New Zealand Labour government scraps remaining COVID public health measures

Tom Peters

On Monday, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced that the government was ending the requirement for people with COVID-19 to isolate at home for seven days, and to wear masks in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Subsidies for COVID-related sick leave have been removed.

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. [AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File]

These were the last remaining mitigation measures to slow the spread of the potentially deadly and debilitating coronavirus. In late 2021, the Labour Party government ended its zero-COVID policy, which used border quarantine and temporary lockdowns to eliminate the virus from the community.

Schools and businesses were fully reopened and mask and vaccine mandates lifted in 2022, as the government adopted the same homicidal profits-over-lives agenda that has now killed around 25 million people worldwide.

By July 2022 New Zealand was leading the world in per capita weekly COVID-19 infections and deaths. The country’s total COVID-19 death toll surged from about 30 in October 2021—among the lowest in the world—to 3,249 according to the Ministry of Health’s latest figures.

The real number is probably higher: another 140 deaths are unconfirmed but likely due to COVID. There are 1,385 more people who died within four weeks of testing positive for COVID, but the Ministry asserts that these were not caused by the virus. New Zealand’s all-cause mortality increased by 10 percent in 2022, with 3,642 more deaths than 2021.

At a press conference, Hipkins and Health Minister Ayesha Verrall did not hide their enthusiasm for ditching all measures to reduce the spread of COVID, with the prime minister saying he had “longed for this particular day.”

The event was almost like an election rally. With voting scheduled for October 14, Labour is running a right-wing campaign with pledges to boost spending on the military, tougher law-and-order measures, and now the complete evisceration of COVID-19 protections.

Verrall declared: “While our case numbers will continue to fluctuate, we have not seen the dramatic peaks that characterised COVID-19 rates last year. This, paired with the population’s immunity levels, means Cabinet and I am advised we’re positioned to safely remove the remaining COVID-19 requirements.”

Hipkins and Verrall did not mention the fact that every week dozens of people are dying from COVID-19 and hospitalisations are rising. Another 29 deaths were added last week and 171 people were in hospital with the virus on Sunday night—up from 116 in hospital two weeks earlier.

They remained silent on the current surge in COVID-19 infections and hospital admissions in the US, Britain and across the northern hemisphere, fueled in part by the new and even more infectious EG.5 or Eris variant. New Zealand will inevitably be hit by a similar surge.

Notwithstanding Verrall’s statements, immunity from vaccination, while it can decrease the severity of COVID cases, is not enough to stop the spread of the virus. Nor does it prevent Long COVID, which can be potentially debilitating. The risk of developing Long COVID, a condition that affects the brain, heart and lungs, increases with every repeat infection.

The government’s pretence of being guided by health advice is farcical.

Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles, a former advisor to the government’s pandemic response, wrote on Twitter: “Gutted by today’s news that masking in healthcare settings and mandatory isolation are [gone].”

Writing in the Post, she pointed out that immuno-compromised people would be at significant risk from the removal of restrictions. Drawing attention to the danger posed by Eris, Wiles noted: “In the last month, Ireland has seen a five-fold increase in the number of outbreaks in hospitals and nursing and care homes—from five to 30—and a six-fold increase in the number of people in hospital with Covid—from 63 to 378.”

Epidemiologists Nick Wilson and Michael Baker—both former government advisors—also criticised the announcement. Wilson told Stuff: “The government is so keen to pretend it’s all over, despite people dying daily in hospital. It’s not trivial.”

Baker pointed out to Radio NZ that COVID “is still, in New Zealand, amongst the infectious diseases, the leading cause of death and hospitalisation.”

Kelvin Ward, the urgent care physician who began a health workers’ petition in March 2020 calling for a lockdown, wrote on Twitter: “I am dumbfounded. How on earth do you expect ‘healthcare workers’ to continue to want to work in an increasingly stressed healthcare system, when your government makes a conscious choice not to limit transmission of an infection that causes death, morbidity and long term disability… which WILL increasingly put more and more stress on the health system.”

Ward added: “This decision shows disdain for the vulnerable and the marginalised. The death of public health and collective responsibility.”

On the other hand, according to Stuff, business groups such as the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce welcomed the end of self-isolation: “Chamber boss Leann Watson said the leave requirements had added extra cost to business owners and exacerbated workforce pressures.”

As far as the business elite and the government are concerned, people with COVID-19 should be compelled to go to work where they can infect others, otherwise profits will suffer. Last year it was revealed that government officials deliberately sought to reduce COVID testing because positive test results would take people “out of the available workforce.”

The Labour government has always been guided first and foremost by the needs of big business. The initial lockdown in March-April 2020, which reduced cases to zero, was imposed by then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern because the government was afraid of mass action by thousands of healthcare workers and others demanding a scientific public health response to protect lives. These demands emerged outside of the unions, which opposed lockdowns.

