The Biden administration’s war on refugees

Eric London

Behind the backs of the population, the Biden administration is implementing a dangerous and reactionary shift in immigration policy and enforcing it through dictatorial expansions of presidential power.

The aim of the shift is to dramatically reduce physical border crossings on a scale not seen in decades, as well as to block asylum seekers from reaching US soil where the US Constitution applies. This right-wing shift exposes as lies the claim that US imperialism is a beacon for “democracy” and that its war against Russia has anything to do with “human rights.”

On October 30, NBC News reported that the Biden administration has drafted a policy document granting the executive branch the power to detain Haitian immigrants at Guantánamo Bay, adjacent to the military prison where the government has imprisoned and tortured hundreds under the auspices of the “war on terror.”

Now the Biden administration says it may use Guantánamo as a “lily pad” for immigrants, though the correct term would be “internment camp.” Under the initial proposal, 400 Haitian immigrants would be held in cells and bunk rows in a constitutional no man’s land where they have no right to challenge their treatment or deportations as they would have if they had arrived on US soil.

Days earlier, the Biden administration pulled out of mediation talks with lawyers representing over 300,000 recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who sued the Trump administration for rescinding TPS for 240,000 Salvadorans, 77,000 Hondurans, 14,000 Nepalese and 4,000 Nicaraguans in 2018. The Biden administration has continued to oppose the immigrants’ challenge, essentially backing Trump’s revocation of TPS status and threatening to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

Earlier in October, data published by the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) documented that the Biden administration removed 2.8 million immigrants from the United States in Fiscal Year 2021, more than any year in American history.

Most significantly, the data revealed that over one million were removed under “Title 42,” the antidemocratic provision by which the government bans immigration due to a “public health” emergency. Trump initially invoked Title 42 citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a pseudo-legal justification, and courts have maintained it under Biden. Those banned from entering the US under Title 42 also do not have constitutional rights and cannot apply for asylum.

On October 12, the Biden administration signed a new rotten deal with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) banning tens of thousands of immigrants from Venezuela from crossing into the United States, also under Title 42. AMLO has agreed to allow the Venezuelans to live in tent cities, where immigrants escaping societies ravaged by imperialist war and capitalist exploitation live in squalor and disease.

With a blend of cynicism and hypocrisy that the Democratic Party has perfected over the last 200 years, Biden and the Democrats continue to posture as defenders of immigrants.

At a recent event for new US citizens, Biden repeated the hackneyed Democratic Party appeal: “It’s the dreams of immigrants like you that built America.” But on Monday, when a group of asylum seekers tried to march across the Rio Grande near El Paso carrying a flag that said, “We, the migrants, built America,” Biden’s CBP fired pepper balls down at their heads, as they scrambled across the river back to their tarp houses in Mexico.

The attack on immigrants comes as poverty and scarcity devastate the working class of Latin America and the Caribbean. The pandemic and the prolongation of the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine have had a devastating impact on hundreds of millions of people in countries who have suffered over a century of US imperialist domination.

In Haiti, society is in a state of collapse, as cholera spreads, food and gas are running out, and gangs take control of broad portions of the country. Nevertheless, the Biden administration has deported refugees back to Haiti, even after family members reported that the Haitian government was detaining deportees in a penitentiary in exchange for ransom money.

Those who make it to the US are treated with extreme brutality. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with a young Haitian mother who was detained by the Biden administration at the border last year:

It is painful to talk about what happened to me in Texas. When I talk about it, it feels like someone is putting a fork in my heart. When I was detained, it was horrible. First, I was forced to sleep under a bridge with my baby. Some of the guards were beating us under that bridge, like you used to be able to see on the news. When we were moved to a prison, I thought things would get better, but they didn’t. In prison they took my child’s medicine even though he was bleeding. I was there four days, they didn’t give us food, we were only eating crackers. We couldn’t bathe, brush our teeth, we had to sleep on the floor. The babies were dehydrated, their eyes looked like they were going to faint. One doesn’t know what to do as a mother when your child says, “Mom, I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” but you can’t do anything. My baby was vomiting, he had diarrhea, he was bleeding in his feet. And when we left the guards mocked us for smelling bad.

The policy pivot currently being carried out by the Biden administration is a massive concession to the fascistic political right.

The Republican Party’s midterm strategy has gone farther than the usual right-wing chauvinistic language. The Republican governors of Texas and Florida (Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis) have spent the last several months bussing and flying over 11,000 immigrants to large cities run by Democrats in a series of stunts aimed at portraying immigrant workers as criminals.

The Democratic political strategy has been to adapt to this narrative. In a Pennsylvania Senate debate with Trump-backed Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, for example, the Democrat John Fetterman denounced “illegal immigrants” and called for “secure borders.”

Amid this right-wing climate encouraged by the political establishment, incidents of violence against immigrants are growing. In late September, Michael Sheppard, the warden at an immigration detention center in Sierra Blanca, Texas, fired on a group of migrants who had stopped for a drink in the desert, killing 22-year-old Mexican immigrant Jesús Iván Sepúlveda Martínez and critically wounding 31-year-old Brenda Berenice Casias Carrillo.

The ongoing attack on immigrant workers is an international process and a warning to the entire working class. On Monday, British Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced immigration as “out of control” and an “invasion.” The same day, a right-wing individual threw firebombs at a center for immigrant refugees in the coastal town of Dover, where the government detains refugees in crowded internment camps, where they sleep on floors and catch diseases like diphtheria.

