Lawyer denounces Brazilian company’s barbaric experiments with elderly during pandemic

Eduardo Parati

Testifying last week before the Brazilian Senate’s Commission of Inquiry (CPI) into the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the lawyer for doctors employed by the health care company Prevent Senior exposed a regime of coercion, intimidation and cover-up surrounding the prescription of so-called “COVID kits” that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of elderly patients.

Lawyer Bruna Morato at the Brazilian Senate (Credit: Roque de Sá/Agência Senado/FotosPublicas)

In August, a complaint signed by 15 Prevent Senior doctors made public that the company, which is an insurance and health care provider for more than 600,000 elderly people, had been functioning as a center of operations for fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in his campaign for “herd immunity” through mass infection.

Already in April 2020, a “pact” was made between Prevent Senior and the Bolsonaro administration to promote hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, both widely endorsed by the president as “early treatments” against COVID-19 that would facilitate reopening the economy. Prevent Senior’s COVID-19 medical protocols were created in consultation with close medical associates of the president.

Doctors revealed that company officials ordered the prescription of the scientifically discredited drugs as “COVID-19 kits” for symptomatic as well as hospitalized elderly patients without their relatives’ or their own knowledge. The doctors’ lawyer, Bruna Morato, said that this resulted in the deaths of hundreds. Meanwhile, for an unknown number of COVID-19 patients, the cause of death was changed after 10-14 days of hospitalization to falsely claim a higher rate of recovery by COVID-19 patients taking these medications.

Medical staff in hospitals were also ordered to prescribe the ineffective drugs for themselves in case they developed COVID-19 symptoms. During an interview with the whistleblowers on Saturday, the doctors recounted a routine in which they prescribed the “COVID-19 kits,” while having to tell their patients in secret not to take the medications. “They watched who was giving the prescriptions and who wasn’t. It was a situation in which they had control, so there was no autonomy,” a doctor said.

Prevent Senior’s CEO Eduardo Parrillo systematically enforced his reign of terror with the selection of “guardians” loyal to the company, assigned to supervise on-duty doctors and make sure that they were following the company’s orders.

Dr. Walter Correa de Souza, a former doctor at the company, stated, “As someone who worked as a military firefighter for many years, I’ve never seen a hierarchy so tightly enforced as the one inside the company. Not even in the Army.”

Intimidation tactics included hospital coordinators threatening to fire dissenting medical staff who refused to prescribe the quack cures. The lawyer, Morato, said that the company frequently fired personnel who disagreed with their measures.

Prevent Senior’s protocols were enforced as Bolsonaro pressured the health ministry to officially include chloroquine as a COVID-19 medication.

In May 2020, Bolsonaro appointed Army Gen. Eduardo Pazuello as his health minister. The general carried forward the president’s herd immunity campaign, promoting chloroquine. He later transformed Manaus into a death trap, in January 2021, by refusing to send oxygen supplies to the capital of Amazonas, despite several warnings.

The CPI session with lawyer Morato also revealed that a hospital director recommended and supervised cutting off oxygen supplies for patients hospitalized for more than 10 to 14 days, stating that “death is also a form of discharging [the patients].”

In March-April 2020, Prevent Senior’s directors coordinated a secret experiment on elderly patients, treating them like “human guinea pigs.” After they were secretly medicated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, their results were “rounded out to match Bolsonaro’s speech,” as ordered by Dr. Rodrigo Esper who was coordinating the macabre experiment.

Esper and his bosses published the “study” in a pre-print version after “rounding out” the data to falsely show that no one died as a result of taking the drugs. In reality, nine patients died who had taken the drugs, double the number of the group that had received a placebo.

Morato further made the connection between the company’s barbaric actions and the campaign supported by the ruling elite to reopen the economy, despite the predicted surge in cases and deaths. Referring to Bolsonaro’s closest medical associates, “completely aligned with the economic interests of the Finance Ministry,” Morato stated that “they referred to an ‘ideological alignment.’ in which the economy cannot stop, and so what they had to do is to give people hope. That hope had a name: hydroxychloroquine.”

These macabre experiments could not have been carried out without the support of the company’s CEOs, the Parrillo brothers, who implemented a company-wide system of coercion and intimidation to conduct the experiments on the elderly during the pandemic.

Morato and Prevent Senior doctors have also revealed that the “guardians” frequently sang a hymn with their hands on their chests during company events. The Parrillo brothers played their guitars as the guardians were ordered to sing.

The lyrics include the following passages: “We were born to live, Fighting until we die, ... And together we will win, With swords and cannons, We are the guardians.” The ritual is inspired by the Nazi Waffen SS, a paramilitary group selected for their “pure blood” to protect Hitler.

Morato stated that the SS-inspired motto, “obedience and loyalty,” was instituted in 2015, and is promoted to this day by company officials.

The Parrillo brothers are members of the rock band Doctor Pheabes, having opened for major rock bands such as Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones during music festivals like Lollapaloza and Rock in Rio. The band released its latest album in 2019 called “Army of the Sun,” a direct reference to the Waffen SS.

Such figures could only have felt free to carry out these abominable acts under conditions in which entire governments are ever more openly arguing for the deaths of millions to be treated as the new “normal” to which people will have to get accustomed during the pandemic.

If Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson in the UK could perform their mass experiments on millions to achieve herd immunity, it would appear only natural for such elements to do the same.

Since April 2020, when these barbaric acts were directly coordinated by Nazi sympathizers in the company’s management, governments throughout the world have defended ever more openly the reopening of schools and the economy, resulting in the deaths of millions globally.

On Tuesday, the mayors of Brazil’s two biggest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, announced the lifting of mask mandates in the coming weeks, justifying it on the grounds that vaccination rates would be high. The mayors’ criminal measures were declared as the Delta variant is ripping through the US and the UK, showing that even with most of the population having taken double shots, thousands of people will continue to die each week.