As soon as it was able to, the government began lifting restrictions and forcing workers back to work and children back to school. This could not have been done without the assistance of the trade unions, which act as a police force for the working class and have not lifted a finger to stop the infection of millions of people by COVID-19.

Germany’s Left Party parliamentary chair resigns

Peter Schwarz

The resignation of Amira Mohamed Ali as co-chair of the Left Party’s faction in the Bundestag (federal parliament) brings a possible split and the formation of a new party under the leadership of Sahra Wagenknecht much closer. Mohamed Ali is part of the Left Party’s leadership, which consists of two party and two parliamentary group leaders.

Amira Mohamed Ali [Photo by Martin Heinlein / Die Linke / CC BY 2.0]

At the beginning of last week, Mohamed Ali announced she would not run again in the election of the new parliamentary party co-chairs on September 4. The reason she gave was irreconcilable political differences. It had become “impossible for her … to support and represent the line of the party, above all the party leadership, in public.” The unanimous call by the party executive on June 10 for Sahra Wagenknecht to resign her parliamentary mandate, saying that she no longer had a future in the Left Party, was the final straw, she said.

The conflict between Wagenknecht and the party leadership has been simmering for a long time. For months, there has been talk of founding a new party. However, Wagenknecht has not yet committed herself. One reason is likely to be that if three or more MPs leave the party, the Left Party faction loses its parliamentary group status, resulting in the loss of large financial contributions and up to 70 staff.

However, Wagenknecht wants to decide by the end of the year at the latest. The new party would then be able to participate in the 2024 European elections and state elections in the eastern German states of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, where Wagenknecht has high approval ratings. Mohamed Ali’s open attack on the party leadership is a signal that a split will soon occur.

Two right wings

The dispute between the party executive and the Wagenknecht camp is a struggle between two wings that are responding to mounting class tensions by rapidly moving to the right.

On the one hand, the party executive is based on politicians who bear government responsibility at state and local levels and—like the Thuringia state Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow—are no different from corresponding Social Democrat (SPD), Green or Christian Democrat (CDU) politicians. They organise social cuts, beef up the police, deport refugees, support the federal government’s pro-war policy and promote arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Another pillar of the party executive are pseudo-left politicians who—like the two party leaders Janine Wissler and Martin Schirdewan—focus on gender and identity politics and court the well-heeled clientele of the Greens. They also support the German government’s pro-war course and arms deliveries to Ukraine.

As a result of these right-wing, anti-working class policies, voters and Left Party members are running away in droves. Having received just under 12 percent of the vote in the 2009 Bundestag elections, it failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle in 2021 and only returned to the Bundestag thanks to winning three direct mandates. In the meantime, it has only achieved 4 percent in the polls. In its eastern-German strongholds, where the Left Party was at times the strongest party, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) now occupies the top spot. The Left Party is now only in fourth or fifth place.

Party membership fell from 78,000 to 54,000 between 2009 and 2022, and is now likely to be even lower. According to Andreas Grünwald, a Left Party official in Hamburg, 10,000 members have left since the 2021 Bundestag elections.

The Wagenknecht wing is reacting to this bloodletting by adopting the policies of the AfD more and more openly.

Wagenknecht, who holds a doctorate in economics, was spokesperson for the Stalinist Communist Platform in the Left Party’s predecessor, the PDS, in the 1990s. She disposed of the works of Karl Marx two decades ago and replaced them with the writings of the ordoliberal economists of the post-war Adenauer era. The terms “socialism” and “communism” no longer appear in their vocabulary.

Wagenknecht infuses her capitalist economic ideology with a large dose of nationalist poison. In 2021, she published “The Self-Righteous,” a völkisch-nationalist tirade against cosmopolitanism and cultural openness, for protectionism and a strong state. In it, she denounces immigrants and refugees as depressing wages, strike-breakers and elements alien to the culture.

Wagenknecht tries to present herself as the advocate of the little people against the wealthy urban middle classes, against “left liberals” and “lifestyle leftists.” In her resignation letter, Mohamed Ali also accuses the party executive of not formulating “a fundamental no to the wrong course of the [federal] coalition [government] … which does nothing against child poverty, against wages that are not enough to live on, against poverty pensions.” But this is hollow social demagogy.

Wagenknecht and her supporters have always gone along with and supported the anti-working class policies of the Left Party. When Mohamed Ali first took on a public function for the party, it had been involved in state governments for 17 years and pursued a strict austerity course. In Berlin, the SPD-Left Party Senate (state executive) had even left the municipal employers’ association in order to be able to significantly reduce public sector salaries and lay off tens of thousands.