The same applies in the “democratic” European Union, where thousands of immigrants fleeing North Africa and the Middle East drown attempting to enter every year.

Just yesterday, a boat carrying 68 refugees sank off the Greek island of Evia. Earlier in October, 92 immigrants from Morocco, Iran, Bangladesh and Pakistan were discovered in Greece after having been “abandoned” and stripped “completely naked” by authorities. In Italy on Tuesday, fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appointed a man who has been photographed wearing a Nazi armband as a minister in her government.

The attack on immigrant workers is driven by the logic of the escalating war against Russia. In wartime, the most ruthless attacks on democratic rights are always bound up with restrictions on immigration and the shoring up of the repressive apparatus of the nation-state.

As US imperialism entered the First World War, the Wilson administration signed the Espionage Act, which restricted both anti-war speech and immigration and now serves as the basis for the prosecution of Julian Assange. As the US prepared to enter the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration signed the Smith Act, also known as the Alien Registration Act, which banned anti-war speech, blocked immigration and enabled Japanese internment.

Netanyahu and establishment parties pave way for rise of far-right in Israel’s election

Jean Shaoul

Israel goes to the polls Tuesday for the fifth time in three and a half years. The general election takes place amid rising class tensions within Israel and the occupied territories, the Middle East and internationally.

Opinion polls are predicting that the Likud Party, headed by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will once again win the largest number of seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party taking second place.

People walk past an election campaign billboards showing Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister and the head of Likud party, in Bnei Brak, Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Israel is heading into its fifth election in under four years on Nov. 1. [AP Photo/Oded Balilty]

Nevertheless, the outcome, in terms of which political bloc will be able to form a government, is too close to call. The result will largely depend on the surging vote for the far-right, fascistic forces led by Jewish Power legislator Itamar Ben Gvir and his Religious Zionism partner Bezalel Smotrich, who are allied with Netanyahu, and the plunging support for the traditional parties of the “left”, and the Arab parties competing for the votes of Israel’s Palestinian citizens making up 20 percent of its 9.3 million population.

The 5.5 million Palestinians who live under the gun in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza have no vote, although the 700,000 or so Israeli settlers that live there do.

Today’s elections were called last June, one year after the formation in June 2021 of yet another unstable coalition with a majority of one after the 73-year-old Netanyahu—on trial for corruption, fraud and breach of trust for his actions while serving as prime minister—proved unable to form a coalition despite his Likud Party winning the most seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

United only in their opposition to Netanyahu, the coalition consisted of eight disparate parties, spanning most of Israel’s mainstream parties, including those ostensibly committed to the Olso Accords and a Palestinian mini-state—Meretz, Labor, Yesh Atid and Blue and White—and included for the first time one of Israel’s Arab parties, Ra’am.

In a rotten deal aimed at ousting Netanyahu and securing the support of some of the secular rightwing parties, Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party won the second largest number of seats, ceded the premiership to Naftali Bennett, a former settlers’ leader, even though his party won only six seats, and agreed not to negotiate with the Palestinians over statehood for the duration of their alliance.

What passes for Israel’s left and centrist parties then proceeded to participate in an ever-sharper lurch to the right, an escalation of Israel’s covert wars against Iran and its allies, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollahin Iran, the Persian Gulf, Syria and the eastern Mediterranean—and its attacks on the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, including administrative detention without charge, house demolitions, land theft, almost daily raids and mass arrest operations, collective punishment and trampling on basic human rights.

In June, as Bennett faced mounting opposition from his own right-wing ministers, Netanyahu’s opposition bloc engineered a parliamentary maneouvre aimed at bringing down the government and securing his return to power. Following the coalition’s collapse and in accordance with their coalition deal, Lapid replaced Bennett as caretaker prime minister until the elections set for November 1 and the formation of a new government that could take weeks if not months to negotiate. Bennett, with his party—now led by strident right-winger Ayelet Shaked—viewed as unlikely to cross the minimum threshold to qualify for any seats in the Knesset, promptly announced his resignation from politics.

The elections come amid key domestic issues, including the annual budget for 2023 that must find cuts in services to fund a pay rise awarded to teachers to avert a national strike at the start of the school year and the health, economic and social fallout from the continuing COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 12,000 people and is on the rise following the lifting of restrictions.

The skyrocketing cost of living and rental charges, among the highest in the advanced countries, is making it hard for Israelis and Palestinians alike to put food on the table.

Israel’s ruling elite, the dozen or so wealthy families that dominate economic life, has refused to lift a finger to alleviate the mounting social and economic suffering.

The beneficiaries have been the far-right, fascistic forces of Ben Gvir and Smotrich who support ethnic cleansing, with the media amplifying their every word. It was Netanyahu who engineered their entry into the Knesset to bolster his bloc prior to the 2021 elections.

These racists, the ideological successors of the banned Kahanist movement, are forming vigilante groups in Israel’s Negev and Bat Yam, an impoverished Tel Aviv suburb, and inciting pogrom-like violence against the Palestinians in both the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Israel’s mixed towns and cities. Ben-Gvir was filmed recently pulling out a handgun during a campaign stop in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, where he demanded the police fire on the residents.

Their Jewish supremacist agenda includes Israeli rule over the West Bank, the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian population, the demolition of the al-Aqsa Mosque to make way for the building of a Jewish Temple, and the imposition of religious law.

