With more than 1 million dead, who have been the victims of the coronavirus pandemic? (Part 2)

Benjamin Mateus

A brief note on children

Children arriving to first day of classes. Credit Maja Hitji

Researchers from Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California at Berkeley, recently conducted a larger contact-tracing observational study with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, involving 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

The lead author, Ramanan Laxminarayan, found that 8 percent of infected individuals accounted for 60 percent of new infections, while 71 percent of infected individuals did not pass on the infection to any of their contacts. COVID-19 deaths occurred, on average, six days after hospitalization, versus 13 days on average in the US. As in other countries, the proportion of deaths is skewed to the older population.

The study found, however, that children and young adults accounted for one-third of COVID cases and were a significant factor in the transmission of the virus. Additionally, children and young adults were prone to contracting coronavirus from people their age. “Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies,” the lead author explained to PEI correspondent Morgan Kelly. This has significant implications for the reopening of schools as news of teachers succumbing to COVID-19 has made headlines.

In the US, according to data provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of October 1, there were 657,572 children infected with COVID-19 out of 6,231,564 total cases, or 10.6 percent. This puts the overall rate at 874 cases per 100,000 children in the population, after a series of weekly increases from 583 per 100,000 children as of August 20.

Across 42 states and New York City, the death rate for children was 0.02 percent of those infected, while only 1.7 percent of children infected have been hospitalized. There have been 112 cumulative child deaths in the US. There is similar data for Europe and Asia.

There are nonetheless some disturbing trends. After California, the most populous state and the one with the largest number of children infected with COVID-19, the states with the highest totals of children infected include Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, and South Carolina, across the south and southwest. Illinois is the only northern state high on the list. In percentage terms, the worst figures are in Wyoming and North Dakota in the north, and Tennessee and South Carolina in the south. The early northern hotspots for the pandemic—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan—have some of the lowest rates for children, since the virus swept disproportionately through nursing homes.

A severe condition that afflicts a small subset of children infected with the coronavirus termed COVID-19 Associated Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS-C) presents two to four weeks after the onset of COVID. The disease was identified in April 2020, when a cluster of children in Europe and New York City went into a hyperinflammatory shock that had features like Kawasaki disease and toxic shock syndrome. Clinical signs and symptoms included fever, rash, conjunctivitis, gastrointestinal symptoms, elevated inflammatory markers, and cardiac injury. As of July 29, the CDC has documented 570 MIS-C patients in the US with 10 fatalities.

In the poorest countries, the socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic are likely to be even more deadly for children than the strictly medical ones. Worldwide, 15,000 children under the age of five die each day from all causes (5.4 million annually). The annual mortality rate comes to 3.9 percent of all children. But the poorest countries, like Chad, Nigeria, and others in sub-Saharan Africa, have death rates in the 7 to 10 percent range. Despite the gains made in the last three decades in bringing these numbers down, the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic will indirectly lead to more deaths among this fragile group who will lose access to clean water, nutrition, and health services, while political pressures may lead to regional conflicts and other violence.

Does race or class drive COVID-19 mortality?

Patient receiving a vaccine - credit Joe Raedle

Early during the pandemic in the United States, even before President Trump had made his notoriously wrong prediction that the virus would suddenly disappear, it became clear that the pandemic was having a disproportionate impact in the poorest working class neighborhoods.

A February 4 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “poverty is instrumental in cultivating conditions that allow the disease to spread. In turn, infectious diseases exacerbate certain factors that contribute to poverty. In many parts of the world, healthcare is not free, nor is it cheap, placing huge financial stress on families who may already live under the poverty line.” On February 7, Mother Jones wrote, “while certain racial and ethnic groups might be more vulnerable to infectious disease, it’s well documented that the poor bear the brunt of viral disease outbreaks.”

Bob Woodward’s reporting, based on lengthy interviews with Trump, documented that by this time the entire government apparatus had been fully briefed on the deadly nature of the virus, and there was a clear understanding of the deadly potential of the pandemic’s spread through densely populated urban centers where the poor are concentrated. The consequences could already be seen in late February, with the images and reports from Italian hospitals and cities.

It became evident to the Democratic Party and its auxiliary organizations that discussions in the press and the impact of the contagion on American society might highlight the socioeconomic divisions within American society. Accordingly, they worked to redirect discussion of this massive social disaster into the well-established channels of identity politics. Race would be used to suppress any discussion of social class and poverty.

By the end of March, Democratic lawmakers in Congress, led by senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, and representatives Ayanna Pressley and Robin Kelly, began pushing for federal disclosure of racial data regarding COVID-19. By early April, major news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, were actively publishing racialist narratives on the pandemic.

Additionally, from early to mid-April, Democratic governors were emphasizing the release of state data on race and COVID-19 and the formation of task forces meant to address racial disparities. By April 14, more than 80 Democratic senators and representatives sponsored a bill to compel federal health officials to post data daily that breaks down COVID-19 cases and deaths by race and ethnicity. No such requirements were imposed in relation to income or occupation.

Every state and national COVID-19 dashboard has now framed their reports in racial terms omitting any occupational data on victims of COVID-19 or census tract data that would provide socioeconomic inferences. Racial inequities and systemic racism were repeatedly highlighted in the media. And in fact, cities like Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and New York City boroughs were devastated by the pandemic. But their populations did not consist solely or primarily of people of color. They were working people of all races, ethnicities and shades of skin color.

In Michigan, for example, the heaviest death toll was initially in Detroit, and at one point, it was being reported that African American residents of that city were three times more likely to know someone who has died of COVID-19 than outstate residents, who are predominately white. But these disparities lessened as the pandemic penetrated into rural and small-town areas. Whites now comprise well over half of COVID-19 cases in Michigan, and the county with the largest number of infections is Oakland County, comprising the northern and northwestern suburbs of Detroit, not Wayne County, which includes the city and its western and southwestern suburbs.

More recent and conscientious research has returned to describing the role of poverty and its association with the severity of COVID-19.

Nicholas Papageorge et al. showed that people with lower income, less flexible work arrangements, and lack of outside space at home are less likely to social distance: “Broadly, our findings align with typical relationships between health and socioeconomic status.”

Mark Stabile et al. highlighted the chronic conditions that predispose to severe outcomes with COVID-19 infection occur more frequently in those in the lowest economic status. They write, “it stands to reason then that if those with lower incomes are more likely to have multiple chronic conditions and those with multiple chronic conditions are more likely to experience severe responses to COVID-19, then low-income people are going to be hit harder by COVID-19, all else equal. Add to this the existence of access barriers for testing and care that still exist by income in many places, and the effect of getting COVID-19 if you are lower-income will be more severe on your health, on average.”

A study conducted by Caitlin Brown and Martin Ravallion noted that they found a higher population share of blacks and Hispanics was associated with higher infection rates at the county level. They further characterize their findings: “We see the combined effect of the higher incidence of poverty among these racial/ethnic groups and the fact that there is a concentration of these groups among the designated ‘essential workers’ in healthcare, food preparation, and other services, who are more exposed to the virus through their work.” They go on to add that socioeconomic predictors tend to matter more to “deaths via infection rates, rather than independently of the latter.”