After her election as parliamentary party leader four years ago, Mohamed Ali herself had declared that she could imagine a coalition with the SPD and the Greens in the federal government. “It is about bringing about tangible improvements in the lives of the vast majority of the population. If that is possible with the SPD and the Greens, I am of course in favour,” she told the Freie Presse at the time.

Wagenknecht and Mohamed Ali also do not fundamentally reject the massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and NATO’s aggressive war course against Russia, another disagreement with the party leadership.

Wagenknecht’s criticism of the Ukraine war is not directed against German militarism, but against its dependence on the USA. If Germany rearms for its own interests, she is for it.

In his latest book, her mentor and husband Oskar Lafontaine calls for “the liberation of Europe from the military tutelage of the USA through an independent European security and defence policy” and “a joint defence alliance between Germany and France.” At the Berlin “peace demonstration” of February 25, 2023, which Wagenknecht organised together with the feminist Alice Schwarzer, the main speaker was retired Brigadier General Erich Vad, an ardent militarist.

After her resignation, Mohamed Ali justified her rejection of economic sanctions against Russia on Deutschlandfunk radio by saying that they primarily harmed Germany. “If it were the case that these energy sanctions had led to Russia having difficulties in continuing this war, I would have a different position there.”

The Wagenknecht camp is alarmed that the Left Party is no longer able to buffer the growing social opposition and serve as a fig leaf and lightning rod for the federal and state governments. It is therefore trying to channel the discontent into a dead end with a mixture of social demagogy and reactionary nationalism.

Wagenknecht and AfD

Wagenknecht’s new party project enjoys great support among the ruling class. She is regularly invited onto the most important talk shows. Her books are hyped as bestsellers, making her one of the best-earning members of the Bundestag; since the Bundestag elections two years ago, she has reported a side income of almost €800,000. Major media outlets such as Der Spiegel and The Pioneer regularly devote extensive cover stories to her.

This propaganda reaches the peak of cynicism when Wagenknecht’s right-wing project is portrayed as an attempt to pull the rug from under the AfD. In an editorial on August 9, Der Spiegel explicitly called on Wagenknecht to finally found a new party: “Do it, Ms Wagenknecht!” In justification, it said: “For the Left Party, a split under Wagenknecht’s leadership would be a serious setback. For democracy, it could be good news.”

“With Wagenknecht’s new party, a ‘Left Alternative’ could grow up in the East to collect the disenchanted and disengaged,” author Severin Weiland continues. “Some who are currently considering voting for the AfD with a guilty conscience would possibly vote with a clear conscience for a left-wing package with partly similar content. … A weakening of the AfD, especially in the East, would be a gain for the democratic stability of the Republic.”

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung expresses a similar opinion. Under the headline “Possible Wagenknecht party: danger also for the AfD,” it says: “A Wagenknecht party would not only poach [voters] in East German left-wing strongholds, but also from the voter reservoir of the AfD, which is largely right-wing extremist. Programmatically, populist Wagenknecht offers an attractive mix of classic left-wing social policy and a restrictive national course on the immigration and refugee issues for ideologically unaffiliated protest and non-voters.”

Mohamed Ali also argues in this direction when she accuses the party leadership of “increasingly driving the Left Party into political irrelevance” because it fails to “reach the people for whom a left-wing party should above all make policy.” This included AfD voters “who can still be won back.”

In reality, a Wagenknecht party that combines right-wing and nationalist positions with social demagogy would strengthen the most reactionary forces. It would even be able to ally itself with the AfD. Syriza, the Greek sister party of the Left Party, has already demonstrated this when, after its election victory eight years ago, it formed a coalition with the far-right “Independent Greeks” and realised the dictates of the international banks.

This is the reason why many media outlets hail Wagenknecht’s project. In the face of increasing international class struggles—the pension protests in France, the strike wave in the USA, the collective bargaining disputes at Deutsche Bahn, etc.—the ruling class rely on fascist forces to intimidate and suppress resistance.

That is why they are rolling out the red carpet for the fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Berlin, Brussels and Washington. In Germany, they court AfD representatives and elect them to high parliamentary offices. The only reason the establishment parties (still) shy away from accepting them into government is because they fear a public outcry. The diversions via a Wagenknecht party should remedy this.

The Military Junta in Burkina Faso

Malick Doucouré

Image of Ibrahim Traore.

Ibrahim Traore, shortly after the military coup in September, 2022. Youtube screengrab.