Both leaders support the introduction of a “French Law” that bars criminal investigations into a sitting prime minister, with Ben Gvir, a lawyer who defends Jewish extremists, supporting retrospective legislation that would end Netanyahu’s trial. Netanyahu, taking his cue from former US President Donald Trump, has called his trial a “rigged” political witch-hunt by a leftist judiciary.

This has been enough to guarantee them key posts in a Netanyahu-led government that would remove any remaining restraints on the imposition of direct military rule over the Palestinians. They constitute a serious threat to the Israeli and Palestinian working class, strengthening the far-right forces in the state apparatus and in society that are already terrorizing immigrants, refugees and human rights and left-wing activists. Netanyahu and the media’s cultivation of these forces demonstrate that the ruling class, like its counterparts internationally, is preparing for the violent suppression of social and political resistance, for which it needs the fascists.

Their rise has been aided by the refusal of the Labor Party, the nominally left parties and the corporatist trade unions to lift a finger to defend the living standards of working people. Similarly, the four Arab parties face dwindling support and voter apathy. Mansour Abbas, the leader of the conservative Islamist party Ra’am, was the first leader of an Arab party to join a coalition government based on the promise of funding for Israel’s impoverished Arab towns and cities and pledges to tackle inequality that proved to be little more than empty words. Should the Arab parties fall below the electoral threshold, it would further weaken the links between the Arab working class and its traditional leaders that have bound them to the State of Israel.

Workers, Jewish and Arab, face the complete dead-end of bourgeois politics. All the establishment parties and the trade unions have acted against the interests of the working class, slashing expenditure on education, health, essential public services and the social safety net, while overseeing a massive decline in the living standards of those on lower incomes and pensions. Workers also face the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic, climate change that has brought drought, fires and floods, and the war against Russia that threatens to draw Israel/Palestine and the entire Middle East into the front line.

Resistance is growing. The ruling class is preparing for this by giving carte blanche to the military to behave with impunity, as the recent murder of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the mass closures and raid and arrest operations in the West Bank have demonstrated, giving succour to the fascists and turning to authoritarian forms of rule.

Europe’s governments prepare third winter of mass COVID-19 infection and death

Samuel Tissot

Contrary to the propaganda of the European political establishment and the corporate media the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Thousands of people continue to die each week across Europe from the virus and a new winter surge, alongside other respiratory illnesses and increasing poverty, will lead to hundreds of thousands more excess deaths on the continent.

A patient is pushed on a trolley outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, during England's third national lockdown since the coronavirus outbreak began. Britain, with over 81,000 dead, has the deadliest virus toll in Europe and the number of hospital beds filled by COVID-19 patients has risen steadily for more than a month. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Another winter of mass infection and death from COVID-19 is primarily a product of the European ruling class’s decision to allow the virus to freely spread through the population. With a “vaccine only” strategy and the near-total abandonment of even minimal measures to contain the spread of the virus, epidemiologists are warning of the deadly impact of two new vaccine resistant variants this winter.

In Europe over the past two weeks cases have fallen slightly as the eighth wave of the virus slowly subsides. In the last seven days there were just over 1 million cases throughout Europe, compared to 1.5 million in the week before. There were 4,216 deaths in the last week, compared to 5,449 the week before.

However, scientists are warning that the rapid spread of immunity-evading new variants in Europe will lead to a massive surge of the virus on the scale of the Omicron wave last winter. Omicron was first detected in Europe on November 19, 2021, and the original variant and its offshoots have caused the majority of over 600,000 European COVID-19 deaths since.

On Friday, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned of the spread of the BQ.1.1 variant, which has immune escape from BA.5-targeted antibodies. The BA.5 and BA.4 drove the summer waves of COVID-19 throughout Europe.

BQ.1.1 is already dominant in France and accounts for more than 40 percent of infections in the UK. The ECDC predicts that it will be dominant across the continent in mid-November. This is also when new bivalent vaccines protecting against BA.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are scheduled to hit the European market. The effectiveness of these bivalent vaccines and their older counterparts against BQ.1 will be reduced, although it is not yet known to what extent.

In a press conference on October 26, Marco Cavaleri, the head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) vaccine strategy, stated that the EMA is also tracking the progress of the XBB variant in Europe. Due to its high number of protein spike mutations, it has been dubbed “the nightmare variant,” and is currently driving surges in Singapore and India. Early studies of XBB show significant immune escape from vaccines and the nullification of anti-viral treatments. A pre-print study from a lab in China describes the variant as, “the most antibody-evasive strain tested, far exceeding BA.5.”

It is possible that the vaccine resistant BQ1.1 and XBB variants will drive back-to-back or simultaneous waves. Cornelius Roemer, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told Nature magazine, “If it turns out that XBB is going to dominate globally in the end, we might see some sort of double wave in Europe and North America.”

It is also likely that the two variants are so genetically distinct that infection-based immunity conferred by BQ1.1 will be evaded by XBB and vice versa. Meanwhile, the level of vaccine conferred immunity is also waning amongst the European population. New vaccine doses are being taken up at a much slower rate than previously and the level of immunity gained from previous doses is continuously decreasing. These factors will significantly increase the number of infections and deaths over the winter.

In a massive COVID-19 surge, alongside other respiratory illnesses such as influenza and the effects of increased poverty and potential energy shortages, it is likely that many European hospitals, many of which are already near or overcapacity, will collapse under the weight of incoming patients.