Following in Bolsonaro’s footsteps, since April of last year, state governors have given ever more open support to the government’s campaign of herd immunity through mass infection. The motto “the cure can’t be worse than the disease” was fully endorsed by the Workers Party (PT), with Governor Camilo Santana of Ceará being one of the first to reopen his state’s economy after the first wave, followed by his fellow PT governors in Bahia and Rio Grande do Norte.

That is the reason why, after the practices at Prevent Senior were made public, efforts were intensified to contain and cover up the episode. The São Paulo attorney general declared that “we must respond rapidly but judiciously to give a prompt response to the population but also not to harm the company.” He concluded by saying that “we have to be surgical.”

The investigations by the CPI in Brazil are an effort to shift the blame for the country’s 600,000 deaths from the entire political establishment, which carried out wholly inadequate mitigation measures while forcing children back into schools and workers back into factories in order to make profits for the rich.

Meanwhile, instead of issuing a public apology, the company is doubling down against the doctor whistleblowers, showing how confident company officials are that they will go unpunished. Prevent Senior is currently blaming the doctors for giving the prescriptions themselves, trying to turn reality on its head, and declared in September that the whistleblowers were the criminals for accessing patients’ records.

The fact that such individuals are given power on medical boards is an expression of a diseased social order, that puts profit above all else, including human life. That they are able to maintain political office is a sign that the ruling class is preparing to confront the mass struggles of the working class with openly anti-democratic and violent methods of repression.

Northern Ireland military amnesty more wide-ranging than in Pinochet's Chile

Steve James

The British government intends to stop all investigations into crimes carried out by British forces during and after Northern Ireland’s three decades of armed conflict known as “The Troubles”. The move, announced in a parliamentary command paper “Addressing the Legacy of Northern Ireland’s Past”, has been analysed by a team of Northern Ireland academics and deemed more wide-ranging than that offered to Chile’s military in 1978 under the bloody dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

A mural in Belfast commemorating the victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971, when 11 unarmed civilians were killed by British soldiers. (Credit: photograph of work by public artist R. Ó Murchú--Flickr PPCC Antifa)

The proposal amounts to an unconditional amnesty for British agents, informants and services personnel, as well as members of paramilitary groups, and seeks to draw a legal veil over the role of the British government and its intelligence services during the decades long dirty war in its oldest colony. Should the paper become law, the only people at risk of prosecution from further investigations are those seeking to place new information in the public domain.

Introducing the paper, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis indicated the government felt under pressure on the issue. “Time,” wrote Lewis, “is not on our side”.

“Without movement very soon, we... will fail to explain the complexity of the Troubles in an unbiased way and from all perspectives to the children of Northern Ireland today, condemning them to carry a partial view of the Troubles that acts as a barrier to community integration and understanding.”

Explaining the truth “in an unbiased way” for Lewis means doing the opposite. The problem for Lewis is that even the slow-moving legal investigations already in motion threaten to reveal far more than the British government can tolerate of its murderous and vile methods in Ireland. Any threat to prosecute individual soldiers brings with it the danger that the personnel in question can, in their defence, bring out the role of their military superiors and of the British government.

Paragraph 34 states explicitly that “the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] and Police Ombudsman Northern Ireland would be statutorily barred from investigating Troubles-related incidents.” This would “bring an immediate end to criminal investigations... and remove the prospect of prosecutions.”

In paragraph 37 the government claims it is “committed to providing greater certainty for all those directly affected by the Troubles and to enable all communities in Northern Ireland to move forward.” But the only certainty is that no-one will be held to account, and no-one blamed. Judicial reviews and civil cases would also be barred. These, according to the government, “involve an approach that can create obstacles to achieving wider reconciliation.”

In place of legal proceedings, the government proposes a new Information Recovery Body which would result in families and relatives being offered a file rather than a court case. The government claimed it was committed to “full disclosure” while taking steps to ensure “no inadvertent disclosure into the public domain of information that could threaten national security”, i.e., nothing that the comprises the intelligence services.

Over five decades ago, in 1969, the British Labour government despatched thousands of troops to reinforce the pro-British Ulster Unionist government in the six counties of Northern Ireland. The unionists were seeking to suppress a popular movement for civil rights. Since Ireland’s partition in 1921, Northern Ireland had been ruled as a semi-dictatorship through emergency powers, fascistic loyalist mob violence, elections gerrymandered to ensure unionist victory, and systematic discrimination against Catholics, particularly the working class, in all areas of social life.

Over the next three decades, the six partitioned counties were permanently occupied by tens of thousands of British troops and the border with the Republic of Ireland was heavily militarised, while British forces, backed up by Northern Ireland’s police and paramilitary state forces, conducted a “low intensity” dirty war against Irish republicans. A vast security, surveillance, infiltration, assassination, and propaganda operation was unleashed. In all, over the course of the Troubles, some 3,500 people were killed and 40,000 injured by British forces, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, loyalist and nationalist paramilitaries. Countless more suffered, and continue to suffer, lifelong physical and mental trauma.

The Troubles only came to an end in 1998 when the British government, seeking to unwind its military commitment and with Northern Ireland facing economic ruin and unable to attract investment, put together a deal backed by US and European capitalism to offer Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) political wing, a route to power-sharing devolved government along with their unionist opponents. The Northern Ireland Assembly has operated fitfully, with all its activities divided on sectarian lines, ever since.

Along with the 1998 Good Friday agreement came mechanisms to allow some legal investigations of both the unresolved killings and the numerous outrages of the Troubles. A number of high-profile public inquiries were set up, invariably delivering partial but nonetheless damaging reports.

A public inquiry was authorised in 1998, for example, into the January 30, 1972, Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in which 13 people died. The Saville inquiry finally reported in 2010, accusing British paratroopers of shooting unarmed civilians. One anonymous solder was eventually charged, but the case against “Soldier F” was dropped earlier this year.

Earlier this a year, a coroner’s inquest returned a verdict on the Ballymurphy massacre –the shooting of ten unarmed civilians in Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate in 1971 during Operation Demetrius—the internment without trial of hundreds suspected of membership of the IRA. The inquest verdict only came about due to relentless and determined campaigning by relatives and supporters of the murdered residents. Yet no one is to face charges.

