India’s Farmers and the Neoliberal Playbook

Colin Todhunter

Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who sells it. This model involves highly processed food adulterated with chemical inputs ending up in large near-monopoly supermarket chains or fast-food outlets that rely on industrial-scale farming.

While the brands lining the shelves of giant retail outlets seem vast, a handful of food companies own these brands which, in turn, rely on a relatively narrow range of produce for ingredients. At the same time, this illusion of choice often comes at the expense of food security in poorer countries that were compelled to restructure their agriculture to facilitate agro-exports courtesy of the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and global agribusiness interests.

In Mexico, transnational food retail and processing companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.

Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition in 2012. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of overweight women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 25 to 35 per cent and the number of obese women in this age group increased from 9 to 37 per cent. Some 29 per cent of Mexican children between the ages of 5 and 11 were found to be overweight, as were 35 per cent of the youngsters between 11 and 19, while one in ten school age children experienced anaemia.

Former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, concludes that trade policies had favoured a greater reliance on heavily processed and refined foods with a long shelf life rather than on the consumption of fresh and more perishable foods, particularly fruit and vegetables. He added that the overweight and obesity emergency that Mexico faces could have been avoided.

In 2015, the non-profit organisation GRAIN reported that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to the direct investment in food processing and a change in Mexico’s retail structure (towards supermarkets and convenience stores) as well as the emergence of global agribusiness and transnational food companies in the country.

NAFTA eliminated rules preventing foreign investors from owning more than 49 per cent of a company. It also prohibited minimum amounts of domestic content in production and increased rights for foreign investors to retain profits and returns from initial investments. By 1999, US companies had invested 5.3 billion dollars in Mexico’s food processing industry, a 25-fold increase in just 12 years.

US food corporations began to colonise the dominant food distribution networks of small-scale vendors, known as tiendas (corner shops). This helped spread nutritionally poor food as they allowed these corporations to sell and promote their foods to poorer populations in small towns and communities. By 2012, retail chains had displaced tiendas as Mexico’s main source of food sales.

In Mexico, the loss of food sovereignty induced catastrophic changes to the nation’s diet and many small-scale farmers lost their livelihoods, which was accelerated by the dumping of surplus commodities (produced at below the cost of production due to subsidies) from the US. NAFTA rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small business people into bankruptcy, leading to the flight of millions of immigrant workers.

Warning for India

What happened in Mexico should serve as a warning as Indian farmers continue their protest against three recent farm bills that are designed to fully corporatize the agrifood sector through contract farming, the massive roll-back of public sector support systems, a reliance on imports (boosted by a future US trade deal) and the acceleration of large-scale (online) retail.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

And if you want to know the eventual fate of India’s farmers, look no further than the 1990s when the IMF and World Bank advised India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture in return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time.

India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops for export to earn foreign exchange. Part of the strategy would also involve changing land laws so that land could be sold and amalgamated for industrial-scale farming.

The plan was for foreign corporations to capture the sector, with the aforementioned policies having effectively weakened or displaced independent cultivators.

To date, this process has been slow but the recent legislation could finally deliver a knock-out blow to tens of millions of farmers and give what the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations have wanted all along. It will also serve the retail/agribusiness/logistics interests of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and its sixth richest, Gautam Adani.

During their ongoing protests, farmers have been teargassed, smeared and beaten. Journalist Satya Sagar notes that government advisors fear that seeming to appear weak with the agitating farmers would not sit well with foreign agrifood investors and could stop the flow of big money into the sector – and the economy as a whole.

And it is indeed ‘big’ money. Facebook invested 5.5 billion dollars last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested 4.5 billion dollars. Currently, Amazon and Flipkart (Walmart has an 81% stake) together control over 60% of the country’s overall e-commerce market. These and other international investors have a great deal to lose if the recent farm legislation is repealed. So does the Indian government.

Since the 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration.

Little wonder the government needs to be seen as acting ‘tough’ on protesting farmers because now, more than ever, attracting and retaining foreign reserves will be required to purchase food on the international market once India surrenders responsibility for its food policy to private players by eliminating its buffer stocks.

The plan to radically restructure agrifood in the country is being sold to the public under the guise of ‘modernising’ the sector. And this is to be carried out by self-proclaimed ‘wealth creators’ like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Ambani who are highly experienced at creating wealth – for themselves.

According to the recent Oxfam report ‘The Inequality Virus’, Mukesh Ambani doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. The coronavirus-related lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent, while 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

Prior to the lockdown, Oxfam reported that 73 per cent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent, while 670 million Indians, the poorest half of the population, saw only a 1 per cent increase in their wealth.

Moreover, the fortunes of India’s billionaires increased by almost 10 times over a decade and their total wealth was higher than the entire Union budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19.

It is clear who these ‘wealth creators’ create wealth for. On the People’s Review site, Tanmoy Ibrahim writes a piece on India’s billionaire class, with a strong focus on Ambani and Adani. By outlining the nature of crony capitalism in India, it is clear that Modi’s ‘wealth creators’ are given carte blanche to plunder the public purse, people and the environment, while real wealth creators – not least the farmers – are fighting for existence.

