European governments seize upon terrorist attacks in France and Vienna to build a police state

Johannes Stern

European governments are responding to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, Dresden and Vienna by adopting the political agenda of the far right. Under the pretext of the “war on terror,” EU leaders and European leaders on Tuesday agreed on a massive expansion of “Fortress Europe,” the de facto abolition of the right of asylum, and the creation of what amounts to a Europe-wide police state.

“The work at government level is aimed at bringing our various services and authorities into line and better coordinating our efforts to fight terrorism, radicalisation with many targeted measures,” declared French President Emmanuel Macron, at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and former German Defence Minister.

French President Emmanuel Macron by the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty in the courtyard of the Sorbonne university, Oct. 21, 2020 in Paris (AP Photo/Francois Mori, Pool)

“The task now is to implement these measures consistently, for example the interoperability of databases, the linking of our databases and the cooperation of our security services also at the external borders.” Another topic “we discussed was the determination with which we want to combat terrorist propaganda and hate speech on the internet,” Macron added. “We are working to ensure that in the coming weeks a regulation on the removal and deletion of terrorist content within one hour is adopted.”

“We must also work on a reform of the Schengen rules,” Macron said. “This means that we must strengthen and better defend the external borders of the European Union and that we must better control and implement the functioning of the Schengen rules … I hope that we will soon be able to establish a real Security Council.”

Merkel also pleaded for a strengthening of Europe’s external borders and stepped-up censorship, stressing that “the German Presidency of the Council still wanted to finalise the regulation on preventing the distribution of terrorist content on the internet.” She boasted: “We have recently given our security authorities in Germany new opportunities” for monitoring “messenger services [such as Telegram] and surveillance.”

Von der Leyen took the same line, announcing that the EU Commission’s 2018 proposal to prevent terrorist content online “will now be finalised in the Council and Parliament trialogue.” She said it was important to “focus on the speed of deleting such terrorist content. It is crucial to be fast.” This will also involve “giving greater responsibility to the major Internet platforms in the fight against illegal and harmful online content.” To this end, the so-called Digital Services Act will be “presented in a few weeks’ time.”

It is clear what this means. Under the guise of the fight against “terrorist content,” the censorship of left-wing content and websites in particular will be expanded. Only on October 28, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted at a hearing before the US Senate that Google’s search engine censors the World Socialist Web Site.

The new directive will oblige internet giants such as YouTube and Facebook, which work closely with the secret services and governments and already censor left-wing and progressive content on a massive scale, to delete “harmful” articles, videos or other postings even faster.

In order to justify the construction of a European police state, the ruling class is seizing upon the horrific terrorist attacks of recent weeks and fueling fears of a continuing terrorist threat.

“We have a constant danger among us. We have thousands of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ who either survived the fighting in Syria, in Iraq for the IS and returned or who did not get through at all because they were stopped somewhere when they left,” warned the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. He therefore called for a “more robust approach to the threats throughout Europe.” If we want to “protect the freedoms of all, we have to restrict the freedom of these people.”

What Kurz concealed was that European governments are in many ways responsible for the terrible terrorist attacks of recent weeks. The thousands of “foreign terrorist fighters” did not fall from the sky, but were used by the imperialist powers and their reactionary regional allies—above all Saudi Arabia—as shock troops in the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.

Almost all the assassins of the major terrorist attacks in recent years were known to the security authorities: Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016, the Kouachi brothers who stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie He bdo in early 2015, and also Kujtim Fejzulai, the assassin in Vienna.

Kurz’s assertion that European governments are concerned with “protecting freedom” is a blatant lie. In fact, the policies of the ruling class do not protect freedom and life, but bring oppression and death. Due to the lethal “herd immunity” strategy, over 300,000 people have died in Europe alone since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In previous years, tens of millions of people had already been killed, injured or made refugees in the EU-backed neo-colonial wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. Tens of thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. Within Europe, the ruling class is cultivating and using extreme right-wing and fascist forces to intimidate and suppress the growing opposition of the working class and youth.

The latest police-state measures are part of this strategy. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the advanced economic, social and political crisis of the capitalist system. The ruling class feels it is sitting on a social and political powder keg. In recent days and weeks, teachers and students in Greece, Poland and France have protested against the unsafe reopening of schools.