An Historical Enquiry Team (HET), staffed with as many as 100 detectives, operated from 2006 to 2014 only to be wound up after an official inquiry conceded it was not investigating “state involvement cases” with the same rigour as others. The HET was replaced with a cheaper Legacy Investigation Branch which has convicted no-one since it started work. Half of the 19 cases it has investigated, of 953 outstanding, involve the military.

Some of the most sensitive cases are under investigation by Operation Kenova, the police investigation into the murderous activities of the British agent in the IRA’s security unit, known as “Stakeknife”, Freddie Scappaticci. The operation has expanded its activities to include over 200 cases. Headed by former police chief Jon Boutcher, Kenova has so far amassed over 50,000 pages of evidence covering 17 murders and 12 kidnappings. Over 300 people have been interviewed.

Since 2019 Boutcher has also been investigating the Glenanne gang of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force, which included members of the Northern Ireland security forces. The Glenanne gang is suspected of carrying out as many as 90 attacks, including those that cost the most lives of any single atrocity during the Troubles, the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

On May 17, 1974, in a coordinated attack, three bombs exploded in the packed streets of rush hour Dublin at two-minute intervals. A fourth device exploded in the town of Monaghan, near the border, one-and-a-half hours later, as a diversionary tactic for when the attackers would be crossing the border into the six counties. 33 people, as well as an unborn child, were killed in the attacks, while 258 were injured. No one has ever been charged for the atrocities and the British government has refused to release relevant documents.

Two years earlier, two British agents, Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, were involved in a British intelligence operation which exploded two bombs in Dublin simultaneously with a Dáil Éireann debate on criminalising Sinn Fein. Two people were killed and around 100 injured in an attack blamed on the IRA. The Offences against the State (Amendment) was due to be thrown out until the bombs went off in earshot, swinging the outcome. The Littlejohn affair was covered extensively at the time by the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League, who published a pamphlet “Anatomy of Dictatorship - the Littlejohn Affair”.

These are not only issues of historic sensitivity. The amnesty paper follows the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 which places a six-year time limit on legal action against crimes carried out by British troops overseas. As such, the paper is part of British preparations for major new conflicts abroad and dictatorial measures to confront the working class at home.

The command paper was subjected to an excoriating analysis by a team of legal and human rights academics from Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster, the Model Bill Team—who had viewed the Stormont House Agreement of 2014 as capable of producing legal mechanisms compliant with current human rights practice.

Among the team’s most startling findings was the result of a comparison between the British government’s proposed amnesty and similar moves worldwide, including a 1978 amnesty passed by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, which the team noted is “widely regarded as one of the most egregious examples of amnesty”. The British government's proposal, like Pinochet’s, covers “serious human rights violations including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture and disappearances”.

However, the British proposal goes much further. Unlike in Chile, no offences are excluded, no time limits imposed, and all current proceedings will cease, including all judicial and investigative processes.

The team also noted that the Information Recovery Body, put forward to give a pretence of moving investigations forward, will be entirely voluntary and therefore be ignored, while its powers to extract documentation from the state will be less than currently exist.

By contrast, coupled with moves to tighten the Official Secrets Acts, the team noted that “journalists, legacy investigators and human rights defenders who put evidence of human rights violations into the public domain... would be the only people liable to be prosecuted for conflict-related matters.”

School mask requirements overturned in last German states despite high infection levels

Tamino Dreisam

Despite rising infection levels, schools are systematically dismantling all protective measures against transmission of the coronavirus. These include social distancing rules, quarantine orders and even testing. Over the last two weeks, a number of state governments took another significant step down the road to mass infection of unvaccinated children with the elimination of mandatory mask-wearing in the classroom. This policy, in the interest of securing the profits of big business, endangers the health and lives of hundreds of thousands of students and teachers.

School in NRW (Source: www.instagram.com schuelerstreik_nrw)

The states of Bremen, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt have already abandoned compulsory mask-wearing for all grades since the start of the school term. It has also been lifted for grades one and two in Lower Saxony and up to grade four in Saxony. In Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia, mask requirements are controlled by reference values of a “corona traffic light,” which are set so high that the requirement to wear masks only comes into force when it is already too late.

Other German states have followed suit: Brandenburg lifted obligatory mask-wearing on August 23 at elementary schools; Saarland on October 1 for all classes; in Berlin, grades one to six; and in Bavaria on October 4.

But the remaining states will follow this trend in the coming days and weeks: In Baden-Württemberg, the requirement to wear a mask will be dropped on October 18, in North Rhine-Westphalia on November 2, and in Schleswig-Holstein it will be relaxed in November after the fall vacations. Saxony and Lower Saxony—where the requirement has already been dropped for the lower grades—have already announced that they want to relax it even further.

This policy of mass infection by all federal and state parliamentary parties deliberately endangers the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Since the end of the summer holidays, a clear increase of case numbers among children and young people is underway. In the 5- to 14-year-old group, the incidence level is currently 178 (per 100,000) and in the 15- to 34-year-old group it is 89. According to the Robert Koch Institute, the number of outbreaks in schools “increased again very significantly from the beginning of August to mid-September 2021.”

The same picture is emerging in the United Kingdom and the United States, where schools have opened fully just as they did after the summer vacation. In the UK, at least one in 20 children has now been infected—an average of one child per classroom.

It is also clear how dangerous the consequences of a coronavirus infection can be, even for children and young people. In the UK, around 40 children are hospitalized every day due to the virus. By July, 25 had already died and since the end of the summer vacations, 10 more have succumbed. In Indonesia, about 100 children are currently dying every week, and in Brazil, 1,518 schoolchildren have already fallen victim to COVID-19 this year. Eleven under-18s have already died in Germany.

The abolition of the requirement to wear masks is part of a worldwide policy of the ruling class to remove any protective measures against the virus. Here in Germany, it is being pushed by all federal and state parliamentary parties. From the Left Party to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), all have supported the reopening of schools and ensured the lifting of the requirement to wear a mask. In the federal election campaign, all the chancellor candidates spoke out against another lockdown to save lives.