The ruling elite understands that the pandemic hits hardest those most disadvantaged by capitalist relations regardless of the color of their skin or racial and ethnic demographics. The poorest in the urban centers have faced decades of hardship in every aspect of life from physically demanding labor, poor nutrition, and infrastructure, inadequate access to health care, which has seen their life expectancies well below those in higher income brackets. Wealthy or upper-middle-class African Americans are no more likely to fall victim to COVID-19 than wealthy or upper-middle-class whites.

Conclusion: International paralysis

With more than 90 percent of the global population still not exposed or immune to the coronavirus, every international health agency has noted that an effective and safe vaccine will be critical to ending the pandemic. However, such a massive endeavor to supply the most impoverished nations with a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 is fraught with many obstacles.

The World Health Organization, in coalition with GAVI and CEPI, has implemented an ambitious project COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) for coordinating global vaccine development and the fair and equitable distribution of an eventually licensed vaccine. The goal is to have 2 billion doses to distribute by the end of 2021 that should suffice to vaccinate 20 percent of each participating country’s front-line health care and most vulnerable.

Only the United States and Russia have chosen not to participate in or support the effort. But many of the wealthiest countries have already made deals with pharmaceuticals locking up the globe’s future vaccine supply. According to OXFAM International, “wealthy nations representing just 13 percent of the world’s population have already cornered more than half of the promised doses of leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates.” In the unlikely case that the front runners in the phase three trials all succeed, still 61 percent of the globe’s population (4.76 billion people) will not see a vaccine until at least 2022.

Having received billions in taxpayer money to fund its enterprise, Moderna has bluntly stated that it intends to see a profit from its vaccine as will every other pharmaceutical manufacturer involved in vaccine production and trials. With per-dose prices ranging from $12 to $16 in the US and $35 for other nations, poor nations will simply be priced out.

The COVAX project is having difficulty bringing in the necessary millions from donor nations and private groups to start the project, let alone the estimate of $5 billion more by the end of next year to fund the initiative. Though the EU has contributed a paltry $469 million in support of the effort, it has signed its own deal to procure more than 1 billion doses.

Considering the trillions in stimulus governments have signed over to the markets, there is no interest in funding any such project. Jeff Bezos’ $200 billion in wealth would remain virtually intact if he alone would provide all the funding. However, he has little inclination to do more than capitalize on the opportunities the pandemic has provided him while the virus has infected close to 20,000 of his employees.

The pandemic has intensified the rapid advances in the decay of capitalism. Its auxiliary international agencies have grown impotent. They have become empty shells providing rhetorical assessments and analysis without possessing or having access to the financial means to implement the necessary logistics for their programs. Simply put, these global developments act as a diagnostic measure of the death agony of the international order that has been in a continual state of crisis and decline for nearly a half century.

This analysis is made evident in a recent report issued by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. They write, “it [the pandemic] has exploited and exacerbated the fissures within societies and among nations. It has exploited inequalities, reminding us in no uncertain terms that there is no health security without social security. COVID-19 has taken advantage of a world in disorder.”

Furthermore, according to the World Bank, the pandemic and the economic catastrophe it has caused will throw up to 100 million people into extreme poverty, defined as “subsisting on less than $1.90 a day (at 2011 prices).” Many of these newly destitute will be in South Asia. The United Nations predicts that 490 million across 70 nations will lose access to clean water, electricity, nutrition, and schools. The impending food crisis and hunger is expected to impact an additional 130 million.

These economic indices hide the real magnitude of the pain and suffering that millions upon millions have already faced. These conditions will continue to deteriorate by all indications, further fueling the class antagonism growing by leaps and bounds. Regional conflicts will erupt to drive critical social pressures driven by mounting debts outward along nationalist lines.

Europe and the United States have proven incapable of addressing the globe’s needs nor confronting this pandemic in any reasonable fashion.

The policy of herd immunity amounts to social euthanasia, a frontal attack on the working class, in what amounts to a global civil war. Yet, the means to stop the coronavirus and provide for the planet’s population exists within the capabilities of modern health science and technology. One million have died. How many millions more will be added to this grim statistic? That depends on the independent intervention of the international working class.

Dutch government’s malign neglect accelerates resurgence of COVID-19

Harm Zonderland & Parwini Zora

The Netherlands has become a major hot-spot in western Europe for COVID-19 infections, with record numbers of confirmed infections each day. Daily infection rates are skyrocketing, with many clusters amid the Netherlands’ 17 million population—in the capital, Amsterdam, the political centre, The Hague, and the port city of Rotterdam.

When COVID-19 first hit the Netherlands in February, the government deliberately took only half-hearted measures as the virus spread in the four major cities—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Its so-called “intelligent” lock-down was limited to closing schools, sports clubs and the hospitality sector, and to the 1.5 metres social distancing. The use of face masks was limited to public transport, and COVID-19 testing reserved for hospitalised patients with serious symptoms. By June, these limited restrictions were effectively lifted; bars, restaurants and schools all reopened.

Due to the Dutch ruling elite’s reckless policy, by mid-September, record numbers of COVID-19 cases were reported with around 1,500 daily cases by September 14, nearly doubling by the end of the week, surpassing the number of cases confirmed during the initial surge in March-April. By the end of the first week of October, daily cases had surpassed 5,900.

According to the National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM), 6,544 people had died of COVID-19 in the Netherlands on 8 October. The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) however, claims more than 10,000 COVID-19 deaths in March-June alone, possibly because the RIVM did not count cases where COVID-19 was marked as cause of death, but it did not receive laboratory confirmation.

Amid a mounting death toll, the universal response in the political establishment and the corporate media throughout has been to minimise the threat to life, in line with the ruling class’ homicidal herd immunity policy.

In Netherlands and around the world, capitalist governments insist that no serious measures be taken to halt the resurgence of the virus, herding workers back to work to produce the profits needed to pay off massive state bailouts for the banks and big corporations.

New infections now exceed 50 per 100,000 residents in all Dutch provinces except Zeeland. The Rutte government euphemistically labelled North- and South-Holland, Brabant, Flevoland and Groningen provinces “worrisome,” placing them under a “stricter” regime since September 28. These include a 10 pm curfew for restaurants and bars and the banning of gatherings of over 50 people. However, workers must still report even for non-essential work and children to schools and childcare.

In reality, these “stricter” measures of the Rutte government are the same as those implemented during the “intelligent lockdown” in March/April, with no significant effect on public health. The Dutch government refused from the start to implement effective containment measures and treated the pandemic as an economic, rather than as a public health crisis.

The Dutch Security Council, the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) and RIVM all mendaciously advise against face-masks, claiming there is no scientific consensus on their efficacy. After nearly a year of global pandemic claiming over a million lives, little has been done to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to workers whose jobs are essential for the community. Public health and the health care system’s ability to handle the onrush of dying patients caused by their reckless “herd immunity” policies are not treated as a serious issue.