West Africa has, in recent years, seen a flurry of coup d’états spanning across the Sahel and extending into the tropical shores of Guinea. France, the former colonial power for these nations, has been caught on the backfoot again and again – French President Emmanuel Macron was reportedly “furious” with French intelligence services for not predicting the Niger Coup. The anti-Western sentiments accompanying these events, alongside the encroachment of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) throughout the African continent, remain a significant topic of discussion as the world reacts to the reshaping of the West African geopolitical scene. This is the first of a series of articles that will offer a brief summary and analysis of the coup d’états in Burkina Faso (January 2022, September 2022), Guinea (September 2021), Mali (March 2012, August 2020, May 2021), and Niger (July 2023). We begin with Burkina Faso.

Burkina Faso has had two coup d’états since 2020, the first taking place on 23rd-24th January 2022 under the leadership of Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. Lieutenant Colonel Damiba was notably trained in Paris alongside Mamady Doumbouya – the military officer who seized power in Guinea the previous year, as will be explored in a later submission. Both men also received training from the United States. Damiba acted in response to perceived inefficiency and inadequate responses by the Burkinabé government to the growing insurgency towards the north of the country. For example, President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré refused the military’s requests, including that of Damiba, to hire Wagner mercenaries to help fight against the spread of jihadist extremism.

Kaboré had been democratically elected in November 2015 in the first elections following the fall of long-time (1987-2014) neocolonial ruler, President Blaise Compaoré – the man who had murdered his friend and colleague, Captain Thomas Sankara, with French and US support. Kaboré was a former Prime Minister (1994-1996) and a long-serving member of Compaoré’s government and political party, the Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP). He had left and founded an opposition party (People’s Movement for Progress – MPP) after Compaoré’s unpopular attempt to change the constitution and extend his term limits, the move that ultimately led to his November 2014 downfall. 

I was living in Burkina Faso at the time and recall seeing pictures of Thomas Sankara being waved on the streets and in news reports as mass protests finally toppled the 27-year-long neocolonial government of Compaoré. By the end of Compaoré’s rule, Burkina Faso was among the poorest nations in Africa, with almost half of the country living under the poverty line. The rapid development and progress made under the four years of Sankara’s rule (1983-1987) had been stopped in its tracks by Compaoré’s Western-backed illiberal adherence to Françafrique, maintaining French business, cultural, and political interests at the expense of his compatriots. Compaoré’s unpopularity contrasts significantly with the widespread popularity of Sankara, a Marxist-Leninist and Pan-African, whose radical ideas in the Sahelian country have resurged in recent years. But Kaboré failed to capitalise on both Sankara’s popularity and policies. 

Years into his democratic government (2015-2022), old friends in the country informed me of a feeling of dissatisfaction among the youth over the lack of meaningful change following Compaoré’s fall. Sankara had been rehabilitated on the national political scene, and Compaoré was made to stand trial in absentia over his murder of Sankara. Still, other than that, Sankara’s popular policies weren’t felt to have been put into practice by Kaboré. The country still retained the capitalist mode of production, and a strong French presence. Not enough had been done, adding to Kaboré’s increasing unpopularity among the masses. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was the rising tide of the danger posed by the Islamist insurgency to the North of the country. Enjoying French logistical and military support combined with excellent diplomacy, Compaoré had long kept the insurgency in check, only for the situation to spiral out of control under Kaboré.

Before leaving Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, I had known it to be an incredibly safe city. Jihadist terrorism was not a concern on anybody’s mind, and this was true across all sections and classes of Burkinabé society. But with the instability following the fall of Compaoré, militants from Boko Haram, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, Ansar Dine, Ansar ul Islam, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, launched attacks on the capital as well as seemingly indiscriminate slaughters of unarmed rural civilians. The conflict, since 2015, has claimed over 10,000 lives, displaced 1.4 million people, and sent shockwaves throughout the country with shootings and car bombings on Hotels and Cafés. A bus carrying school children was blown up after hitting an explosive device. Foreign embassies and restaurants have also been targeted. Outside of the cities, hundreds of men, women, and children have been killed on raids targeting local markets and rural villages. 

The security situation has well and truly deteriorated to a disastrous level. Poverty breeds extremism, so the intensive regime of neocolonial superexploitation maintained for decades by France certainly deserves its fair share of the blame. However, poor leadership has also exacerbated an already critical situation. In November 2021, a mass jihadist assault on a security outpost claimed the lives of 49 soldiers near the northern town of Inata. The soldiers were reportedly underpaid and undersupplied by the Kaboré government; resentment and unpopularity among the civilian population in West Africa is one thing – but in a region with over 20 attempted coup d’états since 2010, there’s nothing riskier than allowing resentment and unpopularity to build up among the military. Kaboré was removed from power by Lieutenant Colonel Damiba just two months later, in January 2022.