Discounting the initial wave of the virus in in early 2020, this will be the northern hemisphere’s third winter of mass infection and death, and its second since the development of vaccines.

Indeed, over each of the last three years, the level of European deaths has remained consistent, despite the invention of life-saving vaccines. If March 1, 2020, is taken as the start of the pandemic, then in the first 12 months, around 845,000 died in Europe. The next year, after vaccines had been developed, between March 1, 2021, and March 1, 2022, 905,000 Europeans died. Since March 1, 2022, 220,000 people have died, and this is before the winter surge.

This constant level of death and the ever-present threat of illness underlines the criminal nature of the ruling class response to the pandemic. In France, a trial involving major figures under Emmanuel Macron’s first presidency is revealing considerable evidence that the French government broke the law in failing to take measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. This policy was mirrored throughout the Europe and the world, apart from China.

Measures were only reluctantly put in place in March 2020 by governments following a wave of wildcat strikes which began in Italy and soon spread throughout Europe and to the United States. However, at this time capitalist governments resolved not to eliminate the virus, but to force workers back to workplaces to resume the extraction of profit as soon as possible.

After the development of vaccines, the governments have pursued a “vaccine only” policy that has proven to be deadly for the working class. These vaccines were highly effective and have enormously reduced the proportion of those infected who fall seriously ill or die. But infection rates surged to astronomic levels, so that even after the first life-saving vaccines were rolled out in Europe in December 2020, nearly 1.5 million Europeans died from COVID-19 due to the malign neglect of the ruling class.

Under this policy, the impact of pandemic on the population is not being alleviated, but in fact threatens to get worse. In the same October 26 press conference, Cavaleri warned that new COVID-19 variants are evolving faster than vaccines are being developed. According to the World Health Organization, now over 300 Omicron sub-lineages are being tracked worldwide.

With more and more variants spreading freely, the mutation rate of the virus is increasing exponentially, making it harder to track variants and ascertain their risk, in a situation described as “variant soup” according to an article in Nature. A “vaccine only” strategy thus only ensures year after year of mass infection and death. Furthermore, epidemiologists’ ability to accurately track variants has also been systemically undermined by the gutting of testing infrastructure and reporting since European governments declared the pandemic over.

The criminal response of the French government in March 2020 was not the exception, but the rule for the pandemic response through Europe. At every possible juncture governments have lifted what remained of measures to stem the spread of the virus.

The ruling class in Europe and elsewhere have been able to achieve this only insofar as it has successfully suppressed scientific knowledge of the virus and its destructive impact on the human body. This continues with the consistent denunciation of China’s Zero COVID policy, which has saved millions of lives and has shown that eliminating the virus globally is possible.

As more infectious variants spread in Germany, rising number of COVID patients experience severe illness

Tamino Dreisam

As the number of severe COVID-19 cases rises and more infectious variants spread, politicians across party lines are showing their willingness to accept a new winter of death in the pandemic.

As of last week, between 700,000 and 1.6 million people in Germany were symptomatically infected with the virus. Although the autumn vacations, which are currently underway in many states, appear to have reduced the incidence of infection, the 7-day rate is still 464.1 infections per hundred thousand members of the population. However, due to the abolition of compulsory testing and infrastructure, official figures have long since inadequately reflected the actual incidence of infection.

An intubated COVID-19 patient gets treatment at the intensive care unit at the Westerstede Clinical Center, a military-civilian hospital in Westerstede, northwest Germany [AP Photo/Martin Meissner]

This is evident from the continuing rise in the number of outbreaks in hospitals and nursing homes. In medical treatment facilities, there were 274 outbreaks last week, 126 more than the previous week. In addition, 38 people died from past outbreaks. In nursing homes and homes for the elderly, the number of outbreaks increased from 567 the previous week to 687 last week, when 99 people died from previous outbreaks.

The seriousness of the situation is particularly evident in hospitals. The number of hospitalizations has been rising for weeks and, when adjusted, is 20 per 100,000, or about 16,000 hospitalizations per week. It has thus tripled within one month. 1,723 people need intensive care treatment.

Two weeks ago, the chairman of the German Hospital Association (DKG) Gerald Gaß told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND): “We have significant increases in Covid positive patients. Compared to the previous week, occupancy has risen by 50 percent. ... With around 19,000 positively tested patients, we are currently as high as at the peak times of the summer wave. ... We are heading for extremely difficult weeks across the board and not just in southern Germany.”

Christian Karagiannidis, head of the DIVI intensive care registry, also warned, “In some regions of Bavaria, Hesse and in several cities in North Rhine-Westphalia, we already have hotspots where there are hardly any free intensive care beds left because staff are often symptomatic and also absent for longer periods.”

Since then, hospitalization rates have risen steadily, bringing many hospitals to the brink of overcrowding. “The emergency centres are overcrowded, patients are piling up in the corridors,” complained the works council of the municipal Munich Clinic, for example. At Caritas Hospital in Bad Mergentheim, the medical director said more coronavirus patients were currently being treated than at any time in the last two years. Those experiencing severe illness as a result were also on the rise.

Hospitals are also burdened by a high number of staff absences, due to staff infections. For example, Detlef Troppens, chairman of the Brandenburg State Hospital Association (LKB), warned Monday, “We have 10 to 15 percent ward closures.” There are already restrictions in the treatment of patients.