In particular, the nominally “left” parties are pushing an aggressive reopening policy. Left Party-led Thuringia has had the highest incidence level of any state for almost the entire pandemic. Just a few weeks ago in a tweet, state Premier Bodo Ramelow defended this policy—which has already led to more than 4,400 deaths in Thuringia—as “scientific”— immediately garnering massive opposition.

The removal of all safeguards is a thoroughly anti-scientific policy, designed solely to return to “normality” to keep production running and profits flowing. Scientists, on the other hand, warned against ending the mask requirement. Virologist Melanie Brinkmann, for example, condemned it as “premature,” citing the high number of unvaccinated children.

Eberhard Bodenschatz of the Max Planck Institute explained, “If we now drop the mask requirement after the elimination of mandatory testing in many situations, we will basically be in an undisturbed life as we were before the pandemic ... So why shouldn’t the pandemic come back?”

The trade unions have played a central role in the unsafe reopening of schools and the dismantling of the last protections. Around the world, they have helped support the reopenings and sabotaged any protest against them. On Monday, Education and Science Union (GEW) President Maike Finnern declared, “Schools should stay open.”

Protest is being voiced from many sides against the dangerous measures, which contradict any scientific findings. In Baden-Württemberg, the VBE education association warned against ending the mask requirement too soon. Its chairman, Gerhard Brand, declared, “We shouldn’t rush into anything; the pandemic situation and vaccination rate are unchanged.” In Berlin, almost 2,000 people signed a petition against the end of mandatory mask wearing in schools in a short period of time.

The growing resistance to dangerous policies is taking on more concrete forms outside the major parties and unions. Lisa Diaz, a mother from the United Kingdom, called for a one-day school strike for October 1, which was supported by thousands of parents, workers and young people worldwide, who tweeted their agreement and sent statements of solidarity.

Britain’s Ambulance Services: “Totally broken and beyond fixable”

Richard Tyler

Members of the armed forces have now been deployed to assist ambulance services across the whole of Britain.

It was announced yesterday that 110 personnel will be sent to Wales from October 14, after the local government made a Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) request. Another 97 soldiers have been supporting ambulance services in the east, north-east, south central and south-west of England since August. In Scotland, 114 soldiers have been carrying out non-emergency driving work for the last two weeks.

Ambulance's outside Bournemouth hospital's accident and emergency unit. September 2021 (WSWS Media)

Britain’s ambulance services have been under acute strain for months. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that, in England, the number of emergency calls answered in August was more than in any other month on record, except for July. Ambulances consistently failed to reach patients in the two most urgent categories within the required times.

An analysis by health charity the Nuffield Trust found that, of the 10 percent of incidents which fell under the highest “category 1”, including cardiac arrest patients who have stopped breathing, fewer than 75 percent were reached within eight minutes, the percentage target laid down in performance standards. The last time this figure was met was in January 2014.

The same pattern was repeated, but with even longer waiting times, in less urgent categories.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said the ambulance service is “operating at its highest level of escalation.” The number of people in Scotland suspected of having a serious condition waiting more than 10 minutes for an ambulance has more than doubled since 2019.

In Wales, the number of 999 calls rose by over 25 percent between January and June this year and has only increased further since then. With its second-worst response time on record, the Welsh ambulance service failed to respond within the 8-minute deadline for “category red” emergency calls in over two out of five cases during August this year. The 57.6 percent response rate is significantly behind the target of 65 percent, which has not been met for over a year.

This all translates into potentially fatal delays in reaching patients with life-critical conditions.

Some patients in Scotland have waited up to 40 hours for an ambulance. This led to at least one pensioner dying, and another 86-year-old woman lying on her kitchen floor for eight hours with a broken hip awaiting an ambulance.

A woman in Grimsby who had suffered a stroke in March had to wait over 10 hours for an ambulance when she collapsed at home in October. Her husband said, “She needed to be up at the hospital straight away in case there was another stroke. We are in a mess and it needs sorting.”

Writing in Pulse magazine, GP trainer Dr Shaba Nabi said she had “never been more scared for the health and well-being of my loved ones.”

Dr Nabi told how, after she had waited three hours for an ambulance to arrive at her surgery to attend two patients who had collapsed with chest pains, she reluctantly advised them to travel to hospital by car.

The same week, she witnessed an elderly man lying bleeding on the pavement. “Because he was alert, awake and breathing, my immediate thought as I went to help was ‘this man’s not getting an ambulance for love nor money’—despite his obvious need for one. I spoke to ambulance control who confirmed my fears and advised me to call 111. When I questioned how a lone GP would have the ability to ‘scoop and dispatch’, they had no answer.”

A COVID patient in Scotland who began to struggle with breathlessness eventually died due to the delay in dispatching an ambulance after calling the NHS 24 hotline. The Scottish Public Service Ombudsman (SPSO) found there was an “unreasonable” delay in calling the ambulance. Although the call handler had followed the correct protocols, these were clearly “not fit for purpose”, the SPSO found.

The pressures placed on ambulance crews are enormous. A paramedic in Falkirk, Scotland, told the Daily Record that working conditions were so bad it was causing some staff to suffer insomnia and panic attacks. They reported having to work two or even three hours past the end of their shift, and facing 15-hour days with no breaks due to the volume of calls.

“I have never experienced working conditions like it. Even during the height of the pandemic, it wasn’t this bad. The service isn’t in crisis, the service is totally broken. And I worry that it’s beyond fixable.”

According to the paramedic, “Not a day goes by that myself or a colleague breaks down before, during or after a shift.”

The deployment of hundreds of soldiers marks the severity of the breakdown of Britain’s emergency medical services, but will do little to solve it.

Since the army staff have not had the requisite training, they are unable to drive using the flashing blue lights. This means they can only be sent to non-emergency calls. However, should the patient they are attending develop more serious symptoms the military driver is unable to transport them to hospital at high speed. In such emergency cases, an ambulance with a trained paramedic driver would then need to be dispatched.