In his first speech to the nation, he blamed the president for failing to contain violence by Islamist militants. Damiba made sure not to repeat Kaboré’s errors and sought to retain the support of the people. One way he did this was by channeling the image of the ever-popular Captain Sankara; donning Sankara’s iconic dress sense by sporting a red beret and military fatigues, he also sought to appease ECOWAS concerns – the regional bloc suspended Burkina Faso’s membership following the coup – by promising to return to constitutional civilian rule when the conditions were right. Unfortunately for Damiba, conditions would only further deteriorate during his nine months in power. By September 2022, over 40% of the country’s territory had been captured by non-state actors. This was nothing short of a political and military catastrophe. 

Without hesitation, Captain Ibrahim Traoré intervened in a September 2022 coup d’etat, seizing power with the support of the ‘Cobra’ elite special forces fighting at the frontlines of the insurgency. This was also a unit he had previously led in the Northern region of Kaya. Junior officers had grown dissatisfied with Damiba’s leadership as he had failed to keep his promise to control the security situation. Since taking power, Captain Traoré has ordered a ‘general mobilisation’ of the population in a radical effort to turn the tide of the debilitating insurgency. Importantly, Traoré has taken an explicitly anti-Western stance, much more so than his Paris-trained predecessor, Damiba. This has proven to be especially popular with the masses, among whom anti-imperialist sentiments towards their former colonial power had long existed; after all, France had kept the nation in poverty and assassinated Sankara, seen by many in Burkina as the ‘father of the nation’.

Traoré comes from a very modest class background, somewhat similar to Sankara’s. Like Sankara, he also seized power at the age of 33-34, making him the youngest head of state in the world. He has nominated a Marxist, Pan African and ally of Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, as his Prime Minister – a man who has already reduced salaries of government ministers and declared, to the adoration of many, that “I have already said that Burkina Faso cannot be developed outside the path set by Thomas Sankara”. The Sankarist line being boldly taken by Captain Traoré, at least on paper, marks a radical turn from the neocolonial path, economic instability, and lack of development that has characterised his predecessor regimes. In the anti-imperialist spirit of Sankara, Western military aid has been refused as Traoré sets a course away from France, the EU and the US. French-owned foreign media channels have been prohibited, French troops have been ordered to leave the country and military accords have been terminated.

While anti-imperialist organisations and social media commentators have rightly celebrated these actions, Traoré’s domestic record presents a sobering picture. For starters, there is speculation that he will turn towards the Wagner Group – who are already operating in neighbouring Mali, resulting in a disproportionate number of civilian deaths in Wagner-involved operations, as well as reports of rape and torture against African civilians. These reports remain unconfirmed, and there is no evidence suggesting that Wagner is active in Burkina Faso. With that said, Traoré’s comments at the 2023 Russia-Africa summit, alongside his Prime Minister’s visit to Russia, suggest collaboration with Wagner is undoubtedly on the cards. He has also hailed Russia as a strategic ally to the nation, seemingly shifting from alignment with one capitalist imperial power, to yet another. 

A string of massacres – one event saw 147 people killed in the northern (Yatenga) village of Karma, “including 28 women, 45 children from 9 days old to 14 years old, and 9 wounded” – and assaults on the towns and villages of Nouna, Holdé, Yaté, Ména, and Dabere-Pogowel, have claimed scores of civilian lives. Such horrors may be inevitable during war, but it raises serious questions and eyebrows at Traoré’s leadership. Civilian slaughters committed under a military junta, ruling illiberally without the great masses of the people, is not exactly something that can be described as ‘progressive’ or even celebrated, regardless of the anti-imperialist rhetoric offered by the junta. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the context of the ongoing insurgency; what country can be expected to develop and rule progressively or liberally while 40% of its territory has been violently captured? Burkina Faso, as an impoverished Global South nation struggling to free itself from the chains of French colonialism, is simultaneously going through a national crisis; our analysis must not lose sight of this vital context.

The situation has many nuances, and even 10,000 words wouldn’t do it all justice. For now, those who concern themselves with the enfranchisement and empowerment of the people, should take a cautious and critical approach to the Burkina Faso military junta. Traoré’s anti-imperialist rhetoric is indeed worth celebrating, but we must not make the mistake of seeing it as any more than just that… rhetoric. Violence towards civilians should always, unconditionally, be condemned. The country’s alignment with Russia, and the flirtatious courting of Wagner, is worrisome; alignment with Russia, despite its imperialist invasion of Ukraine, undermines Traoré’s anti-imperialist credentials. Other than protests and empirical observations, there is no reliable data to confidently suggest that the majority of the Burkinabé support this ideological reorientation towards Moscow. 