The government recently mandated testing priority for healthcare and school workers, as thousands of potentially ill people are refused a test.

Calls are growing stronger to abandon all attempts to limit the pandemic and just “let it rip.” In an appearance on the Dutch talk show Op1, Ira Helsoot, professor of the Governance of Safety and Security at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, declared: “It is terrible, but we have to accept there will be more victims.” By summer, a far-right campaign was formed to protest against the minimal social restrictions imposed by the government.

The campaign organisers called themselves initially as Viruswaanzin (Virus Insanity) and organised protests involving celebrities’ fan-following on social-media, demanding an end to the restrictions in the name of “freedom,” somewhat as in Germany.

The organisation, funded by the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD), later changed its name to Viruswaarheid (Virus Truth). It continues to claim that PCR tests to establish the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are “unreliable,” that Intensive Care Unit patients are “actors on the payroll of the RIVM,” and that the coronavirus is “not worse than the flu.”

These are attempts to manufacture consent for the fascistic official “herd immunity” policy pursued by governments in the interest of big business across Europe. During the first outbreak, British prime minister Boris Johnson infamously suggested the people might “take it on the chin.” More recently, French banker-president Emmanuel Macron callously demanded that people “learn to live with the virus.” The trade unions and their defenders maintain a politically complicit inaction.

The middle class Socialistisch Alternatief (SA)—the Dutch counterpart of the International Socialist Alternative (ISA) linked to Socialist Alternative in the United States and the SAV in Germany, and entrenched in the union bureaucracy—writes on its Dutch website: “As for the workers, the coming years or even decades, come down to organising all strength to combat the consequences of the crisis. A bright spot in the crisis-darkness is the FNV [Netherlands Trade Union Confederation] insisting on a wage increase of 5 percent.”

The FNV, the largest Dutch union, has less than a million members after a historic collapse of its membership but negotiates contracts for over 5.1 million workers, over half the nearly 9 million Dutch workforce. SA concludes: “The FNV and other unions need to work for wage increases, affordable housing and work or education for everyone and a responsible health care system where pandemics are prevented. There is every reason now for the labour movement to take the future into their own hands.”

In reality, the Dutch unions and their defenders like SA have overseen for a long period a horrific stagnation and decline in living standards. Now, with empty promises of minor wage increases, they are demanding that workers and their children go back to work and school, risking their health and their lives. The union bureaucracy can then bargain, in line with its separate class interests, for a slice of massive European Union-funded bailouts, like the €1 billion state loan and the €2.4 billion in state loan guarantees for KLM airline.

Workers in all sectors must take their safety and that of their communities into their own hands through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace. This goes hand in hand with the preparation of a general strike against the deliberate endangerment of lives by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government in the Netherlands, and governments across Europe, in the interests of the financial oligarchy.

Brazil’s Workers Party promotes military police in mayoral elections

Miguel Andrade

The mayoral elections to be held in Brazil between November and December of this year are laying bare the turn by all factions of the ruling class to the hated Brazilian military forces, including its murderous state-based military police corps.

This year’s elections are the first to be held nationally after the coming to power of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. Expressing the essential collaboration of all the established political parties with his brand of authoritarianism, the number of mayoral or vice-mayoral candidates coming from the Armed Forces or the Military Police has doubled this year in relation to the last mayoral elections, held in 2016.

Brazil's Military Police confront protesters (Credit: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil)

The 2018 election had already seen the tripling of the Congressional caucus composed of former members of the Armed Forces or Military Police. In his first year in office, Bolsonaro filled his cabinet with high-ranking Armed Forces officers—who comprise 36 percent of senior cabinet members—while tripling the numbers of military officers in the lower echelons of the federal government, including the administration of state companies.

In order to carry out his murderous “herd immunity” policy in response to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, after two medical experts resigned as health ministers in two months, he named an active duty Army general to the post—an act without precedent even under the dictatorship. He also packed the Health Ministry with unprecedented numbers of military officials.

The first two years of his presidency also saw growing threats by Bolsonaro against the Supreme Court (STF), which is investigating his involvement in organizing far-right demonstrations and interfering in the Rio de Janeiro offices of the Federal Police to shield his son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, from corruption investigations.

Military members of the cabinet, such as the ultra-right intelligence chief, Gen. Augusto Heleno, speak openly about “unpredictable consequences” if investigations reach the president, while Supreme Court justices openly consult with the military chiefs over what steps to take next. A pseudo-legal theory that Article 142 of the Brazilian Constitution allows the president to call out the Army if the Supreme Court or Congress “overstep their duties”—in this case by attempting to hold Bolsonaro to account for criminal activity—has been supported by Attorney General Augusto Aras.

In face of overwhelming social opposition to Bolsonaro’s policies, what passes for the “left” opposition to his rule, the Workers Party (PT) and its pseudo-left appendage, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), are seeking to give a left cover to the essential premise of his rule: that the military is the fundamental arbiter of the political situation in the country.

The vehicle for this campaign is the running of two Military Police officers for mayor and vice-mayor in the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, respectively.

In Salvador, the capital of Bahia, which the PT has ruled for four consecutive terms, the party has chosen as its candidate Military Police Maj. Denice Santiago, even in face of public opposition from the local party constituency. Santiago, who joined the party at the behest of the PT’s right-wing Governor Rui Costa, has been grotesquely promoted in racial and gender terms, for heading the military police’s special division charged with curbing domestic violence against women. She is pitched as the first black mayor of the city dubbed the “Black Rome,” for having an 80 percent black population and being the foremost center of African-Brazilian religions.

The grim reality is, however, that Bahia’s Military Police, after four terms of PT governments, is the second most lethal unit in the country. A full third of its interventions result in deaths, and over 700 people are killed each year, out of a population of just over 15 million.

For its part, the PSOL has chosen as its candidate for vice-mayor Military Police Col. Íbis Souza. The head of the slate, state deputy Renata Souza, has been similarly praised for being the first black woman to head the state legislature’s human rights commission. The slate was chosen after the preferred candidate of the party machine, federal deputy Marcelo Freixo, refused to run, charging that PSOL’s electoral coalition was too narrow. Freixo had come in second place in the 2016 mayoral elections, almost beating the Evangelical chauvinist Marcelo Crivella, with the support from a host of Catholic sectarians and business interests.

In the press release announcing the choice of Lieutenant Colonel Souza, the PSOL bent over backwards to appease a youth constituency that it previously sought to attract by denouncing Rio’s police, which kills over 1,800 people a year, out of a population of just over 16 million. It stated that Souza’s candidacy is “an important indication that policing and human rights can walk together.”

The party has always presented the murderous operations of the Military Police as a result of racism against their overwhelmingly black victims, avoiding at any cost an appeal to all working class youth against the whole of the capitalist state.

In both Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, the PT and the PSOL are taking identity politics to its logical conclusion, as a means of lending stability to an ever more violent capitalist state in face of growing social opposition.