The current struggle should not be regarded as a battle between the government and farmers. If what happened in Mexico is anything to go by, the outcome will adversely affect the entire nation in terms of the further deterioration of public health and the loss of livelihoods.

Consider that rates of obesity in India have already tripled in the last two decades and the nation is fast becoming the diabetes and heart disease capital of the world. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), between 2005 and 2015 the number of obese people doubled, even though one in five children in the 5-9 year age group were found to be stunted.

This will be just part of the cost of handing over the sector to billionaire (comprador) capitalists Mukesh Ambani and Gautum Adani and Jeff Bezos (world’s richest person), Mark Zukerberg (world’s fourth richest person), the Cargill business family (14 billionaires) and the Walmart business family (richest in the US).

These individuals are poised to siphon off the wealth of India’s agrifood sector while denying the livelihoods of many millions of small-scale farmers and local mom and pop retailers while undermining the health of the nation.

Toxic Corporations Are Destroying the Planet’s Soil

Colin Todhunter

A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health.

The study is discussed by two of the report’s authors, Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone, in a recent article appearing on the Scientific American website. The authors state that the findings should bring about immediate changes in how regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the USA.

Conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the University of Maryland, the research looked at almost 400 published studies that together had carried out more than 2800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. The review encompassed 275 unique species or types of soil organisms and 284 different pesticides or pesticide mixtures.

Pesticides were found to harm organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils in over 70 per cent of cases. But Donley and Gunstone say this type of harm is not considered in the EPA’s safety reviews, which ignore pesticide harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species. The EPA uses a single test species to estimate risk to all soil organisms, the European honeybee, which spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes. But 50-100 per cent of all pesticides end up in soil.

The researchers conclude that the ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive agriculture and pollution are major driving factors in the decline of soil organisms. By carrying out wholly inadequate reviews, the regulatory system serves to protect the pesticide industry.

The study comes in the wake of other recent findings that indicate high levels of the weedkiller chemical glyphosate and its toxic breakdown product AMPA have been found in topsoil samples from no-till fields in Brazil.

Writing on the GMWatch website, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews note that, despite this, the agrochemical companies seeking the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate by the European Union in 2022 are saying that one of the greatest benefits of glyphosate is its ability to foster healthier soils by reducing the need for tillage (or ploughing).

This in itself is misleading because farmers are resorting to ploughing given increasing weed resistance to glyphosate and organic agriculture also incorporates no till methods. At the same time, proponents of glyphosate conveniently ignore or deny its toxicity to soils, water, humans and wildlife. With that in mind, it is noteworthy that GMWatch also refers to another recent study which says that glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil.

The new study, ‘Pesticides in a case study on no-tillage farming systems and surrounding forest patches in Brazil’ in the journal Scientific Reports, leads the researchers to conclude that glyphosate-contaminated soil can adversely impact food quality and human health and ecological processes for ecosystem services maintenance. They argue that glyphosate and AMPA presence in soil may promote toxicity to key species for biodiversity conservation, which are fundamental for maintaining functioning ecological systems.

These studies reiterate the need to shift away from increasingly discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology and practices. This chemical-intensive model has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health.

If we turn to India, for instance, that country is losing 5334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion and degradation, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of synthetic agrochemicals. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is becoming deficient in nutrients and fertility.

India is not unique in this respect. Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization stated back in 2014 that if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years. She noted that about a third of the world’s soil had already been degraded. There is general agreement that chemical-heavy farming techniques are a major cause.

It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic agrochemicals as part of a model of chemical-dependent farming, you harm essential micro-organisms and end up feeding soil a limited doughnut diet of toxic inputs.

Armed with their multi-billion-dollar money-spinning synthetic biocides, this is what the agrochemical companies have been doing for decades. In their arrogance, these companies claim to have knowledge that they do not possess and then attempt to get the public and co-opted agencies and politicians to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its bought-and-paid-for scientific priesthood.

The damaging impacts of their products on health and the environment have been widely reported for decades, starting with Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking 1962 book Silent Spring.

These latest studies underscore the need to shift towards organic farming and agroecology and invest in indigenous models of agriculture – as has been consistently advocated by various high-level international agencies, not least the United Nations, and numerous official reports.

Russian forces fire warning shots at UK destroyer HMS Defender over territorial encroachment in Black Sea

Robert Stevens

A Russian patrol ship fired a warning shot yesterday at the British destroyer HMS Defender off the coast of Crimea. This was followed by the dropping of high-explosive OFAB-250s fragmentation bombs in the path of the UK vessel.

According to Russia’s defence ministry, HMS Defender made a 3-kilometre incursion into Russia's territorial waters off Cape Fiolent in the south of Crimea. Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following a US-backed far-right coup in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

The incident began with a major military and political provocation by the UK. HMS Defender had just left Odessa in southern Ukraine and was carrying out exercises with a Royal Netherlands Navy Frigate, HNLMS Evertsen. The Financial Times reported Wednesday, “British and Ukrainian officials met on board the destroyer on Tuesday to agree a defence deal in which the UK will help boost Kyiv’s naval capabilities. The co-operation will include training of Ukrainian navy personnel, the creation of new naval bases, and the purchase of two Sandown class minehunters.”

The Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender leaves the naval base in Portsmouth harbour for exercises in Scotland, prior to deployment to the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Indo-Pacific region as part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group 21. May 1, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

A statement from Russian ministry's TV channel Zvezda said of the incident, “The Black Sea Fleet together with the FSB (security service) stopped a violation of the Russian border by a British destroyer, Defender.

“Today, at 11:52, the Defender crossed the state border of Russia in the northwestern part of the Black Sea. It entered the territorial waters for three kilometres, in the area of Cape Fiolent…

“At 12:06 and 12:08, a Russian border patrol ship fired a warning shot. At 12:19, the Su-24M aircraft of the Black Sea Fleet performed a warning bombing, dropping 4 OFAB-250 bombs on the course of the destroyer.”

“At 12:23 the British destroyer left the borders of the territorial sea of Russia.”

Clearly caught by surprise at Russia’s swift and aggressive response, the MoD stated, “The Royal Navy ship is conducting innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law. We believe the Russians were undertaking a gunnery exercise in the Black Sea and provided the maritime community with prior-warning of their activity. No shots were directed at HMS Defender and we do not recognise the claim that bombs were dropped in her path.”

This denial was refuted by BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale, speaking from aboard HMS Defender, who made a statement uploaded onto the BBC’s news site as a sound file, and in comments included in an accompanying news update.

Beale wrote, “Two Russian coastguard ships that were shadowing the Royal Navy warship [HMS Defender], tried to force it to alter course. At one stage one of the Russian vessels closed in to about 100m (328ft).

“Increasingly hostile warnings were issued over the radio—including one that said ‘if you don't change course I'll fire’…”

While speaking on a recording just 99 seconds long, the roaring jet engines of a Russian air force jet can be heard at 23 seconds in, for more than 10 seconds—forcing Beale to exclaim “that is another Russian aircraft buzzing the warship, yeah, in the Black Sea. There have been at times more than 20 aircraft above the warship. And there have been warning from Russia coastguard vessels and indeed we have heard shots fired. We believe they were out of range”.

A section of Beale’s report that was taken down within minutes of being published on the BBC site reveals how tense the situation was: “At one stage they [sailors onboard HMS Defender] did put on anti-flash masks to protect their faces, just in case there was going to be an exchange of fire… They didn't think that would happen and it did not happen. But the Russian jets have taken an interest in this and they had warned the ship not to go into Crimean territorial waters, claiming that they are Russian waters.”

That events took this course was no accident given the provocative mission being carried out by the UK in the region. As Beale notes in his report, “The crew were already at action stations as they approached the southern tip of Russian occupied Crimea. Weapons systems on board the Royal Navy destroyer had already been loaded. This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia.”

The incident with HMS Defender must be seen in the context of a ramping up of militarism by British imperialism and its NATO partners, with Moscow and China in their crosshairs.

A Type 45 destroyer primarily designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare, HMS Defender is one of the several warships—alongside warplanes, submarines, UK and US soldiers and sailors—that are forming a “ring of steel” around one of the UK’s two new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is on its maiden operational deployment.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier with seven helicopters visible onboard at Portsmouth harbour. May 1, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

Carrier Strike Group 21 (CSG21) left the UK last month on a six-month trip to the Indo Pacific region. CSG21 was described by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Tuesday, just 24 hours before the Black Sea incident, as “the largest concentration of maritime and air power to leave the UK in a generation…”

Eighteen warplanes, including UK and US F35B jets, “carried out operational sorties for the first time from HMS Queen Elizabeth in support of Operation Shader and US Operation Inherent Resolve”.

The bellicose statement continued, “For the task group, which has spent previous weeks in the Mediterranean working with NATO allies and partners, it marks a change of emphasis. From exercises and international engagements, the Carrier Strike Group is now delivering its full might of naval and air power…”

Operation Inherent Resolve and Operation Shader are code names for military interventions by the US and Britain, set up in 2014 ostensibly to target Islamic State, which mainly consist of constant air strikes and hostile surveillance missions in a host of countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Lebanon.

The MoD statement quoted Captain James Blackmore, Commander of the Carrier Air Wing, who pointed to the significance of Royal Navy-led bombing operations: “this time” UK warplanes were “flying from an aircraft carrier at sea, which marks the Royal Navy’s return to maritime strike operations for the first time since the Libya campaign a decade ago.”

The provocation in the Black Sea, as with all CSG21 operations, could not proceed without the say-so of the United States. Blackmore pointed to the integral role of US forces in the military strikes: “This is also notable as the first combat mission flown by US aircraft from a foreign carrier since HMS Victorious in the South Pacific in 1943. The level of integration between Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and US Marine Corps is truly seamless, and testament to how close we’ve become since we first embarked together last October.”