Traoré’s actions over the past year and throughout this coming year will decide whether the rule of what appears to be a ‘Sankarist’ military elite, is indeed acting as a vanguard of the people, or whether they are instead just serving the role of protecting national bourgeois property interests – the very function and purpose of armed forces in capitalist nation-states like Burkina Faso. It is in the interests of the Burkinabé national bourgeoisie to expand its rates of profit and control over the means of production by expelling France, the neocolonial power. It is in the interests of the Burkinabé national bourgeoisie to end a war harming the country’s land and labour. But is it in the interests of the people, the peasant and working masses, to align with yet another imperial power? Is it in their interests to retain the capitalist mode of production? There are many questions to be asked, and many answers to be heard. 

Perhaps the wisdom of Amílcar Cabral may be of use to us:

“Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace.”

States, districts across US expand police presence in schools

James Vega & Emma Arceneaux

Amid crisis conditions in the American public school system brought on by decades of bipartisan austerity and the criminally negligent response to the COVID-19 pandemic, students and staff are faced with renewed efforts by state and local officials to beef up the presence of armed security forces inside schools. In areas across the US, this push is taking precedence over addressing dire teacher and staff shortages, providing mental health services for students, reducing class sizes or fixing crumbling school infrastructure.

Multiple states have recently passed laws to require armed security personnel on school grounds.

These include Texas, which passed a bill in June to require armed officers at all schools, effective September. Under the law, the term “officer” is loosely defined such that armed teachers and school staff could be used to fulfill the requirement.

Cops milling around outside the funeral service for Jacklyn Cazares, one of 19 students killed last May in Uvalde, Texas. [AP Photo/ Eric Gay]

The footing of the bill to meet this requirement will fall largely on cash-strapped school districts, as the state is only covering $15,000 per campus out of an estimated cost of $80,000 per armed officer. As Joy Baskin with the Texas Association of School Boards stated, “Given that a school district budget usually commits about 85 percent of the budget to pay salaries of instructional staff, this does eat up another very important slice of the pie.'

Meanwhile, districts across Texas, like others across the US, are already facing huge budget shortfalls.

In Wisconsin, state lawmakers passed a bill this summer which forces the Milwaukee Public Schools to have at least 25 school resource officers (SROs) in place by January 1, 2024. The district had removed all officers from school grounds in 2020 following student-led protests. As in Texas, the Milwaukee school district, the only one in the state required to have SROs, will be responsible for the cost of the officers.

Other school boards that have voted to expand the presence of police this year include Perkiomen Valley, Massachusetts and Oakland, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, other districts are beginning to roll back prior efforts to reduce the presence of police in schools, including reneging on promises made following the nationwide protests after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.

The Denver school board voted unanimously in June 2020 to discontinue its relationship with the Denver Police. But earlier this year, following a school shooting, Denver Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero demanded an armed officer at each high school. The board immediately agreed.

In Portland, Oregon, the district has recommended a new partnership with the Portland Police Bureau, with the possibility of bringing officers back onto campuses after having eliminated school resource officers in 2020 due to threats felt by the student body. The board is worried, however, about widespread opposition among students. 'Our students, for the most part, don't really want to see armed uniformed officers in their school,' said one board member.

The chief of staff at Portland Public Schools commented that the district and the police bureau were working to “reimagine” the role of the Youth Services Division. The official said: “When we say reimagine, I think we’re looking forward to having conversations with the bureau and our students about what this future would look like with law enforcement near our schools. For example, we would look at what type of uniforms they might be wearing.”

This is similar to developments in Montgomery County, Maryland. In March of last year, less than six months after the county removed police from its public schools, the district undertook efforts to bring them back. They have been given designated “work stations” in the high schools, and re-branded as “community engagement officers” (CEOs). They wear plain clothes rather than police uniforms. The agreement between the district and the police department notes that “CEOs should also be invited to and encouraged to attend meetings with school-based counselors, social workers, and the MCPS (Montgomery County Public Schools) Restorative Justice Coach.”

This decision was met with protests led by a group of students who demanded more mental health resources rather than police officers. One of the students told the Washington Post last year: “I’m at a point where I’m not sure exactly what we can do. We’ve presented the data; we’ve done the protests; we’ve testified at every possible hearing. … After all that, they’re literally going back to the same exact program that we’ve been fighting against.”

One of the most reactionary and alarming efforts to police the schools is taking place in Florida. In Broward County, the district is actively hiring civilians as armed school guards. The 40 positions the district is looking to fill are full-time, include benefits, and are open to anyone with certain “security licenses” and “two years of some sort of experience.”

The justification cited by school and state officials is an increase in violence in schools, particularly the record number of school shootings. According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, 2023 is currently on track to surpass 2022, which was a record year, for the number of school shooting “incidents.” The database uses a wide definition, including any incident in which a gun is fired or pointed at a person, or a bullet hits school property. So far in 2023, there have been 197 incidents and 149 victims.