Most significantly, both parties are also taking a step further in what has been at the center of their opposition to Bolsonaro: denouncing him not as a threat to workers, but to Brazilian capitalism.

From the first signs that Bolsonaro could be elected in 2018, both the PT and the PSOL sought to frame Bolsonaro as a threat to the interests of the Brazilian ruling class, citing his election as a likely source of commercial and geopolitical isolation, given Bolsonaro’s alignment with the unilateral policies of Washington, which clash with European imperialist interests and affect Brazil’s relationship with China.

The PT sought to appeal to the military by highlighting Bolsonaro’s international isolation on geopolitical issues, with former PT foreign and defense minister Celso Amorim stating that the military could “save Brazilian foreign policy.”

For its part, the PSOL, which draws its main electoral strength from Bolsonaro’s home state and political base, Rio de Janeiro, has sought to highlight the “damaging” effect to the political establishment of Bolsonaro’s involvement with organized crime in the city. To the extent that PSOL uses “human rights” rhetoric to denounce the action of organized crime in Rio, and particularly the vigilante police gangs promoted by Bolsonaro, the “militias,” it is out of fear that opposition to the militias and Bolsonaro among workers will turn against the capitalist system itself.

Such efforts culminated in March and April with both the PT and PSOL 2018 presidential candidates calling for Bolsonaro’s resignation and national unity around his vice-president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão, in order to better deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The PT brought articles of impeachment against Bolsonaro for “threatening the security” of the capitalist state by provoking social opposition with his murderous “herd immunity” policy.

This opposition is an inevitable outcome of the unprecedented growth of social inequality in the last five years of persistent economic crisis, a process vastly accelerated by the criminal policies of the ruling class towards the COVID-19 pandemic. The increasing role of the military, and especially of the murderous and criminal Military Police, is an expression of the objective incompatibility of bourgeois-democratic forms of rule with this social polarization.

Under these conditions, their “left” rhetoric notwithstanding, both the PT and PSOL are covering up for the dangers posed by the growth of the far right within the Brazilian military and police. This is part of an international tendency rooted in the incompatibility of bourgeois-democratic methods of rule with the advanced state of the capitalist crisis. It has found expression in the use of heavily militarized police and anti-immigrant squads to terrorize workers in US cities, and in the massive penetration of German security forces by neo-Nazi elements.

These efforts find an especially fertile soil in the Brazilian military police and have been consciously promoted by Bolsonaro and his 2018 election allies, such as São Paulo Governor João Doria and former Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel. All of them sought to make low-ranking Military Police members one of their key constituencies, and sponsored a shoot-to-kill policy which made police murders jump by 30 percent in the first months of 2020 in São Paulo and to the highest number in 22 years in Rio.

That the PT and PSOL are running pro-military campaigns that portray the Military Police as a democratic constituency opposed to Bolsonaro’s far right policies, is a damning indictment of the class character of these parties. Despite their heated disputes with Bolsonaro centered on foreign policy, both the PT and the PSOL are more fearful of the working class than of Bolsonaro himself. They are attempting to give the murderous and repressive apparatus of the Brazilian capitalist state a “left” cover out of concern that Bolsonaro is insufficiently prepared to deal with a coming social explosion.

Thirty years of German unity: Berlin increases military spending, incites nationalism and war

Johannes Stern

In his speech commemorating the 30th anniversary of German unity, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sought to portray the reunified Germany as a guarantor of a peaceful world order.

In contrast to the German Reich under the Kaiser based on “Prussian dominance, militarism, and nationalism,” which led directly “to the catastrophe of the First World War,” we live today in a “reunited, free, democratic country at the heart of Europe,” said Steinmeier on October 3 in Potsdam.

"Heron" drone of the German Armed Forces (Photo: Bundeswehr)

Thirty years after reunification on a capitalist basis, this propaganda is not merely dishonest. Under conditions of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, escalating international conflicts and mounting tensions between the major powers, the ruling elite is once again showing its true colours. It has embraced “militarism and nationalism,” built up a fascist party in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and is systematically resurrecting an aggressive imperialist foreign policy.

The general debate on the budget held in the days leading up to Steinmeier’s speech was revealing in this regard. In her speech on the new defence budget, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer unveiled a major new rearmament drive.

“All of the major purchase plans, above all plans for European cooperation, will only be enforceable if additional funds are made available in the future,” she stated. This applies “to the Eurofighter as well as the German-French FCAS project and the NH90 helicopter. If German and European companies are to receive the liquidity they need, new promises must be made.” This is “a concern of the entire federal government,” she said.

The costs for the projects initiated by the grand coalition are tremendous. The FCAS (Future Combat Air System) is a European air combat system which includes a combination of sixth generation utility fighter jets, drones, satellites and command-and-control aircraft, and could potentially have its own nuclear capabilities. The development alone is expected to cost €8 billion. Total costs are estimated to reach at least €100 billion. The Handelsblatt daily reported last year that the system could gobble up “up to €500 billion” by “mid-century.”

Other plans, like the purchasing of armed drones, are to be implemented immediately. The issue in 2021 will be “to equip our soldiers with material,” said Kramp-Karrenbauer. The “deployment-ready initiative” begun in February is showing “the first signs of progress,” she added. These include “the increase in flying hours for the Eurofighter and other air force aircraft” and the arrival of “more than 1,200 modern trucks for the soldiers.” However, all of this is “not sufficient.” Additional developments are necessary, including “the key plan to purchase armed drones for the army.”

The defence minister made no secret of the fact that Germany is arming itself with the deadliest weapons in order to wage war around the world in defence of its economic and geostrategic interests—increasingly against its erstwhile allies. “If our business model is global, our security policy must also be global,” she said. “Therefore, I must make clear once again: we Germans, as a guarantor of security, have to do much more—not for Trump or anyone else, but for our own security.”

Kramp-Karrenbauer identified Germany’s spheres of influence and interest as “the EU’s neighbourhood, in a semi-circle from the northeast to the southwest,” which includes the Middle East and North Africa. She also pointed to resource- and population-rich Asia. “The federal government’s new doctrine on the Indo-Pacific defines Germany’s role in this crucial region of the world, where a great part of our prosperity will be generated,” according to the defence minister.

The federal government will therefore “expand its security policy engagement in the Indo-Pacific,” which could include “the participation in exercises in the region” and “various forms of naval presence.” Concrete plans have evidently already been prepared. “If COVID allows” we will “be present with the army in this region next year,” said Kramp-Karrenbauer.

The ruling elite’s aggressive rhetoric in support of mad war plans on a vast scale recalls the darkest periods of German history. Rüdiger Lucassen, a former soldier and adviser in the Defence Ministry, informed the parliamentarians, “A state does not maintain its armed forces to dig wells somewhere or help a grandmother across the street. Armed forces must be willing and able to use deadly military force.” For this, “the army needs team spirit, pride, and a unique professional ethos.”