The FT ’s report of the Black Sea exchange quoted Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute: “Moscow ‘was trying to show it’s not going to be pushed around’ by ‘provocative’ actions such as HMS Defender’s voyage. ‘The Brits are often in this role as a proxy — they [the Russians] don’t want to be too aggressive against the Americans […] so there is a sense you do it against the Brits because it’s not quite as dangerous,’ he said.”

The MoD announced in May that CSG21 “will participate in NATO exercises such as Exercise Steadfast Defender and provide support to NATO Operation Sea Guardian and maritime security operations in the Black Sea.”

Shortly before the Carrier Strike Group left the UK, MoD sources revealed that HMS Defender would “peel off” in the Mediterranean from the main force and head through the Bosphorus “to carry out her own set of missions in the Black Sea”.

On June 10, the Royal Navy said that HMS Defender would be “heading to the Black Sea after a stop in Istanbul.” Over several weeks, it had “completed intensive training and worked on Operation Sea Guardian, NATO’s mission in the Mediterranean to deter and counter terrorism.”

NATO’s anti-Russian operations will be intensified in the days ahead, with its annual Sea Breeze military exercises taking place in the Black Sea region from June 28 to July 10.

Announcing the operation, the US Embassy in Ukraine said, “This year’s iteration involves the largest number of participating nations in the exercise’s history, including 32 countries from six continents, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operation and dive teams.” It would “focus on multiple warfare areas including amphibious warfare, land maneuvre warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defense, special operations integration, anti-submarine warfare, and search and rescue operations.”

Wednesday’s incident in the Black Sea is a stark indication of how the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the interests of competing imperialist powers have transformed the entire region into a powder keg that could ignite a worldwide conflagration. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Russia firing on the UK warship was “A clear proof of Ukraine's position: Russia’s aggressive and provocative actions in the Black and Azov seas, its occupation & militarization of Crimea pose a lasting threat to Ukraine and allies. We need a new quality of cooperation between Ukraine & NATO allies in the Black Sea.”

Migrant children speak of horrifying conditions in detention centers set up by the Biden administration

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

Testimonials filed in a California federal court this week reveal the horrific conditions faced by migrant children who are being held in federal detention centers, euphemistically categorized as “emergency shelters,” set up by the Biden administration. The conditions described in the 17 testimonials from children aged nine to 17, largely from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, include being given spoiled food, lack of drinking water and clean clothes, overcrowding, inability to contact family members and severe mental health issues.

Young unaccompanied migrants, from ages 3 to 9, watch television inside a playpen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, Pool, File)

The testimonials were gathered by attorneys with the Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law and the National Center for Youth Law, who are representing the children in the long-running Flores settlement, a court agreement setting bedrock standards of care for children in federal custody. Recorded between March and early June, these testimonials make it obvious that the Biden administration’s promises of a more humane approach to immigration remain mere rhetoric.

The situation described by the children in their accounts presents a grim picture of what it means to be a detained, unaccompanied minor under the Democratic Party’s watch.

A 13-year-old from Honduras, who was separated from her father while crossing into the US, has been held in Fort Bliss, Texas, for over two months. She told attorneys that she had problems sleeping in her overcrowded tent because the bright lights were on all night. But it was the food that was an even bigger issue. Much of it was inedible, the hamburger they had been served the night before had a distinct odor that made it impossible for them to eat, and one of her friends had been served some chicken that still had feathers on it. “I really only eat popsicles and juice because that is the only food I can trust,” she said.

A 14-year-old from Guatemala, who is being held in a facility in Houston, spoke of the extreme heat in the tents that caused children to faint, the lack of clean drinking water and being forced to drink rancid milk when they ran out of water. A 17-year-old Guatemalan girl detained at Fort Bliss described sleeping in a large white tent with about three hundred girls, on cots stacked on top of each other. She said it was hard to sleep due to the rattling noise the tent’s metal beams made at night.

Many of the testimonies highlighted the impact of the situation on the metal health of the detainees. A teenager, who had been held in the Dallas, Texas, convention center, spoke of feeling “asphyxiated” in the overcrowded facility which held 2,600 children. The testimonial continues in a heartbreaking vein: “There is no one here I can talk to about my case. There’s also no one here I can talk to when I’m feeling sad. There’s no one here; I just talk to God. It helps me and I cry. It would help if I could have a Bible.” A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy, who has been held in a facility in Pecos, Texas, for over two months when his testimonial was collected, spoke of a sense of despair, “a lot of sadness” among the detainees: “Every day, I don’t have the desire to eat… I just want to lie down all the time.” In Fort Bliss, the teenagers spoke of being placed on suicide watch, and the fact that many of the detainees were so depressed that they used the plastic ID tags to cut themselves.

A CBS News report released Tuesday further reinforces the general horror of the situation in these emergency shelters. Focusing particularly on Fort Bliss, the report describes protests by detainees to demand improved living conditions, an aborted attempt by some to escape what even federal employees described as a “juvenile detention center,” and a level of distress so high as to require “bans on pencils, pens, scissors, nail clippers, and regular toothbrushes.” At one point, workers reported having been asked to “remove the metal nose clips from N95 face masks.”