These protests are only an anticipation of massive working-class struggles that will be directed against the entire capitalist system, including in the US. There, the Democrats not only play down the coup plans by President Donald Trump, who seeks to overturn the election results and establish a fascistic dictatorship. They themselves appeal to the military and the state apparatus out of fear of a revolutionary development of the working class.

The same fear is also driving the nominally left-wing bourgeois parties on this side of the Atlantic. In Germany, the Greens and the Left Party, which articulate the interests of affluent sections of the middle classes, stand at the forefront of a sharp shift of the entire political establishment to the right.

Last weekend, excerpts from a so-called “eleven-point action plan” drawn up by Green Party leader Robert Habeck and others became known. Both in terms of its form and content, the paper could have also been drawn up by the right-wing extremist AfD. According to the paper, so-called Islamist “Gefährder” (potential offenders) must be “consistently and closely monitored”. For that, more police and secret service agents are needed.

The Greens attack the grand coalition and its notoriously right-wing Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) from the right. They demand that arrest warrants against “Islamist perpetrators” be executed more consistently and that deportations be organized more quickly.

At the European level, according to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Greens demand the establishment of “a European Criminal Police Office with its own investigative teams, a uniform definition of the term ‘Gefährder’ and more cross-border cooperation between national security authorities.”

This is a blueprint for the creation of a pan-European police state where nobody is safe. If one takes the recent tightening of the Berlin police law by the “Red-Red-Green” (SPD-Left Party-Green) Senate majority, any person who might be willing and seems able to commit a terrorist crime can be classified as a “Gefährder.” This means that anyone can be classified as a “Gefährder” on the basis of a mere presumption and thus prosecuted by the security authorities.

The Left Party leadership is also calling for a strong state, combining this with anti-Islamic agitation. In a commentary for the right-wing Springer newspaper Die Welt, Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of the Left Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag (German parliament), called for an end to “ambiguity and inaction” and a “clear reaction of a well-fortified democracy.”

By this Bartsch obviously understands the oppression of Muslims—among other things, he pleads for a headscarf ban “in day-care centers and primary schools”—and the criminalisation of any opposition to racism and the police state.

“It was shocking that demonstrations took place in this country after the attacks in France—against the French President,” he wrote angrily in Die Welt.

Bartsch could hardly make it clearer where he and the Left Party stand on the class struggle. Protests against the hated “President of the Rich” Macron—who praised Nazi collaborationist Philippe Pétain as a hero and has ordered the suppression of the “yellow vest” protests—are just as taboo for the former Stalinist state party of East Germany as protests against police violence.

In early June, the Red-Red-Green senate in Berlin organized police violence against peaceful demonstrators protesting against the police murder of George Floyd in the USA. At the time Bartsch repeatedly praised the police forces, which are permeated by right-wing extremist networks, and declared that “the police do not deserve less, but rather more social recognition and personnel, especially on the streets.”

Immigrant women who accused ICE doctor of forced sterilization deported from the United States

Kevin Martinez

The Trump administration has deported multiple women who complained they were forcibly sterilized by a Georgia gynecologist while held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention camp.

Already six former patients who alleged mistreatment by Dr. Mahendra Amin have been forced out of the country. Amin is accused of operating on immigrant women without their consent and performing medically unnecessary procedures which resulted in some women unable to have children. Another seven women from the Irwin Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia who spoke out also face deportation according to their lawyers.

Immigrants seeking asylum hold hands as they leave a cafeteria at the ICE South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas on August 23, 2019 (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

One of the women who spoke to federal investigators was told only hours later by ICE that the hold on her deportation had been removed and that her removal was “imminent.” Another woman described being taken to a rural Georgia airport and made to sign deportation papers, only to be brought back to the jail as her lawyers file a lawsuit in federal court.

All of the women described operations by Amin that worsened their pain without being given any non-surgical alternative. The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general have opened investigations.

While Amin is no longer treating women at the Irwin County Detention Center, his lawyer, Scott Grubman denied any wrongdoing on the doctor’s part saying he was a “highly respected physician who has dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk, underserved population in rural Georgia.”

Immigrant advocates have warned that the deportations of the women, often to unsafe countries, will hamper the investigation into not only Amin but also ICE. Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia University law professor who is defending several of the women told the Associated Press (AP), “ICE [is] destroying the evidence needed for this investigation.”