Martin Hohmann, who was expelled from the Christian Democrats in 2004 after giving an anti-Semitic speech, and now sits on the parliamentary defence committee for the AfD, urged the federal government to implement the commitments in the new doctrine of the armed forces at an even faster pace than was originally planned. “Mrs. Minister, get on with creating this fighting force! Take action!” he urged Kramp-Karrenbauer. “Along with the change in course on equipment, we also need a change in course on fighting spirit, a fighting spirit in society and politics.”

Hohmann’s speech underscores the extent to which even foreign policy has assumed fascist characteristics. He provocatively cited the designated US ambassador, Douglas Macgregor, who recently stated that Germany “spends millions on undesirable Muslim invaders” instead of investing in its armed forces.

Nobody in parliament defied this fascist and militarist agitation. On the contrary, the speakers for the nominally left-wing opposition parties made clear that they are in fundamental agreement with the course pursued by the grand coalition. While there is allegedly no money available in the era of the pandemic for health care, education, wage increases and safe working conditions, all parliamentary parties have closed ranks around a programme of rearmament. They are all ready to enforce military rearmament with the same ruthlessness against the opposition of the population they have used to impose the return to unsafe workplaces and schools.

Tobias Lindner, the defence policy spokesman for the Greens, described the grand coalition’s rearmament plans as “good” and merely criticised their insecure financing. In the current draft budget, there is “especially in the area of purchasing … a smorgasbord of dream projects for which financing has been fictively awarded but actually blocked.” This is “irresponsible towards our soldiers.”

The Left Party, which played a key role 30 years ago in reintroducing capitalist relations into eastern Germany, is now fully on board with German imperialism.

At the beginning of his speech, party spokesman Michael Leutert stated that he wanted to “start with two positive things.” Firstly, he read “with interest that the support for ex-soldiers of the NVA (East German Army) in crisis situations will be increased for the German army.” And secondly, “the finances for the military intelligence service will be increased.” He then also indicated his party’s support for rearmament. “I think we have a consensus in this room on national defence; that is not up for debate.”

Officially, the defence budget will increase next year by a further €1.16 billion to reach €46.8 billion. In reality, it is already much higher. In the economic recovery package adopted by the grand coalition in early May, an additional €10 billion was set aside to strengthen the army. Point 10 of the programme stated that in particular “security projects and arms projects with a large portion of German value creation that can begin in 2020 or 2021 should be immediately implemented.” The value of project—€10 billion.

Like the astronomical sums handed over to the financial oligarchy within the framework of the coronavirus bailout package, the billions provided to the military are to be squeezed out of the working class. In his budget speech, which is set to be passed by parliament in December, current Finance Minister and Social Democrat Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz thundered that the notorious debt brake would soon come into force once again. We will be successful “in reducing the debt rate in the years to come once again” and “reach a stage where we … no longer need to make use of the emergency rules,” he added.

Germany, France to sanction Russia over Navalny’s alleged poisoning

Clara Weiss

Ahead of a scheduled EU summit on October 12, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) published a report alleging that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok-type toxin. The cholinesterase inhibitor it named is not formally included on its list of banned substances, but the OPCW claims that its structure resembles other substances it has outlawed.

Alexei Navalny (Credit: Alexey Yushenkov, CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The OPCW report formed the basis for a statement by the French and German foreign ministers, stating that the Kremlin had not provided a satisfactory response to the attack “on Russian soil, against a Russian opposition figure, using a military nerve agent developed by Russia.” The statement claimed that there “is no other plausible explanation for Mr. Navalny’s poisoning than Russian involvement and responsibility.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas threatened: “It is clear that if the events are not cleared up and the necessary information is not provided, targeted and disruptive sanctions against those responsible on the Russian side will be unavoidable. Russia would do well not to let this happen.”

According to the French daily Le Monde, the EU will discuss sanctions on Monday against nine senior Russian officials, including members of the presidential administration and security apparatus.

In response to the OPCW report and statements from Berlin and Paris, Russian officials issued angry rebukes. Russia’s envoy to the OPCW, Ambassador Alexander Shulgin, said: “Russia does not owe anything to anybody. Neither to Germany nor to other countries that categorically and groundlessly accuse Russia of poisoning Alexei Navalny. We do not need to explain ourselves to them and we are not going to.”

The Russian foreign ministry reiterated its calls to get the test analyses and results produced by the German army lab in Munich. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “We are surprised that the EU is functioning without a court and investigation. They demand we conduct an investigation, but the very same Germany does not provide us with any facts.” Earlier this week, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Marina Zakharovra said there can be “no business as usual” between Berlin, Paris and Moscow unless France and Germany change course on the Navalny case.

Nothing published by the OPCW and the imperialist powers can be taken at face value. The OPCW is notorious for providing pretexts for political and military interventions by the imperialist powers. In 2018, it doctored a report, claiming, despite evidence to the contrary from its own staff members, that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. Thus providing the pretext for bombings by France, Britain and the US in Syria.

The alleged poisoning of Navalny with Novichok raises a host of unanswered questions. First and foremost is how Navalny survived exposure to a particularly deadly nerve agent, and why no one who came in contact with him showed even mild symptoms. In the 2018 Salisbury incident, when former Russian secret service agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were allegedly poisoned with Novichok, at least one person died and one became seriously ill from minimal exposure to the poison. Entire buildings had to be evacuated.

In Navalny’s case, however, no one on the plane he took from Tomsk to Moscow reported any symptoms. Nor did any of his staff members—even those who rescued a bottle from his hotel which supposedly contained Novichok, according to the German army lab—suffer any impact.

Leonid Rink, one of the developers of the Novichok agent, told the Russian press that the substances detected by the OPCW were, in fact, not toxic and ineffective as poison.

In a bizarre, two-hour interview with the Russian YouTube blogger Yuri Dud’ this week, Navalny, who has now fully recovered, compared his feeling of being poisoned and dying with the impact of the Dementors in the fantasy book Harry Potter. He and his wife could not describe any part of his alleged poisoning without repeated references to novels and movies.

When pressed by Dud’ why he thought that Putin personally had ordered his poisoning, Navalny insisted that it was primarily the fact that Novichok was used which allegedly “proved” Putin’s direct involvement. In fact, there are many other governments and security agencies capable of producing and deploying Novichok, if Novichok was really used in this case. No evidence has been provided for any kind of Russian involvement, let alone personal responsibility by Putin.

In the same interview, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, claimed she had had virtually no idea of the involvement of the German and French governments in Navalny’s transfer to Berlin’s Charité hospital, stating that the publicity she generated was decisive in making the transfer possible. In fact, it has since been revealed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally became involved early on, pressing for Navalny’s transfer to Germany. She later also reportedly visited him in the hospital, receiving daily briefings on his condition.