The federal employees, who spoke to CBS on the condition of anonymity, described an abysmal pit of despair where panic attacks were par for the course, and children were held without any information about their fates or contact with family members. An employee who had volunteered at Fort Bliss stated that she saw girls having panic attacks that involved seizure-like symptoms: “Their bodies start to twist… They can’t take it anymore.” Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents the Texas district where Fort Bliss is located, told CBS News that the problem with the shelter has been chronic, and has not improved despite her raising these issues after each of her four visits to the center.

In response, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided a pro-forma and blatantly false PR statement deeming the detention camp a paradise for children: “From exercise classes to weekly meetings with case managers for every child at Fort Bliss, we’ve worked hard to provide access to recreation, counseling and behavioral health services and more… There is a library on site which kids are encouraged to visit anytime, weekly spiritual services and comment boxes in every residential space for kids to confidentially reach out with concerns.”

Emergency shelters like the one at Fort Bliss were set up by the Biden administration to supposedly alleviate the horrendous overcrowding in Border Patrol Facilities that was exposed in late-March. These shelters do not have state licenses that certify their ability to care for minors and their standards of care as well as ability to provide services such as case management is much lower than what is expected of normal HHS shelters. Over the past few months, the administration has prevented reporters from accessing any of these sites. The testimonials of the detainees and that of the concerned federal employees makes the reasons for this secrecy obvious.

COVID-19 outbreak worsens in Taiwan amid vaccine row

Jerry Zhang

As the COVID-19 disaster resurges on a global scale, Taiwan’s pandemic continues to grow, with more than 100 new cases every day for a month. In the data released on June 20, another 11 deaths were recorded and 109 confirmed infections were added.

Elderly Taiwanese people wait to receive shots of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

In a bid to downplay the crisis, the Taipei City government decided to end daily reports on pandemic data, causing popular concern. Mayor Ko Wen-Je announced that future reports will be “elastically organised.”

Responding to reporters’ questions, Ko Wen-Je said “the daily report data is meaningless.” He claimed that Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) would publish the number of diagnosed people every day, but the CDC reports often differ from the Taipei City data.

Ko Wen-Je’s statement exposed a fact: Taiwan’s pandemic emergency has been underway for more than a month, but the central and local governments have failed to provide a regular, synchronized way to report the data.

Taiwan’s government is trying to make people believe that “the epidemic has tended to stabilize, and everything is under control,” but the outbreak has exposed its boasts of being a “model of epidemic prevention.”

On May 27, the Taipei Doctors Union said in a Facebook post that with the deteriorating situation in Taipei, the medical system is highly stressed, with medical equipment and professionals extremely lacking.

On May 28, Singapore-based doctor Lim Wooi Tee, an epidemic prevention specialist, appeared on the Taiwanese talk show “50 Era Money” to call for a total lockdown on the island.

Nevertheless, the Taiwanese government has refused to raise lockdown measures to the highest stage. Instead it has extended third-stage measures to the end of June. Taiwan’s ruling elites and media have referred to a “Stay At Home” policy, but have ignored the difficulties suffered by the working class.

According to reports, 445 companies have imposed unpaid leave programs, and at least 4,125 workers have been furloughed without pay, while other workers have had their salaries slashed.

At the same time, the Taiwan Labour Department announced that logistics companies can invoke “disaster or emergency” provisions, requiring workers to do overtime and cancel rest days. Logistics companies can force employees to work more than 12 hours a day, and monthly overtime can exceed the previous 46-hour limit.

This high-intensity work, combined with a lack of protection, is fuelling anger over the use of the crisis to intensify the exploitation of workers.

Employees of many electronic equipment and semiconductor manufacturing plants located in the Hsinchu and Miaoli areas have been compelled to stay at their jobs, directly exposing them to the risk of infection. Many factories began to report large-scale infection clusters from the beginning of June. In the first half of the month, a total of 448 migrant workers in these factories have been infected, along with nearly 100 local workers.

The fact that so many migrant workers have been infected has exposed their poor working conditions and living environment. According to reports, their housing is very crowded and sanitary conditions are terrible. The Labour Department suggested that migrant workers’ agencies quarantine workers with “one person, one room,” but the agencies said this was impossible, or would be too costly, because their dormitories usually have 8 to 12 workers per room, or even more.

After the outbreaks, these factories did not immediately shut down, but only partially suspended production. Infections were reportedly brought under control in recent days, and Taiwanese media outlets have begun to promote bright prospects of rising orders for these factories in the second half of the year.

In addition to the big business-driven chaos of the government’s response to the pandemic, the island’s vaccine supply has been subordinated to the drive by the Biden administration in the United States to use Taiwan as a tool to confront Beijing.

The Taiwanese authorities rejected Beijing’s proposal for vaccine assistance a month ago, then immediately turned to the US and Japan for vaccines. On June 20, some 2.5 million doses of vaccine donated by the US government arrived, three times the amount previously promised.

President Tsai Ing-wen quickly thanked President Biden through Facebook, writing: “A friend in need is a friend indeed, the United States is a true friend of Taiwan.”