Army drivers’ lack of skills and experience resulted in accidents within two days of their introduction in Scotland. Two soldiers out of the Leverndale ambulance station in Glasgow were involved in crashes.

Even when patients are safely delivered to the hospital, they face further delays in receiving necessary treatment as overstretched accident and emergency (A&E) departments struggle to find beds for seriously ill patients. A trade union representative commented, “If there are 50 more ambulances, it just means 50 extra joining the queue [at hospitals].”

Brecon-based ambulance technician, Paul Amphlett, told the ITV News, “Bringing the army in isn’t going to solve the problem. The patients are going to be coming in to the hospitals because they'll obviously be helping out to pick these patients up, but they’re still going to be stuck in the car parks, we’re still going to be waiting with them, babysitting them, so it really isn’t going to solve the problem overall.”

A survey by the Royal College for Emergency medicine found that, in August, half of emergency departments were forced to keep patients outside in ambulances every day, up from a quarter in October 2020 and just under a fifth in March 2020. Half said they were required to treat patients in the corridors every day.

NHS figures show that nearly a quarter of A&E patients in England were not seen within four hours in August, versus 13.7 percent in August 2019. In Scotland, in the week to September 12, 28.5 percent of patients were not seen within four hours.

Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, commented last month, “This is a disaster. This is a system that is on the edge.”

The crisis in the ambulance service and A&E departments has been exacerbated by the pandemic, allowed to run rampant by the official policy of mass infection, but had been building for years due to government underfunding.

A 2017 report by the National Audit Office found that increased funding for urgent and emergency activities had “not matched rising demand”. NHS Providers and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives report that England alone faces a recurrent funding shortfall for ambulance services of close to £240 million.

UN catalogues Libya war crimes, ignoring their source

Bill Van Auken

An independent fact-finding mission delivered a report to the United Nations Thursday cataloguing a plethora of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Libya, including mass killings, arbitrary detention, systemic torture and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands.

Libyan security forces have rounded up thousands of African migrants in recent weeks [Source: Twitter]

The report, which was based on research in Libya, Tunisia and Italy and interviews with over 150 people, acknowledges that the work of the mission had been obstructed by the Western-backed government in Tripoli.

While it focuses on crimes carried out between 2016 and 2020, the report begins by acknowledging: “Since the fall of the [Muammar] Gaddafi regime in 2011, the fragmentation of the State and the proliferation of weapons and of militias vying for control of territory and resources has severely undermined the rule of law in Libya. Libya has also been the theater of quasi-uninterrupted armed conflicts” resulting in crimes “against the most vulnerable, including women, children, members of ethnic minorities, migrants, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons.”

Nowhere, however, does the report refer to what precipitated the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the disintegration of both Libya’s state and its society and the resulting mass violence, i.e., the more than seven-month war of aggression launched by the United States and NATO in March of 2011.

The report highlights the eruption of violence during the 2019-2020 battle for the Libyan capital of Tripoli between the country’s two main factions: the UN-recognized, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA)—backed by Turkey, Qatar and Italy, along with Islamist militias supplemented by thousands of mercenary fighters from Syria—and its rival government in the east of the country, which is defended by the Libyan National Army (LNA) of ex-CIA “asset” Khalifa Haftar, with the backing of Egypt, the UAE, Russia and France.

“Airstrikes have killed dozens of families. The destruction of health-related facilities has impacted access to healthcare, and anti-personnel mines left by mercenaries in residential areas have killed and maimed civilians,” said the fact-finding mission’s chair, Mohamed Auajjar.

The report calls particular attention to the mass murder carried out by the Kaniyat militia, responsible for killing hundreds of civilians in the town of Tarhuna, southeast of Tripoli. Bodies recovered from mass graves there had been shot multiple times after the victims had been handcuffed, blindfolded and their legs tied. The Kaniyat militia has aligned itself with both the GNA and the LNA at different points in the conflict.

Arbitrary imprisonment and torture remain endemic in Libya, according to the report. It states:

Most of these prisoners have never been charged, convicted or sentenced to imprisonment following a fair and public hearing. Many are detained incommunicado, some in secret prisons that officially do not exist, sometimes for years without any prospect of release. The families of prisoners are not informed of the fate of their family member. Torture is an established feature of prison system. The conditions of detention are characterized by a lack of hygiene, adequate food and medical care, as well as no separation between children and adults. The Mission documented several cases of deaths through summary executions, torture, starvation, unsanitary conditions and denial of medical care. Sexual violence is prevalent, in particular during interrogation, and it takes different forms, including rape, threats to rape or coercion into engaging in sexual abuse against other inmates. Women find themselves particularly vulnerable and the evidence also indicated that men are not spared from sexual violence.”

The report cites the forced internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of Libyans who are unable to secure viable conditions of life. It highlights the case of Tawergha, where around 40,000 people, who belong to the ethnic group of the same name, were driven from their homes in 2011 by Islamist militias based in Misrata, backed by NATO airstrikes. A decade later, the people of Tawergha have yet to be allowed to return to the town, which was razed by the US-backed militias.

Also documented in the report are the wholesale crimes carried out against migrants, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, who enter Libya in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. The Libyan Coast Guard (LCG), trained and funded by the European Union, it states, intercepts boats carrying migrants in a manner that is “violent or reckless, resulting at times in deaths.” It continues:

On board, there are reports that LCGs confiscate belongings from migrants. Once disembarked, migrants are either transferred to detention centers or go missing, with reports that people are sold to traffickers. Interviews with migrants formerly held in DCIM detention centers established that all migrants—men and women, boys and girls—are kept in harsh conditions, some of whom die. Some children are held with adults, placing them at high risk of abuse. Torture (such as electric shocks) and sexual violence (including rape and forced prostitution) are prevalent.

The fact-finding mission states that “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed at this population, in furtherance of a State policy. As such, these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.”