Rising energy costs as a result of the war against Russia are also bringing numerous hospitals to the brink of collapse. “The financial situation continues to come to a head drastically and is assuming proportions that threaten hospitals’ existence,” reported Björn Saeger, management spokesman at the municipal hospital in Brandenburg an der Havel. Also, Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (Social Democrat, SPD) warned even that hospitals “face a completely drastic liquidity problem come in the next months.”

The increase in the number of those experiencing severe illness following infection with coronavirus has also resulted in a growing number of deaths. Since the beginning of the week, 895 people have already died—an average of 179 per day, which is more than twice as many as died at the same time a year ago and about five times as many as died at the same time two years ago.

The situation threatens to worsen in the autumn and winter with the spread of Omicron subvariants BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. Both exhibit high immune escape, so that even the recently recovered and fully vaccinated can become infected with the variant.

According to Robert Koch Institute data, the BQ.1 variant currently accounts for 2 percent of infections and the BQ.1.1 variant for just under 3 percent. However, the figures are about three weeks behind the curve and are thus already much higher.

According to calculations by the German Cancer Research Centre, the proportion is already 6 and 7 percent. According to news magazine Der Spiegel, Cambridge scientist and bioinformatician Cornelius Römer suspects that the proportion of BQ.1.1 is already 10 percent.

He expects “that BQ.1.1 will drive a wave of variants in Europe and North America before the end of November. Its relative share has more than doubled every week.” The current autumn wave would then be joined by another—driven by the other Omicron subvariants. The result would be a double wave.

Numerous scientists share this opinion: according to Augsburger Allgemeine, the German Charité vaccine researcher, Leif Sander suspects, “In the next few weeks, BQ.1.1 could become the most widespread variant and displace BA.5.”

Friedemann Weber, director of the Institute of Virology at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, told Focus magazine, BQ.1.1 is “the fastest-growing virus variant in Germany at the moment. While its share of cases is relatively small and BA.5 remains dominant, that may soon change, as the BQ1.1 curve is much steeper.”

However, politicians from all parties have made it clear that they will not do anything about the rising number of those experiencing severe outcomes, nor about the spread of new variants. Despite the surge in recent weeks, no state government has introduced stronger infection control measures. On the contrary, numerous leading politicians openly proclaim their intention to accept the current conditions.

For example, Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens) warned against closing schools or children’s and youth facilities in the coming months. “Under no circumstances should day-care centres and schools, gymnasiums and youth clubs be shut down this autumn and winter. Not because of coronavirus and also not because of energy savings.”

Brandenburg’s SPD state parliamentary group leader Daniel Keller rejected the call for an expansion of the mandatory mask-wearing requirement, saying, “The incidence rate in hospitals is in the red, but in terms of the occupancy of intensive care beds, we are not yet in the critical area,” He warned against “political actionism”: “We have a mandatory mask requirement where it is relevant.”

In his speech at the Christian Social Union (CSU) party conference, Bavarian state Prime Minister Markus Söder also ruled out any real measures to combat the pandemic: “We will no longer do cordoning off in winter. No way.” He added that COVID-19 in Germany was on its way to becoming endemic and that the state government would also set its sights on relaxing quarantine rules.

Last week, the Green Party-Christian Democrat state government in Baden-Württemberg even went so far as to overturn the mask-wearing requirement in nursing homes.

Lula is elected president of Brazil as Bolsonaro maintains silence on results

Guilherme Ferreira

Workers Party (PT)’s candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, defeating the incumbent fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula won 60.3 million votes (50.9 percent), against 58.2 million votes (49.1 percent) for Bolsonaro. This was the smallest margin of victory in a presidential race since 1989, the first election after the end of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

Even with both candidates receiving record votes, a quarter of Brazilian voters refused to vote, either by not showing up to the polls (20.57 percent) or by casting blank or invalid ballots(4.59 percent).

Brazil's president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva addressing supporters in São Paulo [Photo: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil]

Inspired by former US President Donald Trump and trying to repeat in Brazil a “Capitol Hill scenario,” Bolsonaro has carried out, with the support of the armed forces, a systematic campaign to discredit the Brazilian electoral system. He will undoubtedly seek to exploit the divisions exposed in the election, with two months to escalate his dictatorial conspiracy up until the presidential inauguration on January 1, 2023.

Of the 27 Brazilian states, including the Federal District, Lula won in 13 and Bolsonaro in 14. Lula had the most votes in the nine states of Brazil’s impoverished Northeast, while Bolsonaro won in every state in the Midwest, the South, and in three of the four states in the Southeast.

Sunday’s election also chose the governors of 12 Brazilian states. Along with the right-wing União Brasil party, whose origins date back to the ruling party of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the PT was the party with the most elected governors. It won in the four Northeastern states it already ruled, Bahia, Rio Grande do Norte, Piauí and Ceará. In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and richest state, the PT’s candidate for governor, Fernando Haddad, was defeated by Bolsonaro’s ally, Tarcísio de Freitas.

Lula’s victory was hailed by leaders of imperialist powers and the self-proclaimed “leftist” presidents of Latin America, which in recent years has seen a return to power in several countries of bourgeois nationalist politicians linked to the “Pink Tide.”

“Congratulations, dear Lula, on your election that begins a new chapter in the history of Brazil,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted, “I look forward to close and reliable cooperation.” In November of last year, Lula met with Macron and Scholz on a trip to Europe that sought the legitimization of his candidacy by the European imperialist powers.