Nowhere has Navalny’s alleged poisoning been exploited as aggressively as in Germany. Much of the German political establishment seized upon the case to push for a more aggressive stance by Berlin and the entire EU toward Russia. Navalny gave an interview to Bild, calling former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has close ties to Russia’s state-owned Gazprom company, a “lackey of Putin.” He called to stop the nearly completed NordStream2 pipeline, which delivers gas from Russia directly to Germany, and for sanctions against members of the Russian ruling elite.

Navalny’s case cannot be understood outside the imperialist powers’ drive to war amid an unprecedented crisis of capitalism driven by the pandemic, mounting social inequality and bitter geostrategic tensions. The EU’s aggressive stance towards Russia is driven not last of all by growing class tensions inside Europe amid the escalating pandemic. Moreover, US-EU tensions, particularly between Washington and Berlin, have surged in recent years.

It is against this background that the European imperialist powers seek to exploit the growing economic and political weakness of Russia’s post-Soviet capitalist oligarchy. Recent months have seen mass protests and strikes against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus, the only remaining government on Russia’s western borders not directly aligned with NATO. The EU, with Germany and France in the lead, has sought to bolster the pro-NATO opposition in Minsk, both to suppress and divert the strikes and further weaken Russia’s geopolitical position.

In the Caucasus, war is raging between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a religiously and ethnically loaded conflict threatening to spill over into Russia’s North Caucasus. In the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, moreover, the government of Sooronbai Jeenbekov was toppled by opposition parties that decry the former government’s close cooperation with Russia as a violation of Kyrgyzstan’s national sovereignty.

At the same time, the Putin regime has been undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, to which the Russian oligarchy, like the ruling class around the world, responded with a de facto policy of “herd immunity.” While Russia now faces a resurgence of the pandemic, Moscow is preparing further cuts to health care and social spending and has declared that no lock-downs will be imposed to stop the spread of the virus.

Amidst this growing instability, the imperialist powers seek to bolster the right-wing opposition of Alexei Navalny, who is notorious for his ties to far-right and regionalist forces in Russia, both to advance their geopolitical interests in the former Soviet Union, and to build up right-wing allies which can be relied upon in the violent suppression of working class opposition not just to the Putin regime but the capitalist system as a whole.

Reopening of German schools leads to explosion of COVID-19 infections

Gregor Link

On Thursday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced that 4,516 people in Germany had become infected with the coronavirus in the previous 24 hours. That is nearly 1,700 more than on Wednesday, which with 2,828 new infections had already marked the highest increase since April. The rate of positive tests (from 1.22 to 1.64 percent) as well as the average age—and thus the potential death rate of those infected—also rose sharply in the past week. According to the RKI, twice as many cases occurred last week as in the first week of September.

Central train station in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

The ruling class knows that it is preparing a catastrophe with its ruthless policy of opening up the economy and its refusal to take serious measures to contain the virus. Social Democratic Party (SPD) health expert Karl Lauterbach declared that if the average age of those infected continued to converge with that of the population, a death rate of at least 1 percent could be expected—i.e., hundreds of deaths per day. This, however, assumes that the health system would not collapse.

At the end of September, Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) announced she expected 19,200 new infections daily until Christmas. This gloomy forecast has already been exceeded by the events of the past few days. If the trend continues, there is a risk of around 30,000 new infections per day by the end of the year. This would be in the order of magnitude of the United States—a country with a population four times larger.

In the United States, the Trump administration’s callous response to the pandemic has so far claimed 212,000 lives, but with a far larger total number of infected people. The much-vaunted “low death toll” in Germany is almost identical to that of the US in relation to the number of infections. According to the figures of Johns Hopkins University in the US, the number of deaths in Germany would exceed 231,000, once the same number of people who had become infected there.

If, in the long term, as Merkel predicted in March, 60 to 70 percent of the German population were to become infected, this would mean between 1.53 and 1.78 million deaths at the current mortality rate. This roughly corresponds to the warning in a paper prepared in April and published later by the Federal Interior Ministry, which assumes a “worst-case scenario” of “over 1 million deaths in 2020” in Germany alone.

The sharp rise in the number of infections is the result of the criminal and deliberate policy of the federal and state governments allowing the virus to spread. In recent weeks and months, they have done everything in their power to force workers back into factories, opening schools under unsafe conditions, covering up outbreaks and at the same time refusing to invest in protection against the pandemic.

According to the teachers’ initiative #Bildungabersicher (#Educationbutsafe), there have been cases of infection in more than 1,000 schools and day-care centres in Germany so far. According to a recent official study from Britain, schools and educational institutions now account for almost half of the incidences of infection.

At a press conference on Thursday, called because of the exploding number of cases, Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) described the situation at kindergartens and schools as “comparatively good.” Spahn demanded that a “second lockdown” should not be the subject of a media “debate.” He said that the blame for the new infections was not the policy of the federal and state governments in reopening the economy, but private “celebrations,” “weddings” and “religious gatherings.”

Spahn deliberately blames the general population to conceal what is actually driving the pandemic: The explosion of case numbers in Germany and other countries is a direct result of the insecure return to workplaces and schools and is closely linked to the capitalist exploitation of the working class. This has been particularly acute since the beginning of the pandemic in the factories of meat-processing billionaire Clemens Tönnies.

For example, 112 of the 2,000 workers at the Tönnies processing plant in Weidemark in Sögel, Emsland, have already been infected, while production continues. Instead of ordering a comprehensive quarantine and mobilising teams of doctors, the responsible district authority declared on Wednesday that workers in the slaughterhouse must continue working until Friday—those in the cutting plant even until Sunday. This is to be done “so that no goods are spoiled.” The municipal schools are also to remain open as usual.

Meanwhile, the Tönnies subsidiary announced it would apply for an injunction against the closure to “maintain proportionality” in the balance between profit and human life. Furthermore, the company stated that the slaughtering of currently 8,000 pigs per day—instead of the previous 15,000—represented an unacceptable “pressure on agricultural production chains” and endangered “animal welfare on farms in the region.”

In a Vion meat processing facility in Emstek (Lower Saxony), where 63 employees have been infected so far, work is also continuing. The Cloppenburg district administration has agreed to this with the company, reported broadcaster NDR. In nearby Vechta, two residents of a nursing home where 50 coronavirus cases occurred last week also died.

This “profits before life” policy is accompanied by a right-wing propaganda campaign by business, politics and the media, which plays down the virus. In an interview with Wolfram Weimer—the former editor-in-chief of Die Welt and the Berliner Morgenpost, as well as the founder of the right-wing magazine Cicero — the Bonn virologist and advocate of “herd immunity” Hendrik Streeck complains that the population is “too afraid” of a virus that is “deadly only to a few,” After all, the risk posed by the virus is “now well calculable,” he said.

Weimer and Streeck met on the fringes of the Hamburg economic summit “New Thinking,” which was also attended by former SPD Chairman and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, billionaire Erich Sixt, former EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger and the president of the CDU Economic Council Astrid Hamker. Streeck and Weimer agreed that the danger of a global pandemic should “not be overdramatised.”