This state policy involves a coordinated system of brutalization and exploitation of migrants, who are captured by the LCG, turned over to jails run by militias and released only after paying bribes or undergoing a period of forced labor or prostitution. The report says that some migrants have gone through this cycle as many as ten times.

It also cites the “responsibility that may be borne by third States,” without naming them, though certainly the crimes carried out by Libyan authorities against migrants are also in furtherance of the “Fortress Europe” policy aimed at keeping them out.

The report cites two incidents in May and July 2019 during the fighting around Tripoli in which a migrant detention camp set up next to a militia headquarters was bombed twice, killing scores of migrants, who were prevented from fleeing the attacks.

In conclusion, the fact-finding mission states that “The violence that has plagued Libya since 2011, and which has continued almost unabated since 2016, has enabled the commission of serious violations, abuses and crimes, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, against the most vulnerable.” The report’s authors state that they have identified “both Libyan and foreign actors” who may be responsible for these crimes, and that this information may be shared with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

But the “foreign actors” who bear the greatest responsibility for transforming Libya from what was widely considered one of the most advanced countries in Africa into a hellscape are never named. They remain in top state positions in Washington, Paris and London after launching an unprovoked war against Libya based on the phony pretext of a supposedly imminent massacre in the eastern city of Benghazi and under the filthy banner of “human rights.”

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which tried Germany’s former Nazi rulers, called the waging of an aggressive war “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The truth of this principle finds bloody verification in the unending crimes carried out against the Libyan people in the decade since the US and NATO killed thousands and razed much of the country through seven months of continuous bombing, while arming and aiding Al Qaeda-linked militias to serve as their proxy ground troops.

Those responsible for this “supreme international crime” committed in Libya have never been held to account. They include former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton—who gleefully hailed the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi by declaring “We came, we saw, he died”—along with current President Joe Biden, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and other senior administration officials.

There is no prospect of the Libya fact-finding mission handing their names over to the International Criminal Court, and even if it did, the ICC would do nothing. Its standard operating procedure is to ignore the massive war crimes carried out by US imperialism—which have claimed well over a million lives over the last decade—while prosecuting minor dictators and warlords in oppressed and former colonial countries.

Of the ICC’s 30 open cases, all are against Africans, while the court has scandalously announced its dropping of any investigation of war crimes committed by Washington in Afghanistan, instead focusing its entire attention on the Taliban.

Financial parasitism and the decline of US industry

Nick Beams

US President Joe Biden’s October 5 Michigan speech in support of his administration’s infrastructure spending program consisted in large part of a chronicle of the decline of American capitalism.

Repeating his assertion that the US was now at an “inflection point,” Biden began by noting that for the better part of the 20th century the US led the world by a significant margin through investment in infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, ports and airports.

“We invested to win the space race. We led the world in research and development, which led to the creation of the Internet, but then something happened. We slowed up, we stopped investing in ourselves.”

American infrastructure used to be the best in the world, he continued, but now the World Economic Forum ranks the US as 13th. The situation was even worse in early childhood education with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranking the US 35th out of 37 countries.

“All those investments that fueled the strong economy, we’ve taken the foot off the gas,” he said. And then came an astonishing remark from the leader of the world’s most powerful economy: “I don’t know what’s happened.”

As the World Socialist Web Site reported yesterday, Biden’s speech was framed in terms of competition with China as he noted significant areas of the economy where China is outstripping the US.

But Biden left unanswered the question of the underlying reason for the historic decline of the industrial capacity of US capitalism.

The answer is to be found in an another “inflection point”—the end of the post war economic boom and the transition in the US economy from the beginning of the 1980s.

The decline in profit rates that ended the boom refuted the myth of so-called Keynesian economics that skillful demand management by governments could regulate the contradictions of capitalism.

The rise in profits and living standards that had marked the 1950s and 1960s was replaced in the 1970s by the phenomenon of stagflation—the combination of low growth, significant unemployment and rising prices—something which had never previously occurred.

The crisis of profitability drove the American ruling class to launch a violent restructuring of the economy and class relations—a process that was followed, with national variations, by its counterparts around the world.

The spearhead for the US and global offensive was the high interest rate regime initiated by the Federal Reserve under the chairmanship of Carter appointee Paul Volcker.

Whole swathes of US industry were destroyed, and a massive offensive was launched against the working class, starting with the smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and the destruction of their union, PATCO—an operation carried out with the complete collaboration of the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy.

The US economy eventually emerged from the Volcker-induced recession—the deepest to that point since the Great Depression of the 1930s—but it was undergoing a vast transformation.

This involved the development of globalised methods of production through which major corporations outsourced manufacturing activities, very often to other firms and other countries including China, to take advantage of cheaper sources of labour.

At home, the profits derived from these operations were deployed to the financial markets with the result that increasingly the dominant form of corporate wealth accumulation was not investment in new plant and equipment—the growth of industrial capacity leading to the expansion of jobs as it had been in the period of the boom—but the securing of profits through financial manipulation. That is, parasitism, not productive activity, was now front and centre of the US economy.

This process, aided and abetted by the policies of the US Federal Reserve, began under Reagan in the 1980s and then rose to ever greater heights in the 1990s under the Clinton administration which dismantled the last remaining vestiges of the regulations imposed on finance as a result of the Depression.

The internal rot and decay at the heart of this new mode of accumulation was laid bare in the financial crisis of 2008. A Senate report of 2011 into the crisis found it was not a “natural disaster, but the result of high-risk complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”

In the words of Democrat Senator Carl Levin, who chaired the subcommittee that carried it out, the investigation found a “financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.”

However, in the aftermath of this devastating report, nothing was done to address the cause of the crisis. Rather, Wall Street was bailed out by the government to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fed instituted the policy of quantitative easing through which trillions of dollars were injected into the financial markets, not only to continue the speculation that had led to the crisis, but enabling it to reach new heights.

Not one of those responsible was charged for the criminal offences they had committed. In fact, such action was explicitly ruled out by Obama’s attorney-general Eric Holder in 2013 when he said it could destabilise both the US and world economy. The banks and finance houses were not only “too big to fail,” those in charge of their operations were “too big to jail.”