US President Joe Biden wrote: “I send my congratulations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections. I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead.” The New York Times also hailed Lula’s victory after endorsing his candidacy in an editorial on Thursday titled “Brazil’s Presidential Election Will Determine the Planet’s Future.”

In his speech after the announcement of the election results, Lula emphasized that he intends to form a government of national unity with the political right to “rebuild” Brazil. His victory, he said, was the result of “an immense democratic movement that was formed, above political parties, personal interests and ideologies, so that democracy would emerge victorious.”

He claimed that the fight against hunger was the number one priority of his government, while also promising to “reestablish dialogue between government, businessmen, workers and organized civil society” and to “regain the credibility, predictability and stability of the country, so that investors— national and foreign—will regain confidence in Brazil.”

Recognizing Lula’s efforts to win the support of the section of the bourgeoisie which opposed him, and to form “a government beyond the PT,” the São Paulo stock market closed up on the first day after the election, and the dollar was down.

Regarding policies for the Amazon, Lula made a point in his speech that was a signal to the imperialist governments, especially those of Macron and Biden, who had criticized Bolsonaro’s management of the rainforest. “We are open to international cooperation to preserve the Amazon, whether in the form of investment or scientific research,” Lula declared.

On Paulista Avenue in São Paulo, where Lula’s supporters celebrated the victory of the PT candidate, Lula also said that “In any place in the world, the defeated president would have already called me to concede defeat, but so far he hasn’t. I don’t know if he will call. And I don’t know if he will acknowledge it.”

Twenty-four hours after Lula’s victory on Sunday night, Bolsonaro had still refused to comment on the election results. His ominous silence comes on top of the military’s refusal to present the conclusions of its “parallel count” of the vote before the inauguration of the new president. This intervention by the armed forces was initiated on the basis of false allegations of a “risk of fraud” at the polls,

The coming weeks will be marked by an escalation of political tensions in the Brazilian state and society.

The week before the election had already seen new attempts by Bolsonaro’s supporters to cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results. Last Monday, Bolsonaro’s campaign organizers and his minister of communications, Fabio Faria, alleged that radio stations in the Northeast had stopped broadcasting their electoral propaganda, giving an advantage to the PT candidate. Politicians linked to the fascistic president, among them his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, used these allegations as a pretext for demanding that the elections be postponed. The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) found that the accusations were backed by no evidence.

In a flagrant attempt to make it harder for voters to reach the polls on election day, the Federal Highway Police (PRF) conducted more than 600 operations against public transportation, half of them in the states in the Northeast. The decision to organize the blockades came directly from the president on October 19, who met with the justice minister who oversees the PRF.

A ruling by TSE president Alexandre de Morares, the day before the elections, prohibiting operations that interfered with the transportation of voters was provocatively ignored by the PRF. The TSE has sought to avoid a confrontation by declaring that the illegal operations did not alter the electoral outcome.

Both Bolsonaro and the military are looking for a pretext to advance their authoritarian agenda after his electoral defeat.

Last week, the far-right Gazeta do Povo website published an article titled “Military worries about disorder in the streets after Sunday’s vote count.” The article stated: “The perception among active and reserve military personnel speaking to Gazeta do Povo is that an eventual defeat of Bolsonaro at the polls could further inflame the spirits of voters and lead them to the streets in demonstrations and protests against the TSE and the Supreme Court (STF).” In this case, the report continued, “the Armed Forces would be responsible for establishing order by means of an Operation to Guarantee Law and Order [that is, a domestic intervention by the military].”

Retired General Maynard Santa Rosa, former head of the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs of the Presidency of the Republic at the beginning of the Bolsonaro administration, was further quoted in the article: “I think it’s not only possible, but probable. If there is some climate of uprising and conflict that gets out of the control of the civil authorities, it is possible that there will be a participation of troops. It is worrying. I think we are in a climate of potential crisis.”

Initial demonstrations of this character began shortly after the announcement of the election results, with Bolsonaro supporters blocking roads across the country, especially in regions dominated by sections of agribusiness and corporations linked to the fascistic president. As of early Monday afternoon, 81 protests had been registered on highways in 14 states across Brazil. The protesters, some identified as truck drivers, have as their main demand an intervention by the military.

In Brasilia, traffic on the Esplanade of the Ministries was blocked by the Public Safety Secretariat of the Federal District after “identifying a possible act scheduled for the location on social networks.” In addition to the seats of the legislative and executive branches, the Supreme Federal Court, one of the main targets of Bolsonaro’s threats, is located on the Esplanade.

Should Lula make it through the turmoil that is expected in the coming months, he will lead a government even more to the right than his previous two administrations (2003-2011), and one marked by deep political instability.

US GDP up but recession trends grow

Nick Beams

The US economy grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the third quarter after experiencing contractions of 1.6 percent and 0.6 percent in the first two quarters respectively.

But the latest data have not dispelled fears that the world’s largest economy could move into a recession next year. In fact, some of the figures show this prospect is becoming increasingly likely as the Federal Reserve continues to lift interest rates to slow the economy as it tries to suppress the wage demands resulting from 40-year high inflation.

A man shops at a supermarket on Wednesday, July 27, 2022, in New York. [AP Photo/Andres Kudacki]

Recession fears have been heightened by the figures on consumer spending. These showed an increase of only 1.4 percent for the quarter, a slower rate than the 2 percent rise over the previous three months, a sign that inflation is having its effects.