This is also the line of the Left Party. “The virus and the disease are dangerous, but our health system is now able to deal with COVID-19,” said Thuringia’s state Premier Bodo Ramelow yesterday in an interview with Neues Deutschland. “I ask that we panic less.”

In Thuringia, which is governed by the Left Party, the SPD and the Greens, there was recently an outbreak of COVID-19 in a home for the disabled, during which 23 people—15 residents and eight employees—became infected. According to a report by broadcaster MDR, the people affected are currently in quarantine. After the Kassenärztliche Vereinigung (Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians) had explicitly refused to allow several residents who showed symptoms to undergo a test, one of the accusations is that they failed to provide assistance.

Ramelow described the district as a “hotspot” but immediately made clear that even a local lockdown in a risk area was out of the question for his administration. He explained to Neues Deutschland that the contacts of those affected were currently being monitored “so that we do not have to shut down the entire district.”

In the meantime, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the cities and districts of Bremen, Esslingen, Offenbach and Frankfurt am Main, Hagen, Hamm, Remscheid, Vechta and the whole of Berlin are considered risk areas. On Wednesday afternoon, a majority of the federal states agreed on a ban on commercial accommodation for holidaymakers from domestic risk areas. Ramelow rejected the measure, declaring that one cannot lock oneself up from the virus.

There was sufficient capacity in his state that all those in Thüringia could get a test before undertaking a journey—however, there would be no free coronavirus tests for workers. He only wanted to “point out that people have to pay for it themselves. And that means: Those who have less money may not be able to afford it for their families. ... A pensioner who wants to visit her grandson may not be able to afford it.”

Ramelow’s remarks confirm the warnings of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) that the murderous policy of systematically allowing the virus to infect the population is being pursued equally by all parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament).

Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusions. They must organise themselves into independent action committees and prepare a general strike to save the lives of hundreds of thousands. In this struggle, they face not only federal and state governments and their allied trade unions, but the entire capitalist system.

Sri Lankan government presses ahead with plans for a presidential dictatorship

Saman Gunadasa & K. Ratnayake

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse is pushing ahead with the reactionary 20th constitutional amendment to the constitution. The Colombo media has reported that Rajapakse wants the amendment ratified in parliament before the government presents its annual budget on November 17.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, attends an event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

Last week Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the president’s brother, met with several media editors. He brushed aside reports about fissures within the ruling party and declared that the government would win the necessary two-thirds parliamentary majority to change the constitution.

Facing an economic catastrophe exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, President Rajapakse wants new anti-democratic measures to suppress the eruption of mass social struggles by the working class and the poor.

Although the amendment has been presented to parliament, debate cannot begin until the Supreme Court has ruled on petitions opposing the proposed change.

Parliamentary opposition parties, including the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), United National Party (UNP), Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and several civil organisations and individuals have filed dozens of petitions in the Supreme Court.

The SJB, UNP and TNA want the Court to rule that the amendment must be endorsed not just by a two-thirds parliamentary majority but a national referendum.

On Tuesday, a Supreme Court bench of five judges concluded hearing arguments for and against the amendment. It is not clear when the Court’s ruling on the amendment will be sent to the parliamentary speaker.

The Sri Lankan judiciary is notorious for its political bias. Workers and the poor should have no illusions that this arm of the capitalist state will defend their democratic rights.

The proposed 20th amendment gives sweeping autocratic powers to the president. These include the appointment or removal of the prime minister and cabinet ministers without consulting the prime minister; the dissolution of parliament within one year of its election; and the appointment of chairmen of commissions on elections, police, human rights, bribery and corruption and finance.

The president, who is also given immunity from litigation, is the appointing authority for top judges and the attorney general. The president may consult with a parliamentary council, which includes the prime minister, parliamentary speaker and the opposition leader, in the appointment of these top officials, but it is not mandatory.

The 20th amendment will repeal the 19th amendment which imposed a two-term limit on presidents; prevented the president from dissolving parliament until after it had served four and half years; established independent commissions to appoint top state officials and judges; and mandated that the appointment of ministers could only occur with the advice of the prime minister. Former President Maithripala Sirisena introduced the 19th amendment, which was enacted in April 2015.

Prior to his election as president, Sirisena had pledged to completely abolish the executive presidential system. Like his predecessors, Sirisena dropped this promise after coming to power and instead put forward the limited 19th amendment.

The executive presidential system, which was introduced in 1978 and is widely hated by Sri Lankan workers and the poor, has been used to suppress democratic and social rights and to conduct Colombo’s 30-year brutal communalist civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The Rajapakse government falsely claims that the 20th amendment is needed to boost economic development. President Rajapakse and the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) came to power by exploiting popular opposition to the austerity measures of the previous government of President Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. While falsely pledging to improve social conditions, the SLPP promised big business it would establish “strong and stable” rule.

Rajapakse is rapidly moving to establish autocratic forms of rule. President Rajapakse made this abundantly clear to a meeting in the remote central hills village near Haldummulla on September 25. In a sinister reprimand to state officials for their alleged lethargy, he declared: “Take my orders as circulars; no written circulars are necessary. I am the executive president of this country. What is beyond me?”

Soon after coming to power last November, Rajapakse began militarising his administration, appointing retired and in-service generals into key state positions, including retired Major General Kamal Gunaratne as the defence secretary.

The media has reported that some government members have criticised aspects of the 20th amendment. The concerns are from members of the Sinhala-extremist National Freedom Front and the Pure National Heritage Party who contested the last general election in alliance with the SLPP.

These racist organisations oppose any weakening of laws to strip dual citizens of election rights and argue the 20th amendment could open the way for members of the Tamil diaspora to stand in the elections. They have also criticised any removal of the auditor general’s scrutiny of companies where a majority of shares are held by the state and any undermining of the power of the president to pass emergency acts without gazette notifications.

However, these “critics” sat with the prime minister this week when he met with media editors, making clear their allegiance to the government. None of them has opposed the president assuming dictatorial powers.

Legal counsel for the SJB, UNP, TNA and other formations have raised various concerns in the Supreme Court. These include the concentration of power in just one branch of the government; reduction of the auditor-general’s powers and the enabling of dual-citizenship holders to obtain senior posts in the government. While the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) did not petition to the Supreme Court it shares these positions.

While these parties posture about democratic rights, they all have, in one way or another over the decades, backed the repressive executive presidential system. It was the UNP that introduced the autocratic presidential system.

Nor have they at any time opposed President Rajapakse’s militarisation of the government. All participated in the all-party meetings convened by the prime minister in March and April, expressing support for the president’s military-based response to the coronavirus pandemic.

JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake has downplayed the grave threat of Rajapakse’s dictatorship by dismissing the president as a “tribal leader” and blaming those who voted him into power.

The JVP, which previously backed the autocratic rule of former President Mahinda Rajapakse and then switched to supporting the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, prepared the political ground for Gotabhaya Rajapakse and the SLPP to come to power. The JVP is now calling for a broad front to defeat the 20th amendment. This is nothing other than an alliance with various bourgeois formations to divert any opposition into harmless protests.