The period since the global financial crisis has seen speculative parasitism escalate to ever-greater heights. The rise and rise of the stock market and the emergence of ever more arcane forms of speculation was fueled by the ever-greater injections of money from the Fed—more than $4 trillion since the near total financial meltdown in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The development of high-tech and the production of ever-more sophisticated computer chips is one of the key areas for the economy of the future. It is here that some of the most egregious expressions of parasitism are to be found, as a recent report by economist William O Lazonick, published on the New Economic Thinking web site, makes clear.

Lazonick has for some time been documenting the growth of share buybacks by major corporations, to boost the value of their stocks, at the expense of productive investment. He holds out the reformist utopian prospect that if this could be halted then corporations could at least be turned in the direction of acting for the common good.

Nevertheless, his work has provided some valuable insights. In his latest analysis he focuses attention on the high-tech firms that are seeking billions of dollars from the Biden administration under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.

The Act, which provides $52 billion, was passed by the Senate in June and now awaits approval by the House. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) describes it as “bipartisan legislation that would invest tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor manufacturing incentives and research initiatives over the next 5–10 years to strengthen and sustain American leadership in chip technology, which is essential to our economy and national security.”

But as Lazonick and his co-author Matt Hopkins report, most of the corporate members lobbying for the passage of the CHIPS for America Act have squandered the support they have received in the past.

They note that among the signatories on the SIA letter sent to Biden in February this year are five large stock repurchasers. Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Broadcom did a combined total of $249 billion in buybacks over the decade 2011–2020, equal to 71 percent of their profits and almost five times the subsidies they are now seeking over the next decade.

The extent of buybacks is even greater in another lobby group, the Semiconductors in America Coalition (SIAC) formed in May this year to push for passage of the legislation. This group includes Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and Google. These firms spent a combined $633 billion on share buybacks in the period 2011–2020, more than 12 times money under the Act.

In the period from October 2012 to June 2021, Apple alone spent $444 billion on buybacks, equal to 87 percent of its net income. This is on top of the $114 billion paid out as dividends, representing an additional 22 percent of net income.

The corporate lobbyists of the SIA have a clear sense of where the political winds are blowing, with the emphasis by the Biden administration on the need to combat China. They wrote in their February letter that the decline in the US share of global semiconductor chip manufacturing capacity from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2020 was “largely because the governments of our global competitors offer significant incentives and subsidies to attract new semiconductor manufacturing facilities, while the US does not.”

As for Biden’s professed ignorance as to the reasons for the American decline, Lazonick and Hopkins make clear he is well aware of the role of share buybacks. They note that as vice-president in 2016 he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that “the government should take a look at regulations that promote share buybacks and tax laws that discourage long-term investment, saying “the future of the economy depends on it.”

But this president from Delaware, the home of American tax avoidance companies, is a long ago bought-and-paid-for creature of Wall Street. Moreover, the growth of parasitism has become so entrenched within the financial system and the economy as a whole that attempts to curb it threaten to set off a financial and economic crisis. The US response to its manufacturing decline is not going to be a return to the past but rather, as the crippling of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei demonstrates, an intensified attack on its rivals.

To the extent that industrial and manufacturing capacity is developed it will arise from the drive to war, rooted in objective logic of the strategy of the “strategic competition” with China that the Biden administration has made central to its agenda.

Pandora Papers reveal finance minister profited from offshore account as misery ravages Brazil

Miguel Andrade

The recent leak of the so-called Pandora Papers by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has revealed that Brazil’s Finance Minister, Paulo Guedes, has since 2014 kept a sum of US$ 9.5 million invested in a company named Dreadnoughts International, based in the British Virgin Islands. These assets have been protected from the massive 40 percent devaluation of the Brazilian Real since Guedes took over the post at the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, in January 2019.

The same period has seen a massive economic crisis that has plunged 112 million Brazilians—over half of the population—into food insecurity, while 19 million face outright destitution and hunger. The number of unemployed stands at 14 percent of the workforce, or 14 million workers, while another 20 million work partial hours.

The leak also revealed that from 2004 to 2019, an offshore account was kept by the head of Brazil’s Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto. It was closed 14 months after he took office.

These revelations stand as a testimony to the rampant social inequality that is the defining trait of Brazilian capitalism. Only the 12th largest economy in the world, Brazil boasts the second largest number of billionaire offshore asset holders in the Pandora leak. Nearly 60,000 Brazilians keep US$ 192.6 billion exempt of taxes abroad.

The Pandora Papers revelations have provoked deep nervousness within Brazilian ruling circles. The major corporate newspapers— Folha de S. Paulo, Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Valor —have either ignored the scandal or focused entirely on foreign officials and international sports and pop music celebrities. Infamously, the financial daily Valor interviewed Campos Neto on Monday and failed to ask him a single question on the revelations. None of these corporate outlets is part of the IUCRJ, which is represented in Brazil by the web-based Metrópolis and Poder360 and the magazine piauí.

Major government critics in the corporate press, such as Globo’s Miriam Leitão, rushed to clear Guedes of any wrongdoing, stressing that he had duly reported his foreign assets to Brazil’s Federal Internal Revenue Service and the Presidential Ethics Committee. The latter is responsible for evaluating possible “conflicts of interest” involving the state officials and cabinet members, who are forbidden by law from holding financial interests directly affected by their policy decisions—such as the exchange rate of the Real, in the case of the finance minister and the Central Bank chief. In any case, the committee is known for rubber-stamping whatever “lack of conflict of interest” is declared by cabinet members.

Senior authorities also attempted to minimize the issue. Speaking for Congress, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, declared that “personal issues” related to Guedes “should not interfere in the country’s agenda.” The press conference in which he spoke had been called to announce a major breakthrough in negotiations between states, local governments and the federal government in a tax reform which has been dragging on since Bolsonaro took office, despite the fact that Guedes has repeatedly defined it as a government priority.