Japan, which occupied the island from 1895 to 1945, also stated recently that it would continue to provide assistance to Taiwan.

In response, Beijing and the media under its control has conducted a propaganda war on the “Taiwan vaccine safety issue,” directed against the AstraZeneca vaccine being used. Mirroring the attacks on Chinese vaccines carried out by the Western media, the Chinese media have exaggerated the side effects and health risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The pandemic in Taiwan shows that the capitalist government, like others around the world, has chosen to sacrifice the poor and the working class, and prioritize the profits of large enterprises. At the same time, the official response to the pandemic has been subjected to the agenda of the US and its allies in stepping up their offensive against China.

US seizes PressTV.com and 32 other Iranian media website domains

Kevin Reed

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed on Tuesday that the US had seized 33 websites affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three others operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (Hezbollah Brigades), an Iraqi Shia group supported by Iran.

In a press statement, the DoJ stated that the website domains—including the English and French language PressTV.com based in Teheran—were “in violation of US sanctions.” The statement said that the US Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC) had “designated IRTVU as a Specially Designated National (SDN)” during the Trump administration in October 2020 for “being owned or controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC).”

The DoJ also said that organizations labeled as SDNs are “prohibited from obtaining services, including website and domain services, in the United States without an OFAC license” and that IRTVU “and others like it” are not news organizations but are used to launch “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.” It also claimed that the 33 website addresses were owned in the US by IRTVU which “did not obtain a license from OFAC prior to utilizing the domain names.”

Notification on PressTV website that it has been seized by the US government

In the case of Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), the DoJ says that it was both designated an SDN by OFAC and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the Department of State in July 2009. It claims that KH has “committed, directed, supported or posed a significant risk of committing acts of violence against Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces” and also did not obtain an OFAC license prior to acquiring the domain names.

Whatever the public justifications provided for its aggressive act, the transparent political purpose of the Biden administration’s website seizures is the effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran amid ongoing negotiations in Vienna over the 2015 nuclear agreement and following the June 18 selection of the hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi as the next Iranian president.

Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday called the seizure an example of a “systematic effort to distort freedom of speech on a global level and silence independent voices in media.”

One of the seized sites, Al-Masirah, is not owned by Iran, but by Ansarullah, the movement of the Houthis in Yemen, a faction the US has claimed to be “proxies” of Iran. The news outlet is headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.

In a statement reported by RT, Al Masirah said it was “not surprised” by the seizure, as it “comes from those that have supervised the most heinous crimes against our people.” The website shutdown , “reveals, once again, the falsehood of the slogans of freedom of expression and all the other headlines promoted by the United States of America, including its inability to confront the truth,” the statement said.

Indicating the broader political aims of the website seizures, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US took over the domain name of the news website Palestine Today, which publishes the views of Gaza-based Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, redirecting the site to the same takedown notice.

Visits to the seized websites bring up a graphic with the headline, “This website has been seized” and a message that says the domain has been taken offline due to a “seizure warrant” issued under the authority of US code involving civil and criminal forfeiture and special powers given to the president during “unusual and extraordinary threat; declaration of national emergency.”

Some of the websites have been operating for many years, such as PressTV.com which was launched in 2007. The Wikipedia entry for the Iranian news and documentary network says that the annual budget of PressTV was $8.3 million and it had 400 employees worldwide as of 2009.

AP reported that most of the seized domains are .net, .com and .tv domains. The .net and .com domains are considered generic “top level domains” (TLDs) and they are controlled by the global provider of the domain name registry, Verisign, based in Reston, Virginia. The contract with Verisign is managed jointly by the US-based non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce.

The domain .tv is “owned by the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu but administered by the US company Verisign,” according to AP. Other news and media domains which are owned by Iran, such as the website PressTV.ir which also publishes in English, have not been affected by the seizures.

A similar action was taken by the DoJ under the Trump administration in November 2020, when the FBI seized 27 domain names it claimed were used by Iran’s IRGC to spread a “global covert influence campaign.” Coming from the number one worldwide purveyor of “influence campaigns” involving money, murder and military occupation, the unsubstantiated accusations against the Iran-based media outlets must be completely rejected as part of the preparations for further wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, the use by Biden of designations made by both the Obama and Trump administrations makes clear the fundamental agreement over foreign policy between the two parties of Wall Street and the US military-intelligence apparatus regardless of whether it is the Democrats or Republicans that control the executive or legislative branches of government.

Governments abandon COVID-19 restrictions as Delta variant surges worldwide

Andre Damon

Around the world, epidemiologists and public health experts are ringing the alarm about the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19, which is up to 60 percent more transmissible than the previously dominant variant and has shown indications of being partially resistant to some vaccines.

The “Delta variant is faster, it is fitter, it will pick off the more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants,” warned Dr. Michael Ryan at a World Health Organization press briefing last week. Jennifer Surtees, co-director of the University of Buffalo’s genome research hub, told the Financial Times, “The variant could really get transmitted like wildfire.”