The Bar Association of Sri Lanka has expressed fears in ruling circles that the reactionary amendment will produce a mass rebellion. “If the public do not have access to remedy a grievance against the unlawful exercise of powers by an all-powerful President the only remedy will be to take arms against the State,” it declared.

Indeed, the turn to dictatorial methods of rule makes clear that the fight for basic democratic rights is bound up with the political struggle to abolish capitalism.

The Sri Lankan working class must oppose the Rajapakse government’s reactionary agenda as well as its bourgeois “critics” on the basis of its own independent program. Against capitalist dictatorship, it must fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government, rallying the rural poor and oppressed on the basis of a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program. This is the perspective on which the Socialist Equality Party fights and we call upon workers and youth to join us in this struggle.

New Zealand debates reveal bipartisan support for austerity and US alliance

John Braddock

With the New Zealand election due on October 17, the third of four debates between Labour Party Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and National Party leader Judith Collins took place in Christchurch on Tuesday evening. The event, organized by the Stuff media organisation, followed two previous debates, broadcast on TVNZ and Newshub. The final debate will be aired on NZTV on Thursday.

Despite media attempts to depict the third debate in particular as “energetic” and even “feisty,” all three were lacklustre affairs, with little substance. New Zealand Herald commentator Bryce Edwards had earlier bemoaned the fact that there was no “contest of ideas” anywhere in the campaign and the “policy void” was worse than usual.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meeting with US President Donald Trump last year (Credit: The White House)

This is not accidental. Claiming that the coronavirus crisis makes policymaking too difficult, Labour and National, the two main parties of big business, along with their allies, are deliberately hiding from the population the sweeping austerity agenda that will be imposed as soon as the election is out of the way.

The campaign began amid extraordinary instability in the political establishment. The election was postponed by a month, after a series of fresh COVID-19 cases surged in Auckland during September. In July, Labour’s Health Minister David Clark resigned over failures in his handling of the COVID-19 response. Collins was installed as third opposition leader in as many months in July following ongoing inner-party turmoil.

When Ardern launched Labour’s campaign in early August, she described it as a “COVID election,” with the pandemic response being the central issue. At the conclusion of Tuesday’s debate, Ardern again emphasised that the country’s “team of five million” voters should support Labour for its purported defeat of COVID-19.

There is an air of unreality about all of this. The election is being held amid an unprecedented breakdown of capitalism, accelerated by the pandemic, which has killed more than a million people worldwide. While New Zealand’s COVID-19 numbers are lower than those of most other countries, it remains a very real threat.

Every party is peddling the nationalist myth that New Zealand is somehow exempt from the intensifying global economic and social catastrophe, which promises to exceed even the devastation of the Great Depression. The US, the so-called pillar of western democracy, is in the grip of a profound crisis that will impact on every country around the world.

A brief exchange during the second debate underscored the right-wing, pro-imperialist character of both parties. Asked by moderator Patrick Gower if they thought Trump was a “dangerous influence on the world,” Ardern replied: “I will work in New Zealand’s interest and if a democracy delivers Donald Trump that’s who we work with.”

That means, among other things, deepening collaboration with Washington’s build-up to war against China, which is backed by the Republicans and Democrats alike.

Collins was even more fulsome, dishonestly declaring: “He [Trump] has actually done some quite recent stuff with Israel and UAE and so actually that's better than war, don’t you think? He hasn’t been ready to rush into war.”

Neither leader mentioned, let alone opposed, Trump’s extraordinary threats to disregard the outcome of the US election and mobilise fascist thugs to carry out a coup if he does not win.

Their comments amounted to a pledge of fealty to Washington by both leaders. Ardern’s government is itself a product of a US intervention. During protracted coalition talks after the 2017 election, US ambassador Scott Brown publicly criticised the incumbent National Party for failing to fully support Trump’s threats to “destroy” North Korea. Following this, the nationalist, anti-immigrant NZ First Party announced it was forming a coalition with Labour, instead of National, despite the latter receiving more votes.

Discussion of last year’s mass shooting in Christchurch, in which 51 people died, has also been suppressed throughout the election campaign, including in the Christchurch debate. The shooter Brenton Tarrant’s fascist ideology had been encouraged by decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the demonisation of Muslims and immigrants, in which every party is complicit. Attacks on democratic rights, including increased police powers and internet censorship, are now under way as the ruling class prepares to suppress working class opposition to social inequality and war.

Like other governments around the world, the ruling Labour Party has responded to the pandemic by presenting businesses and the banks with tens of billions of dollars, while forcing people to return to work sooner than health experts recommend. Each of the three debates has begun with the leaders declaring their principal aim was to “build our economy,” i.e., do whatever is required to boost profits.

The country’s biggest retailer, The Warehouse Group, this week posted an after-tax profit of $44.5 million for the year to August. The company would have made a $4.3 million loss without the $67.7 million “wage subsidy” from the government, which it took before axing 1,080 jobs.

According to Bloomberg, global business leaders are lauding the Labour government as having the world’s “best” coronavirus response—ranked above Japan and Taiwan—but working class living standards are collapsing. Median incomes plummeted 7.6 percent in the June quarter compared with last year, while nearly 80,000 people have lost jobs since March. One in four children lives in poverty and demand for food banks has soared.

The campaign underscores the vast gulf between the ruling elite and the increasingly impoverished working class. In a question submitted to the first debate by Auckland student Aigagalefili Fepulea’i-Tapua’i, the two leaders were asked how they would stop young people dropping out of school in order to work to support their families.

Both leaders responded with empty platitudes. Ardern pointed to Labour’s promise to lift the minimum wage from $18.90 to a paltry $20 an hour. She declared there was still “much to do” about child poverty and “we won’t do it overnight.” Collins rejected any increase in the minimum wage, saying small business owners “can’t afford constant rises.”

Both parties’ tax policies will further entrench social inequality. National has promised to temporarily slash income tax, favouring the rich. A person on the minimum wage would only receive an extra $8 a week, while those earning over $90,000 a year will get an extra $58 a week. Asked about Labour’s promise to raise income tax slightly for the top 2 percent of earners, Ardern declared, “This time now is not the time to have huge uncertainty around tax policy.” Labour has ruled out any taxes on wealth.

Neither party will do anything to address the housing crisis, driven by rampant speculation and profiteering. House prices and rents in New Zealand are among the highest in the world, relative to wages, and have risen by more than a quarter in just three years. A promise by Labour in 2017 to build tens of thousands of new affordable houses has come to naught.

Labour is now pledging to fund an extra 8,000 more social and transitional housing places. Even if implemented, this would do nothing to address demand: the public housing wait list has more than tripled under the Ardern government to reach nearly 20,000 households. National is simply promising to liberalize planning laws and hasten the issuing of building consents.

The working class is being disenfranchised in this election. The next government, whatever its make-up, will pave the way for a resurgence of class struggles, as workers are driven to the left of all the parties by the worsening social crisis. Workers and young people must prepare, by building their own party, on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.