While consumer spending is the largest item in gross domestic product (GDP), accounting for around 70 percent, investment by businesses is one of its key driving forces.

Gross private investment fell by 8.56 percent with the biggest drop in residential spending, down by 26.4 percent—a result of the Fed’s rising interest rates that have pushed home mortgage rates to 7 percent.

The major source of the increase in the GDP number was export growth, which added 2.7 percentage points to overall GDP. But this is not likely to be sustained as the high US dollar—up by 17 percent against a basket of the currencies of major economies so far this year—hits the sales of major US corporations, especially high-tech companies.

Much of the rise in exports came from the sale of oil and natural gas to Europe as US corporations cashed in on the shortages caused by the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

While US President Biden said the GDP number showed the economy continued to “power forward,” some economists have described it as a mirage. This assertion is backed by reports of growing problems for major tech companies that play a central role in the US economy.

Last week, according to a Financial Times (FT) report, “Microsoft warned… of a marked slowdown in the cloud computing business as large customers pause their spending in the face of a slowing economy.” The article said Microsoft expected revenue from software sales to PC makers to fall more than 30 percent in the current quarter.

As with other companies, Microsoft has been hit by the rise in the dollar, making its products more expensive in international markets, leading to a fall in revenue of $2.3 billion.

Apple has also warned it will have a difficult December quarter as it faces “significant” foreign exchange headwinds. In a conference call last Thursday, finance officer Luca Maestri said the company could be hit with a loss of revenue of around $12 billion because of the effects of the rising dollar.

He said the company expected revenue from the sale of its Mac computers to “decline substantially year-over-year.”

Amazon has said consumer spending is in “uncharted waters” as it downgrades its revenue forecasts. The company’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said rising inflation and higher energy costs had led to businesses and consumers reassessing their purchasing power.

Amazon is planning for job cuts with the company becoming “very careful” in its hiring policies.

“We are preparing for what could be a slower growth period. We certainly are looking at our cost structure and areas where we can save money,” he said.

There are also significant signs of a downturn in online advertising on social media. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, last week reported the lowest third quarter growth of revenue since 2013, except for a contraction at the start of the pandemic.

Commenting on the result, Evelyn Mitchel, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, told the FT: “It’s a bad omen for digital advertising at large. This disappointing quarter for Google signifies hard times ahead if market conditions continue to deteriorate.”

Alphabet chief Sundar Pinchai said on a conference call last week that it was a “tough time in the ad market” as the company’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said the strong US dollar has sliced 5 percentage points from revenue growth.

The hardest hit high-tech and social media company is Meta, the owner of Facebook. Besides the problems affecting the other firms, its worsening situation is being compounded by fierce competition from rivals such as Tik Tok and the spending of billions of dollars to create what its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, regards as the next stage of the internet.

He is out to create a so-called metaverse in which people would communicate in a virtual world. But the project has generally been given the thumbs down by the financial markets. As one analyst told the Wall Street Journal: “We’re incredibly frustrated to see expenses balloon with an almost total disregard for investor expectations.”

On Wednesday last week investors wiped off more than $65 billion from Meta’s market capitalisation after it had reported another quarter of falling revenues as investors remained unconvinced that the metaverse project was going to succeed, despite Zuckerberg’s entreaties that they should stay in for the long haul.

Such has been its fall that whereas Meta was in the top 10 companies of the S&P 500 at the start of the year, today it is not even in the top 20.

But the malaise extends more broadly across the high-tech sector where share values, boosted by ultra-low interest rates, are now falling because of the tighter monetary regime being imposed by the Fed.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the total value of the tech-heavy NASDAQ index has fallen by $8 trillion this year putting it on a par with the $5 trillion loss (equivalent to $8.6 trillion in today’s terms) in the years of the so-called tech-wreck 2000–2002.

The interest rate hikes are also creating turbulence and dangers in financial markets. At the end of last week, the WSJ joined other sections of the financial press in warning of the growing problems in the $24 trillion US Treasury market, the basis of the US and global financial system.

These problems centre on liquidity—the ability of traders to easily make large deals without causing major movements. Tight liquidity can set off a panic as happened in March 2020 when, for several days, there were virtually no buyers for US government debt, supposedly the safest financial asset in the world.

The WSJ article noted that while there had not yet been a serious breakdown, “the possibility is far from unthinkable given the tumult this year.”

“Many traders and portfolio managers,” it continued, “warn that such a development would tear through other markets, potentially requiring intervention from the Federal Reserve to prevent a full-blown crisis.”

Andrew Kreicher, a director at Wells Fargo, told the WSJ that liquidity in Treasury bonds recently was the worst he had seen over a sustained period.

“There are so many systems in other asset classes that use Treasury's as a building block. If you have rot in the foundation, the whole house is at risk,” he said.

US to station nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in Australia

Oscar Grenfell

An Australian television program yesterday revealed advanced plans for the US to station B-52 bombers in northern Australia. The deployment of the nuclear-capable bombers, which are crucial to US strike capabilities, marks a significant escalation of the militarisation of Australia, the Indo-Pacific region and the world.

The target is clear. The representatives of pro-war think tanks who spoke on last night’s episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program, and those who have commented in the press since, have openly stated that the bombers are being dispatched to prepare for a war with China that would threaten a global nuclear catastrophe.

In other words, even as the US and its allies are continuously escalating their war with Russia over Ukraine, they are transforming the entire Indo-Pacific into a powder keg that could erupt at any point.