The Delta variant, first detected in India, is responsible for a resurgence of the pandemic in the UK, where the number of daily new COVID-19 cases has grown five-fold over the past six weeks. The variant is also behind a sharp rise of cases and deaths in Portugal and Russia. On Tuesday, Russia recorded its highest daily death toll from the pandemic since early February. Other countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are also seeing a rise in cases due to the new variant.

Passengers board a Missouri River Runner Amtrak train in Lee's Summit, Missouri as the state is seeing an alarming rise in cases because of a combination of the fast-spreading delta variant and stubborn resistance among many people to getting vaccinated. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

Other parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Latin America, are seeing a sharp rise in cases even before the more transmissible variant has been widely detected. In South Africa, daily new cases are again over 11,000 and are approaching the previous peak of 19,000 reached in early January. In Brazil, where more than 500,000 people have died, new cases are at near record levels, at close to 75,000 a day.

The variant also threatens to drive a new surge of the pandemic in the US, which continues to record 12,000 new cases every day and more than 300 deaths. Only 45.8 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, but in some states the vaccination rate is less than 35 percent.

In an ominous warning, epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding predicted that the Delta variant “will become [the] dominant #COVID19 strain within weeks” in the United Sates. He noted data from the Financial Times indicating that close to one-third of US cases are caused by the Delta variant, meaning that the share of cases attributable to the variant may have “doubled/tripled in 1 week!”

In Arkansas, where vaccination rates are lowest in the United States, the Delta variant now accounts for 56 percent of all sequenced cases, according to the data presented by the Financial Times. The newspaper added that the variant is “estimated to account for 49 percent of new cases in Utah and 42 percent in Missouri,” which also have below-average vaccination rates.

Despite the danger posed by the new variant, states throughout the US are accelerating the removal of all restraints on the spread of the pandemic.

On Tuesday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer stood on the beach at Detroit’s Belle Isle park and declared that the state was ending all restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19.

“This is an exciting announcement that we are now dropping the epi[demic] orders,” Whitmer said. “Effective today, there is no more mask or gathering order. Effective today, there are no more capacity limits, indoors or outdoors. Effective today, our pure Michigan summer is back.”

Michigan’s announcement of the end of mask mandates and social distancing—together with similar announcements by New York and California—is part of a nationwide and global move by governments to end all measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 ahead of what scientists warn will be a massive resurgence of the disease.

Throughout Europe, governments are likewise eliminating restrictions on the spread of COVID-19, even as health officials warn that ending them will result in a new wave of cases.

Denmark is ending restrictions despite an increase in cases caused by the Delta variant and has dropped mask requirements in indoor settings. And last week the European Union dropped restrictions on non-essential travel from 14 countries, including the US, effectively allowing unrestricted tourist travel.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warned that the abandonment of measures to stop the spread of the pandemic could lead to a resurgence of cases on the scale of last year’s increase, despite the availability of vaccination. It declared:

Modeling scenarios indicate that any relaxation over the summer months of the stringency of nonpharmaceutical measures… could lead to a fast and significant increase in daily cases in all age groups, with an associated increase in hospitalizations and deaths, potentially reaching the same levels of the autumn of 2020 if no additional measures are taken.

This is an extraordinary warning. Despite the availability of vaccines, death rates could again reach the levels seen last fall as a predictable result of the policies being carried out by governments around the world.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is intransigent in its demands for the reopening of in-person instruction at K-12 schools. On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky told NBC that notwithstanding the rapid spread of the Delta variant, there would be no change in the administration’s plan to ensure the full reopening of schools. This is despite overwhelming evidence that the Delta variant disproportionately affects children.

Throughout the United States almost all masking and social distancing requirements have been eliminated since the CDC advised the abandonment of mandatory masking mandates. In response to the CDC’s announcement, workplace after workplace is dropping restrictions. The automaker Stellantis announced last week that it was abandoning temperature checks and other social distancing measures.

Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, “A growing number of states are slowing the pace of their reports on key pandemic data, including cases, deaths and hospitalizations.”

Nearly 4 million people have died from the coronavirus pandemic over the past year and a half. According to vastly undercounted official figures, daily new cases are at over 360,000 and daily deaths at nearly 8,000. In the United States alone, more than 600,000 people have died, based on official reports, though estimates of the true death toll rise to nearly one million.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, policy is driven by the demands of the financial oligarchy for the removal of all obstacles to profit-making and providing an uninterrupted supply of labor for capitalist exploitation. As a result of the policy of subordinating human lives to private profit, one million new millionaires have been created in the US over the past year, according to a recent report by Credit Suisse.

Workers must reject the ruling class campaign to abandon measures to contain the pandemic, the aim of which is the “normalization” of mass death to facilitate the enrichment of the financial oligarchy. With the spread of the Delta variant, it is all the more urgent for workers to oppose the abandonment of social distancing and mask wearing and the ongoing dismantling of the health care infrastructure for tracking and isolating COVID-19 cases.

