing.

Washington’s accusations against Beijing are entirely hypocritical. Since the Obama administration’s 2011 announcement of its “pivot to Asia,” successive administrations in Washington have pursued military build-ups, regular naval drills in the South China Sea, and “freedom of navigation” operations to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims.

At the end of Trump’s term, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted all restrictions on meetings between US and Taiwanese officials, a policy that Biden has continued. The current administration has demonized China with phony claims of genocide in Xinjiang, accused Beijing of creating the COVID-19 virus in a Wuhan laboratory, and sent naval vessels through the narrow Taiwan Strait at a record rate.

Under Biden, the United States sent its Palau ambassador to Taiwan, the first time a sitting ambassador has visited the island since 1979. Most recently, three senators visited Taiwan aboard a US military aircraft to announce the donation of COVID-19 vaccines to the island after Taipei accused Beijing, without evidence, of blocking vaccine purchases.

Biden’s nomination for assistant secretary of state for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink suggested during a hearing on June 15 that Washington could consider abandoning the “One China” policy. He stated: “I do think that maintenance of that status quo and of that security is a dynamic situation. As the threat from [China] grows, as Beijing’s aggressive and bullying behavior vis-à-vis Taiwan grows, I think that our response has to be calibrated as well.”

This supposed “bullying” largely consists of Beijing’s regular sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). However, Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, the former chief of the general staff of Taiwan’s military, stated earlier this year that these flights were “more about political messaging than about military operational significance.” An ADIZ is declared unilaterally by governments, without basis in international law, and does not constitute territorial air space.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stated during a Congressional hearing on June 17 that, despite recent claims China would soon invade Taiwan, “there’s little intent right now, or motivation, to do it militarily.” He added: “I think China has a ways to go to develop the actual, no-kidding capability to conduct military operations to seize through military means the entire island of Taiwan, if they wanted to do that.”

Milley’s comments are not a call for defusing tensions with China, but the very opposite. Believing it has the upper hand at the moment, US imperialism is provocatively ramping up tensions with Beijing, while intensifying efforts to hit China economically.

Credit Suisse report reveals vast increase in global wealth inequality amid pandemic in 2020

Kevin Reed

The Research Institute of Credit Suisse published its “Global Wealth Report 2021” on Tuesday, showing a substantial worldwide increase in wealth inequality during 2020. The report states, “The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread rises in wealth inequality in 2020.”

The report admits that this growth in the wealth gap—amid the devastating impact of the public health and economic crisis of 2020—is rooted in the “nature of the policy response” by governments and central banks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Global Wealth Pyramid 2020 (Credit: Credit Suisse Research Institute Global Wealth Report 2020)

Summarizing the impact of these polices, the report states, “Wealth creation in 2020 was largely immune to the challenges facing the world due to the actions taken by governments and central banks to mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19.”

The report goes on to state that the initial widespread negative impact on GDP and share prices in February and March 2020 was overcome with central bank interest rate reductions and “prompt action” by governments to help financial markets regain confidence and equity markets to reverse their losses by June.

Credit Suisse is a global investment bank and financial services firm based in Zurich, which has offices in every major financial center around the world. The organization specializes in “wealth management” services and caters to the needs of the capitalist elite and this, its twelfth annual report, is written to provide strategic advice to its customers.

While the writers and editors do their best not to point directly to the class struggle implications of the data contained in their report, an element of concern is evident about stating too bluntly what has really been going on over the past year.

On the one hand, they state that “the aggregate wealth of those at the top of the wealth pyramid and the resulting rise in the numbers of millionaires and UHNW [ultra-high net worth] individuals ... would be expected to raise wealth inequality.”

Meanwhile, they hint at the difference between the vast increase in the wealth of the rich and the experiences of the working class—the economic depression that destroyed tens of millions of jobs and forced millions into poverty, homelessness and hunger—by writing, “The contrast between what has happened to household wealth and what is happening in the wider economy can never have been more stark.”

Significantly, the report claims that the rise of the stock market and inflation of asset values of the rich “in the second half of 2020 was unforeseen.” The report goes, “These asset price increases have led to major gains in household wealth throughout the world. The net result was that USD 28.7 trillion was added to global household wealth during the year.”

Thus, the Credit Suisse Research Institute reporters do not mention that the central banks have been flooding the financial markets with cash that has funneled enormous sums in one form or another into the “household wealth” of the richest people on the planet. In the US, the Federal Reserve bank has been buying assets at a rate of $120 billion per month.

The report defines net worth or household wealth as “the value of financial assets plus real assets (principally housing) owned by households, minus their debts. This corresponds to the balance sheet that a household might draw up, listing the items which are owned, and their net value if sold.”

Among the key statistics reported by Credit Suisse is that the number of millionaires increased worldwide by 5.2 million to a total of 56.1 individuals who possess 45.8 percent of the world’s wealth. With one-third of these new millionaires (1.7 million) residing in the US, 2020 was the first year that more than one percent of the world’s adults were “dollar millionaires.”

A measure of the scale of the increase in economic inequality last year is shown in the statistics presented on the growth in the number and personal assets of what are known as ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWI), that is individuals with net worth above $50 million. The report says there were 215,030 UHNWIs worldwide in 2020, an increase of 41,410 people, or 23.9 percent, over 2019. More than half of the increase, 21,313 people, were in the US.

Within the UHNWI category are subgroups: 68,010 adults with wealth above $100 million and 5,332 with wealth above $500 million.

Reviewing the bottom wealth quartile, the report states without comment, “We estimate that 2.9 billion individuals—55 percent of all adults in the world—had wealth below USD 10,000 in 2020.”

Analyzing the upper-middle segment, those with wealth between $100,000 to $1 million, the report states this group has “expanded significantly this century, from 208 million to 583 million. They currently own net assets totaling USD 163.9 trillion, or 39.1 percent of global wealth, which is nearly four times their share of the adult population.”

This group plus those in the top quartile, with wealth over $1 million, represent 12.2 percent of the world’s population and they own a staggering 84.9 percent of the world’s total wealth or approximately $355.5 trillion.

The report contains statistics on the distribution of the wealth accumulation of the super-rich in different regions of the world that also highlight the socio-economic inequality within the global capitalist system. For example, while the report hails the worldwide average wealth increase per adult of 6 percent, it glosses over the fact that Africa, India and Latin America experienced a decline in average wealth of -2.1 percent, -6.1 percent and -11.4 percent respectively. The indebtedness of these regions also grew significantly during 2020.

By far the largest wealth accumulation and expansion of wealthy individuals took place in the US. As mentioned above, the US had 39 percent of the world’s new millionaires (1.7 million of the total of 5.2 million) in 2020. There is a class significance to the fact that the US also stands out as the country with the largest death toll from the coronavirus last year. Given that as of December 31, 2020 there were approximately 364,000 coronavirus deaths in the US, this means that for each new millionaire in 2020 there were five people who died of COVID-19 that year.