B-52 bomber flies over Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. The US is preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia. [AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File]

For the strategists of American imperialism, the war that is already underway against Russia is the necessary prelude to war against China, the chief threat to US global dominance. This was spelled out in the latest US National Security Strategy, released last month, which proclaimed a “decisive decade” of “geopolitical conflict between the major powers.” China, it stated, was “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order,” something the US would combat with everything at its disposal.

The stationing of the bombers points to the disastrous implications of this program, driven by the long-term decline of American imperialism and the deepening crisis of the entire global capitalist system.

“Four Corners” revealed that the US is preparing to build a “squadron operations facility” at the Tindal air force base in northern Australia. It will include a vast hangar and logistical facilities that can equip six B-52 bombers, which will be rotated out of the facility, likely being based there during the tropical dry season. The US will construct jet fuel tanks at Tindal and an ammunition base. An Australian “upgrade” of the facility is expanding its runways and other capabilities.

Meanwhile, the US is building eleven giant jet fuel tanks in Darwin.

The US air force confirmed the plans, declaring: “The ability to deploy US Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power.”

“Four Corners” also reported a major expansion of the joint US-Australian Pine Gap facility in Central Australia. The military-intelligence facility plays a central role in the technical planning and waging of US military operations throughout Eurasia. The Nautilus Institute has found that the number of its super-powerful satellite antennas has increased from 33 in 2015 to 45 today. The quantitative expansion has been accompanied by the deployment of increasingly sophisticated equipment.

Becca Wasser, of the hawkish Centre for New American Security, told “Four Corners” that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further.” She blithely declared that the deployment would ensure that Tindal and Darwin, with a population of 150,000 people, would inevitably be a target in any US war between China and Australia.

Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper, who has close ties to US and Australian military and intelligence circles, wrote this morning that the B-52 deployment heralded a “growing ‘pre-war’ environment,” adding: “The drumbeats of potential war are sounding across the world. This is not alarmist, it’s reality.”

Sheridan bluntly stated: “The B-52 bombers will have the ability to deliver powerful strategic strikes on Chinese bases and assets in the South China Sea, and indeed in the South Pacific should any ever be developed there. They could also fly from the Northern Territory to mainland China itself, unleash a payload and fly back.”

A Chinese spokesman warned this morning that the deployment was part of a broader US drive which “increased regional tensions, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and may trigger a regional arms race.”

The dispatch of the fighters to northern Australia is part of a US program to diversify its strike capabilities and to align regional allies ever more closely with the war preparations. Northern Australia has been earmarked to play a particularly crucial role. Unlike the US base on Guam, where the B-52s are often located, Australia is out of reach of most conventional Chinese missiles, though not of its intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In justifying the deployment, various pro-war commentators and the “Four Corners” program itself have claimed that the dispatch of the B-52 bombers is a defensive response to the threat of a war triggered by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

This, however, is a lie. It is the US that has deliberately transformed Taiwan into a major flashpoint of war. Successive US administrations have undermined the decades-long norm, under which the American government and the international community de facto recognised the Chinese Communist Party regime as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan. The US has greatly boosted its arms sales to Taipei, along with military trainers, stoked Taiwanese separatism and conducted one provocative diplomatic visit after another.

This has nothing to do with a newfound concern for “little Taiwan.” Instead, the territory, located just 160 kilometres off the Chinese mainland, is to play a parallel role to Ukraine that the US exploited to provoke war with Russia. The aim is to goad China into an invasion, which would be used as the pretext for open war waged by the US.

The militarisation of northern Australia gives the lie to the claims that the heightened US aggression is a response to the recent developments relating to Taiwan.

In 2011, the then Labor government signed on to the US “pivot to Asia,” a vast military build-up throughout the Asia-Pacific, directed against China. That included the establishment of a new US base in Darwin, which now hosts more than 2,000 marines and other measures integrating Australia into the US war machine.

Under the Pentagon’s “Air-Sea Battle” strategy, sketched out when the “pivot” was launched, Australia and its north is to play a decisive role as a “southern anchor” during war with China. It is to be a launching point for US and allied war planes and the staging ground for imposing a blockade of the key shipping routes in the region, which China is dependent upon for most of its raw materials and trade.

The deployment of the B-52s is a warning that these long-running plans are now being activated.

This, along with the entire US-led program of global war, takes the form of a conspiracy against the population. The plans to dispatch the B-52s have never been debated in the Australian parliament, much less publicly-announced. Instead, they have been hatched in closed-door discussions between the US and Australian governments, militaries and intelligence agencies. They were found by “Four Corners” in US tender documents.

In the case of the B-52s, this secrecy is particularly significant. While the aircraft and other nuclear-capable strikers have previously stopped over in Australia, they have never been based in that country, which is officially a non-nuclear state. Yet, the US, as a matter of policy, refuses to confirm or deny whether any of its nuclear-capable war planes and warships are carrying nuclear payloads.

In other words, Australia’s status as a non-nuclear state has effectively been overturned without any public discussion. Significantly, the project, which appears to have begun under the previous Liberal-National government, is being completed by the current Labor administration.

It is likewise pressing ahead with AUKUS, the militarist alliance with Britain and the US, unveiled in September 2021. Under the pact, Australia is acquiring nuclear-powered submarines and has also been earmarked as a launch site for new era hypersonic missiles.

This militarist program is conducted under a veil of secrecy, in Australia and internationally, because the governments know that workers and young people oppose war and want peace.