The spread of the Delta variant demonstrates once again that the pandemic is a global crisis that requires a global response. Only 10 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated. In low-income countries, less than one percent of the population has even received one dose of the vaccine. The continued spread of the virus globally raises the danger of the further development of new variants that will inevitably infect other countries, sparking new outbreaks.

The inability of governments to contain the pandemic reflects the fundamental social dynamic of capitalism—the subordination of policy to the interests of the ruling class and national conflict. It is this social order that bears responsibility for the massive toll of the pandemic, which in the final analysis expresses the incompatibility of the needs of society with the profit system.

Biden funnels pandemic relief funds into strengthening the police

Trévon Austin

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced new measures to deal with what he called an epidemic of gun violence in America. Speaking of his plan from the White House, Biden said nothing about the social causes of the spike in gun violence being reported in many US cities, nor did he mention the continuing wave of police killings that take more than 1,000 lives every year in the United States.

Rather, he sought to establish his law-and-order credentials and dissociate his administration from calls to “defund the police” that emerged during the mass demonstrations last spring and summer against police violence, following the police murder of George Floyd.

Saying that now was “not a time to turn our backs on law enforcement,” Biden announced that states and localities could use any portion of the $350 billion in pandemic relief funds allotted them under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted in March to fund their police departments.

Biden

In a statement released by the Treasury Department, the administration announced that the money could be used to hire additional police officers to reach pre-pandemic staffing levels, and, in communities with high rates of gun violence, increase the size of their department beyond pre-pandemic levels. The money could also be used to establish community violence intervention programs and purchase new policing equipment.

Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, explained that the plan also included expanded deployment of the FBI and other federal police agencies to aid local police, as well as enhanced technology for tracking criminal activity, presumably a coded reference to surveillance activities.

Citing a 34-city study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, the Biden administration claims that homicides rose by 30 percent in large cities across the US in 2020. Additionally, the study says aggravated assaults and gun assaults rose last year by 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively. The White House further states that the nationwide homicide rate was 24 percent higher in the first months of 2021 than it was in the same period of 2020, and 49 percent higher than two years ago.

According to data compiled by CNN and Gunviolencearchive.org, there were 10 mass shootings across nine states that killed seven people and injured at least 45 others just last weekend.

Biden claimed in his speech that “the secondary consequences of the pandemic and the proliferation of illegal guns” were behind the increase in crime and said he expected crime rates to rise over the summer.

“Crime historically rises during the summer,” he said. “And as we emerge from this pandemic with the country opening back up again, the traditional summer spike may even be more pronounced than it usually would be.”

A fact sheet released by the White House on Wednesday listed five major components of the administration’s strategy to reduce gun violence and crime: stiffer enforcement of firearms restrictions, increased federal funds for police departments, community violence interventions, summer jobs for teenagers and young adults and programs to help former prisoners find employment and housing.

As Biden’s White House speech on Wednesday made clear, however, the program is really about vastly increasing funding for the police, with the rest more a matter of packaging than substance.

Noticeably absent from his remarks was any mention of police reform, which he claimed to champion during his 2020 election campaign, as millions of all races and ethnicities were demonstrating in US cities and cities around the world in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Nor did he speak of the massive job loss and growth of poverty for workers resulting from the pandemic, alongside a record rise in stock prices and wealth for the corporate-financial elite, fueled by trillions of dollars in bailouts and virtually free money provided by the Federal Reserve.

Over 600,000 Americans have died to date from COVID-19 due to the policy of subordinating human life to corporate profit pursued by Trump and continued in all essentials by Biden. This policy of social murder is being intensified with the lifting of all restrictions on the spread of the virus and the insistence on reopening the schools with in-person instruction, despite the rapid spread of the more virulent Delta variant of the virus and large parts of the country with low vaccination rates.

What is really driving Biden’s diversion of pandemic relief funds into the strengthening of the police is the mounting social and political crisis in the country and the growth of social opposition in the working class. The entire ruling class, complicit in a policy of mass death, is fearful of an eruption of working-class opposition that will escape the control of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the financial oligarchy.

The police are part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. They are the frontline force for suppressing the working class and upholding the system that exploits it. All factions of the ruling class and both of its parties seek to shore up the police to be thrown against a mass movement of workers.

In an op-ed piece published Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed the panicked concerns of the ruling class when he warned of the danger of “civil war.” Biden and the Democrats, he argued, had to make clear their support for the police. Under the headline “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police,” he warned of “volcanic forces … that could blow the lid off our democracy.”

In 1994, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Bill Clinton administration, Biden championed the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act, which established mandatory and draconian sentences for drug offenders, leading to a surge in incarceration of poor and minority workers and youth. The law also expanded the reach of the death penalty.

Biden drafted the Senate version of the law in collaboration with the National Association of Police Organizations. He warned at the time of “predators” who were “beyond the pale.”

Today he heads a right-wing administration in the midst of an unprecedented economic, social and political crisis of American capitalism. His attempt to outflank the Republicans on the issue of law and order and support for the police underscores the impossibility of reforming the police under capitalism, as well as the bankruptcy of politics based on the notion that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left and turned into an instrument for progressive change.