At the same time that they are broadening the presence of police in public schools, lawmakers across the US have begun passing laws that require harsh discipline policies against students, such as expulsion or suspension for “disruptive” non-criminal behavior, against children as young as kindergarten age.

A large body of research contradicts both the use of police and harsh discipline to create safer school environments. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health reviewed data on school shootings between 1999 and 2018 and found that “the presence of a school resource officer was unassociated with any reduction in school shooting severity.”

Another study published in 2021 in JAMA Network examined data from school shootings between 1980-2019 and concluded that there was “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases.” Moreover, “an armed officer on the scene was the number one factor associated with increased casualties after the perpetrators' use of assault or submachine guns.”

It should be recalled that last year in Uvalde, Texas, over a dozen police and Border Patrol officers equipped with advanced weaponry, armor and shields did nothing to stop gunman Salvador Ramos as he massacred 19 children and two teachers, despite the fact that police were on the scene within three minutes of Ramos's entering the building. Video shows that they actually ran away when they heard the sound of gunshots.

In addition to the fact that it does not prevent school shootings, the presence of police in schools strongly correlates to increased rates of suspensions, expulsions and student arrests, all of which can have long-term negative impacts upon both individual students and the student body at large.

University of Exeter researchers found that a new onset mental disorder may result from exclusion from school (suspension or expulsion), and that poor mental health is a risk factor leading to exclusion from school. Lead researcher Professor Tasmin Ford noted:

For children who really struggle at school, exclusion can be a relief as it removes them from an unbearable situation with the result that on their return to school they will behave even more badly to escape again. As such, it becomes an entirely counterproductive disciplinary tool as for these children it encourages the very behaviour that it intends to punish. By avoiding exclusion and finding other solutions to poor behaviour, schools can help children's mental health in the future as well as their education.

However, under conditions of chronic under-funding and further cuts to school budgets once emergency pandemic funding expires next year, adequate mental health support for all students remains a pipe dream, despite universal acknowledgment of a mental health crisis among the youth, including a historic rise in youth suicides in the last two decades.

Students and teachers are right to be skeptical of and hostile to the push to expand the police presence in schools. The stated concern of officials and lawmakers for “student safety” is contradicted by their failure to guarantee funding for school counselors, nurses, social workers, etc., as well as their obedient enforcement of the Trump and Biden administrations' demand for schools to reopen amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, without any serious measures to filter the air, with no mask mandates, and with the scrapping of testing, quarantining and contact tracing. This is after the pandemic has infected nearly every American child, killed over 2,300, and left millions suffering from Long COVID.

The recent developments in Denver, Portland and Montgomery County, all of which are run by the Democratic Party, highlight the dead-end of trying to appeal to capitalist politicians to address police violence. They expose the political bankruptcy of organizations that foster illusions in the possibility of “reforming” the Democrats.

The priority of both big business parties, Democratic and Republican, is to subordinate all resources to the war against Russia in Ukraine and the preparations for war against China, along with the bailing out of Wall Street. To this end they agree on a policy of further cuts to education and healthcare, as well as attacks on basic entitlement programs such as Social Security.

New Zealand intelligence report targets China over “foreign interference”

John Braddock

New Zealand’s spy agency, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), has published its first unclassified national threat assessment. It alleges that amid rising tensions and geopolitical competition, the country is threatened by “foreign intelligence agencies who persistently and opportunistically conduct espionage operations against New Zealand.”

Front cover of New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service national threat assessment. [Photo: Security Intelligence Service]

To combat this, SIS Director Andrew Hampton called on “New Zealand businesses, institutions and communities [to] use this document to help them make informed decisions about risk and mitigation.” He declared that “we all have a role to play to protect our national security and each other’s wellbeing.” In other words, the agency is urging people to spy on employees, workmates, neighbours and friends for any signs of unpatriotic behaviour.

New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment 2023, released on August 11, follows the recent release of the first part of the Labour government’s Defence Policy Review and inaugural National Security Strategy. Taken together, these documents signal a major strengthening of New Zealand’s alignment with the US-led military and intelligence build-up to war against China.

The latest document points to “increased strategic competition” in the Indo-Pacific as motivating interference from China. Beijing’s “efforts to advance its political, economic, military and security involvement in the Pacific is a major factor driving strategic competition in our home region,” it says. In fact, the opposite is the case—the region is dominated by intensified US efforts to provoke a conflict with China which Washington views as the main obstacle to its imperialist hegemony.

The SIS baldly identifies as the major intelligence threat “the activities of three states in particular: the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia.” It focuses on purported interference by the Chinese intelligence agencies, which are accused of “ongoing activity in and against New Zealand and our home region.”