In a statement, ICE denied that the deportations had anything to do with the investigations of Amin, while the Justice Department refused to comment. Grubman also did not say whether Amin was talking to investigators.

One of the women, Mbeti Ndonga, 37, was taken to Amin last year after she complained of abdominal pain and excessive vaginal bleeding. Instead of being given a treatment that was ordered by her previous doctor, Amin insisted that they operate.

Ndonga told AP, “He was adamant and said I must have surgery.” After the procedure, she was told she would never be able to have children and still suffers bleeding and pain.

She spoke twice to government investigators saying, “I told them that I was abused, tortured, dehumanized.” Hours after her interview last week, Ndonga was told that ICE had lifted the hold on her deportation and she could be sent back to Kenya at any time.

Her lawyer, Mukherjee said, “Mbeti’s fear in answering the investigators’ questions was that it would make her immigration case worse. And within hours of the interview, her worst fears were realized.”

Another woman who asked to be identified only be first name Yanira, because she fears being targeted by criminal gangs if she is deported to Mexico, was also abused by Amin. She said that in February he requested estrogen patches to treat hot flashes, following a hysterectomy by another doctor in 2014.

Amin told her he would perform a vaginal ultrasound and a Pap smear, a test for cancer. The procedures caused her intense pain and were performed with no lubrication causing Yanira to have trouble sitting for a week.

She told AP, “We are humans. We are women. We have feelings. Just because we are detained doesn’t mean we should be treated like animals.”

Yanira’s attorneys said that she wanted to talk to government investigators last Thursday about Amin. On Monday, she was taken to an airport to be deported only to be stopped by another ICE agent who said she was no longer being deported because her lawyers had intervened.

The Irwin County Detention Center is run by the private company, LaSalle Correction. News of the medical malpractice spread after a whistleblower complaint was filed on behalf of nurse Dawn Wooten who worked at the jail until July.

Wooten had dubbed the physician “the uterus collector” because of the multiple surgeries he performed on female detainees. The doctor was later identified as Amin, who had previously been taken to court for filing false Medicaid claims. Amin was accused by the government of charging for obstetric ultrasounds that were not necessary. The case was ultimately settled out of court for over half a million dollars without Amin admitting culpability.

Many of the women interviewed by AP and The Intercept spoke of their fear of Amin who was known for his “rough treatment” and feared losing their reproductive systems if they were seen by him. Amin was accused of performing unnecessary surgeries without women’s consent and would get angry if they asked questions. No interpreters were ever present and they were “unclear about the necessity or purpose of the proposed treatment.”

Amin’s case recalls the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. Mengele performed sadistic experiments on live prisoners and eventually escaped capture at the end of the war to live comfortably in South America thanks to the clandestine “rat lines” set up by the CIA and the Catholic Church to help ex-Nazis escape justice.

The revelations of forced sterilizations of immigrants in ICE custody should serve as a stark

reminder that fascist violence is alive and well in the detention camps set up by the Obama administration and handed over to the Trump administration all across America.

Over 300,000 coronavirus deaths in Europe: Capitalism’s crime against humanity

Will Morrow

This week, as the coronavirus continued to surge out of control, Europe marked the grim milestone of more than 300,000 COVID-19 deaths.

Virtually every European country now faces a resurgence of the virus that threatens once again to overwhelm healthcare systems and kill hundreds of thousands. In Italy, the country first hardest hit when the virus reached the continent, identical scenes to those that occurred just eight months ago are playing out. Yesterday, another 636 people died, up from 623 the day before and the highest number since April. The total number of infections in the country surpassed one million on Tuesday, and the total number of dead is now 43,589.

The country’s hospital system is on the verge of collapse. By Wednesday, coronavirus patients made up more than 50 percent of patients in nine out of 21 provinces, and had reached 75 percent in Lombardy, 92 percent in Piedmont and 99 percent in South Tyrol. Ambulances are queuing up outside hospitals across the country due to a lack of available beds.

Unlike during the first wave, when the pandemic was largely confined to the north, the virus has already overwhelmed a number of regions in the poorer south. In Naples, a 78-year-old woman waited for 26 hours in an ambulance before being admitted to a hospital this week. A video was widely shared online reportedly showing a patient lying dead in a bathroom of a hospital ward. Over the weekend, nurses at Naples’ Catugno hospital provided oxygen treatment to patients sitting in their cars.