The corporate press and senior officials have shielded Guedes out of concern that his fall would generate further financial instability. The bourgeois opposition and major news corporations have opposed the Bolsonaro government largely on the basis that it is incapable of consolidating the “free market reforms” sponsored by Guedes.

The leading force within the political opposition, the Workers Party (PT), has fully lined up behind this right-wing opposition to Bolsonaro, despite its nominal criticism of Guedes’ “social insensitivity.” The party has for almost three years centered its criticism of Bolsonaro on the charge that he is incapable of stemming the hemorrhaging of financial assets from the country and the São Paulo stock exchange, driving the value of the Real down, and that he has damaged trade with China and Europe due to his reactionary anti-Chinese rhetoric and anti-environmental demagoguery.

More fundamentally, however, all of these forces are concerned with the explosive effect of the fact that Guedes has protected his private interests abroad while sponsoring brutal austerity, high inflation and Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy at home—and that this has been a common practice of the country’s entire ruling elite. That includes the owners of the major news outlets, such as the Globo owners, the Marinho family, the owners of CNN Brasil, the Menin family, and of the far-right Jovem Pan radio.

Most significantly, it also includes several businessmen investigated by the Senate’s Commission of Inquiry (CPI) into Bolsonaro’s murderous herd immunity policy towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the high-profile names in the Pandora Papers are major backers of the government, such as Otávio Fakhoury and Luciano Hang, who are accused of financing the president’s far-right rallies, and the Parrillo brothers, owners of the Prevent Senior private health care provider, all of whom have recently testified before the CPI. The Parrillo brothers stand accused of organizing barbaric experiments with quack cures for COVID-19 and hiding the resulting deaths at their hospitals.

Guedes has himself been recently brought to the center of the CPI, with the lawyer representing a group of doctors who previously worked for the Prevent Senior health provider declaring in her testimony that the criminal experiments in its hospitals were coordinated with Guedes’ ministry to provide public reassurances that the economy could be opened without provoking mass death, as “cures” for COVID-19 would be promptly available.

These mounting scandals are emerging against the backdrop of not only the COVID-19 pandemic’s mass death and destruction of entire families, but also the mass destitution of workers. Last week, horrific images circulated worldwide of workers in Rio de Janeiro scavenging for leftover bones and carcasses inside a meat delivery truck, while TV cooking programs were showing how to use chicken feet in soup recipes and avoid impossible meat prices.

Also last week, in the leading meat-producing state of Santa Catarina in the south of the country, one of Brazil’s richest states, an image went viral of a butcher’s shop which put a plaque warning costumers that bones were “sold and not given away,” prompting the state Attorney General’s Office to intervene to prohibit charging for scraps. In northern Pará state, where the fishing industry dominates the protein market, fish carcasses are being sold.

Meat prices have gone up 30 percent in Brazil on a yearly basis. That is far above the record-breaking 10.42 percent inflation recorded for September against September 2020, the highest figure since February 2016, months before PT president Dilma Rousseff was impeached by the House on trumped-up charges of breaking budget rules.

For September alone, the inflation rate stood at 1.16 percent, the highest figure since the Real was established in 1994, ending hyperinflation in Brazil. At the same time, the yearly inflation rate for meat is lower than the 40 percent inflation for gasoline, and 37 percent for diesel oil, the main fuel used by Brazil’s truck-dependent internal transport of goods. Staples such as rice and beans have gone up by over 30 percent, cooking and heating gas by 32 percent, and 21 percent for household electricity. The worst drought in 90 years in the Southern Cone, caused by global warming, has dried up hydroelectric dams and rivers, affecting energy output, agriculture and inland shipping between major agricultural regions of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

On Tuesday, despite attempts by the media and state authorities to minimize or ignore the revelations, their explosive fallout forced the House to call Guedes to speak on the issue in a session scheduled for October 19. It is the first time ever that a finance minister has been called to Congress to testify on such matters in Brazil. A poll by Realtime BigData on Friday found that 64 percent of respondents believe Guedes should be fired.

It is unclear whether deputies will pressure Bolsonaro to dismiss Guedes in order to dissociate himself from the scandal. Whatever his fate, it is clear that Congress, including the PT-led opposition, is working to cover up the intractable crisis of Brazilian and international capitalism, denying the connection between financial speculation and the capitalist system in Brazil and internationally.

After announcing that the PT would ask the Attorney General’s Office to investigate Guedes, the party’s leader in the House, Deputy Elvino Bohn Gass, tried to blame Brazil’s high inflation on Guedes’ profiteering in betting against the Real. He tweeted, in a stupid attempt at irony: “Do you understand? The higher the exchange rate to the dollar, the richer Paulo Guedes gets.” Former president Rousseff, interviewed on Thursday by the union-sponsored Workers’ TV news agency, said Guedes exemplified the “insensitivity of a ruling elite heir to slavery,” that is, which is not capitalist enough.

The PT’s feigned “indignation” is ludicrous. Guedes was the founder of one of the largest investment banks in Brazil, BTG Pactual – after being trained as an economist in Chicago and working under the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile amid his “neoliberal” shock policies. The story of his Dreadnoughts International company begins in 2014, as the Brazilian Central Bank, under the Rousseff presidency, began a massive sale of reserves to calm the markets and avoid the devaluation of the Real.

The PT, whose primary function has been to serve national and international financial interests, was thoroughly unable to stem capital flight. Having won reelection on a bogus anti-austerity platform in October 2014, Rousseff reshuffled her cabinet and named as finance minister another Chicago-trained economist, Joaquim Levy, who would be appointed by Guedes himself as the head of the country’s development bank, BNDES, when he took office. On September 1, the PT-led opposition vote massively in favor of Guedes’ income tax reform which kept offshore assets exempt of taxation.

A genuine struggle against growing social inequality in Brazil and internationally requires a break with capitalism and all of its nationalist defenders such as the Brazilian PT, whose sole concern is that of avoiding the exposure of the massive untaxed assets of the rich provoking a social explosion.