The report consists of sweeping generalisations and uses menacing language to create an air of anxiety and intimidation. One reads, for example, of unnamed states seeking to “further their advantage” through intelligence activities that include “human and cyber-enabled foreign interference and espionage, seeding disinformation, and the use of economic coercion, among other methods.”

Russia is singled out due to its “illegal” invasion of Ukraine and challenge to “international norms”—i.e., the rules established by the US that ensure its own imperialist domination. The SIS claims Russia is “seeking to interfere in international support for Ukraine through coercive measures and leveraging its dominance in energy markets.”

There is, of course, no criticism of NATO’s expansionist aims or its instigation of the 2014 coup in Ukraine and other provocations that sparked the war with Russia. The aim of US imperialism is to inflict a military defeat against Russia as a first step in the redivision of the world, which includes far-advanced plans for war with China.

No concrete details or substantive evidence is provided to back up any of the report’s sweeping claims.

According to the SIS, a growing proportion of cyber incidents affecting major NZ institutions are linked to “state-sponsored actors.” Of 350 reported incidents, none of which are documented, 118 were allegedly connected to foreign states.

The agency claims that foreign states are engaging in “societal interference,” such as attempting “to influence, disrupt or subvert New Zealand’s communities and non-government sectors by deceptive, corruptive or coercive means. This includes New Zealand’s academic sector—encompassing institutions, employees and students.” Students and academics who develop views deemed “subversive” by the state may find themselves accused of being agents of foreign interference.

Iran is accused of reporting on New Zealand’s Iranian communities and dissident groups, while according to the assessment: “Most notable is the continued targeting of New Zealand’s diverse ethnic Chinese communities. We see these activities carried out by groups and individuals linked to the intelligence arm of the People’s Republic of China.”

This accusation, again unsubstantiated, dovetails with an escalating anti-China propaganda campaign, with the pro-Labour Daily Blog, among others, regularly accusing the country’s Chinese community of being potential “fifth columnists” as social and economic tensions intensify.

China’s ambassador to NZ, Wang Xiaolong, denied all the charges, declaring in a statement, “we NEVER interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Period.”

The entire SIS document is drenched in hypocrisy. The most significant player interfering globally in the affairs of other countries—rivals and allies alike—is not China but the United States. Washington is currently escalating a raft of diplomatic, financial and military interventions across the Pacific, including an open threat of “regime change” in the Solomon Islands, to push back against Beijing.

In New Zealand, following the inconclusive 2017 election, the then US ambassador Scott Brown gave three extraordinary media interviews indicating Washington’s preference for a Labour-Greens-NZ First coalition government, which the Trump administration believed would take a tougher line against Beijing than the incumbent National Party. After Brown’s intervention, Labour took office with anti-Asian NZ First leader Winston Peters installed as foreign minister.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with US Ambassador Scott Brown on 19 February 2020. [Photo: @USAmbNZ]

New Zealand remains regarded in Washington as insufficiently reliable in the stand-off with Beijing due to the Labour government’s efforts to maintain critically important trading relations with China. A recent visit to Wellington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken followed a stream of high-powered official visits over the past year, escalating pressure to further integrate New Zealand into US-led military preparations.

A major obstacle to the ruling elites’ war drive is deeply entrenched opposition to war in the working class, as well as increasing anti-capitalist sentiment.

The SIS expresses nervousness about the emergence of popular opposition to the established order, noting “attempts to drive social changes are becoming… commonplace.” It refers to growing distrust for institutions, fueled by “perceptions that people are being deliberately lied to and misled; that those with power don’t have New Zealand’s best interests at heart; and that politicians are incapable of solving the problems facing the country.”

Social and economic inequalities, the report declares, are among the many factors that “we expect to contribute to the radicalisation of violent extremists in New Zealand.”

The report expresses concern that “state-generated misinformation” and disinformation is “consumed” by New Zealanders. This information “often references political and security-related events overseas to exploit pre-existing differences in society and is generated and disseminated to discredit competing world views and values.”

Significantly, the spy agency declares that foreign states “may try to leverage significant social tensions or disagreements in society to their advantage. There could be attempts to cultivate political and social movements” in order to influence policy.

What this means is that, as was the case during the First and Second World Wars, the growth of socialist and antiwar movements against the government will be denounced as “extremism” caused by “enemy” propaganda and interference.

What counts as “extremism” is determined by the state. New Zealand’s intelligence agencies and police failed to prevent the country’s worst terrorist atrocity, the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch by fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant. For many years, since the previous Labour government joined the illegal US invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, the SIS and other state agencies routinely spied on and harassed Muslims while turning a blind eye to right-wing extremists including Tarrant and the groups with which he associated.

The deaths of the 51 victims were used by the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour government to advance stricter procedures for firearms licence applications and to promote more internet censorship mechanisms and greater resources for the intelligence agencies themselves.