“We are very close to not keeping up. I cannot say when we will reach the limit, but that day is not far off,” Dr Luca Cabrini, who runs the intensive care ward at Varese’s Circolo Hospital, told the Associated Press. Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, warned that his city and the rest of Sicily were at risk of an “announced massacre.”

In France, 425 people have died in the last 24 hours. More than 10,000 have died since the start of October, and 42,960 since the beginning of the pandemic. The 551 deaths on Monday were the most in a single day since the peak of 613 on April 6. In the Île-de-France region around Paris, more than 90 percent of urgent care beds are occupied. In Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the number of occupied emergency beds has reached 146 percent of official capacity, with patients now being transferred to other hospitals.

The UK saw another 525 deaths on Wednesday. The official death toll maintained by the government is now over 50,000. The true figure is tens of thousands higher. The British Office of National Statistics had estimated at least 61,000 deaths as of the end of October.

In Spain, there have been more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of the virus, and over 40,000 officially recorded deaths, with 356 reported in the past 24 hours. A study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE reported that the average life expectancy at birth dropped by 0.9 years in Spain from 2019-2020 due to the pandemic. In three regions—Asturias, Murcia and Andalusia—the daily death toll has surpassed the peak of April.

In Germany, which has long been praised by the bourgeois media as a role model in handling the crisis, the situation is increasingly getting out of control. As a result of the opening policy, schools have become breeding grounds for the virus. Currently more than 300,000 students and around 30,000 teachers are in quarantine and the numbers of daily infections (21,866 on Thursday) and intensive care cases (3,186) is higher than ever in spring. Over 1,800 patients are on ventilators struggling for their lives. In some cities and regions no free intensive care beds are left and the death toll is rising.

In many smaller countries, the death toll as a portion of the total population is among the highest internationally. In Switzerland, one of the wealthiest countries in Europe with a population of around 8.6 million people, 94 people died in the past 24 hours. In a country the size of the United States, this would equate to more than 3,000 deaths in a day.

How has this situation been allowed to occur, just eight months after the first peak of the virus on the continent? The first lockdowns took place in March, after wildcat strikes that erupted in Italy and Spain forced governments to take action to stem the spread of the virus, for fear of a popular revolt at their indifference at the death of thousands.

The European ruling class then deliberately pursued a policy, knowing it would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. These deaths are not inevitable. They amount to a crime against humanity perpetrated by the capitalist class and its political representatives.

The European Union used the opportunity provided by the lockdowns to push through two trillion euros in corporate bailouts. While lockdown measures massively cut the spread of the virus, the ruling elite concluded that a confinement stopping production and cutting corporate profits was unacceptable, no matter the number of deaths. Across Europe and in the US, governments prematurely reopened nonessential workplaces, herding tens of millions back to work to produce a continued flow of profits. This ensured the continued spread of the virus.

Already in July, the World Health Organization warned that the resurgence of the virus could be seen across Europe. However, nothing was done.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex expressed most clearly the standpoint of the ruling elite, declaring that same month that a lockdown “stops the spread of the pandemic, of course, but from an economic and social standpoint, it’s a disaster.”

At the beginning of October, as medical authorities warned publicly of an approaching collapse of the health care system, governments enacted partial lockdowns, but kept nonessential businesses open. Schools are also open; the public education system is used as a child-minding service, with anywhere up to 35 students crammed into classrooms, so parents can be forced to remain at work.

This week, the Italian doctors association publicly demanded a full lockdown across Italy. However, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte replied to La Stampa on Wednesday that “a generalised lockdown shouldn’t be the first choice—the costs would be too high.”

In other words, while a lockdown could save an untold number of lives, the “costs”—i.e., the impact on the profits of the corporate elite—are unacceptable. As far as the ruling elite is concerned, if the old and infirm die, and allow for further cuts to pensions and healthcare, that is to be regarded as a positive good.

The response to the pandemic cannot be left in the hands of the capitalist class. Against its policy of profits and death, the working class must intervene to fight for a scientific response to the crisis. The Socialist Equality Parties call for the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in every school and workplace across Europe, independent of the trade unions, which have helped implement government reopening policies in every country. These committees would provide the means to organize a Europewide general strike, to compel the closure of schools and nonessential production, and allow workers to shelter at home.

Massive resources must be invested to provide a high standard of living to everyone throughout the pandemic, including the resources required to maintain online learning for students. The claim that there is “no money” for such measures is a patent lie. Trillions of euros have been handed to the banks and corporations in bailouts since the beginning of the pandemic. The resources exist, but they are monopolized by a corporate and financial oligarchy.

The fortunes of the rich must be expropriated, and the major corporations transformed into public utilities, democratically controlled by the working class as part of the socialist reorganization of economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit. This means the struggle of the working class across Europe to take political power and build the United Socialist States of Europe.

Trump campaign presses demands to suppress millions of votes

Patrick Martin

In a further escalation of its open assault on democratic rights, the Trump reelection campaign is now demanding that millions of ballots for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden should be suppressed in order to give Trump the electoral votes of a half dozen states.

These demands make it clear that Trump’s continuing refusal to concede Biden’s victory in the November 3 election is part of a continuing conspiracy against the American people. Side by side with his ongoing silence on the coronavirus catastrophe—Trump has said nothing for the last eight days while more than one million Americans have been infected and thousands have died—Trump is whipping up fascistic forces in an effort to steal the election.

A man voting at a polling place (Credit: Flickr.com)

In Pennsylvania, the most critical state from the standpoint of the Electoral College, since it has the most electoral votes of the six states where the Trump campaign is seeking to overturn Biden victories, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed that 650,000 “unlawful ballots” were cast and counted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the two largest cities in the state.

He told Fox News that up to 900,000 “invalid ballots” were cast across the entire state, nearly 15 percent of the 6.8 million votes cast in the election. Giuliani did not, of course, provide any evidence of vote fraud, and the irregularities actually cited by attorneys for the Trump campaign amount to only a tiny number of ballots, far below Biden’s margin in the state of more than 50,000 votes.

In Michigan, where Biden won by a comparatively huge margin, 148,000 votes, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits seeking an even larger disenfranchisement of the population for having voted the “wrong” way.

A suit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan, in Lansing, demanded the disqualification of every ballot cast in Wayne County, the state’s most populous, including the city of Detroit; in Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), and Ingham County (Lansing and East Lansing). This comes to the staggering total of 1.2 million votes, or nearly one quarter of the 5.4 million votes in the state. Eliminating those votes would give Trump a margin of 300,000 in the rest of the state and Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.

The principal allegation in the suit is that Republican ballot observers were spoken to rudely or compelled to observe social distancing and kept more than six feet away from the election workers doing the actual opening of mail ballots and their tabulation. No evidence of actual illegal voting or ballot stuffing is provided, only claims based on “expert reports” and data analysis.

“Upon information and belief, the expert report will identify persons who cast votes illegally by casting multiple ballots, were deceased, had moved, or were otherwise not qualified to vote in the November 3 presidential election, along with evidence of illegal ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting, and other illegal voting,” the lawsuit states.

On this threadbare basis, the four plaintiffs propose to disenfranchise 1.2 million people, claiming because in those locations “where sufficient illegal ballots were included” the effect was to cause the ballots of people in other counties to be “diluted.”

A second lawsuit, filed in Wayne County Circuit Court against Wayne County and Detroit election officials, proposes an even more grandiose exercise in disenfranchisement: suppressing the Michigan vote entirely, and ordering the state to conduct an entirely new election.

Whatever the legal prospects for these suits—and every Trump lawsuit but one has been denied or thrown out by the courts, with the exception of a single technical issue in Pennsylvania affecting a few hundred votes—the sheer scale of the disenfranchisement proposed is breathtaking. What the Trump campaign really means is that it should be illegal to vote against Trump.

These suits are being filed even as the scale of Biden’s victory in terms of the popular vote begins to become even clearer. By one measure—the share of eligible voters supporting him—Biden has reached landslide territory, since the voter turnout in 2020 reached records not seen in a century in terms of the proportion of the population voting.

At his current 50.8 percent of the vote, by one calculation, Biden has 34.04 percent of all eligible voters. This is the largest figure since 1972, in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide over George McGovern. If his percentage increases to 51 or 52, which is quite likely given the delays in counting mail ballots on the West Coast, which is heavily Democratic, he will end up matching the 34.17 percent of eligible voters achieved by Lyndon Johnson in his rout of Barry Goldwater.

While Biden leads by five million in the popular vote, his leads in the six states under challenge are sizeable, ranging from just under 12,000 in Arizona to the 148,000 in Michigan. According to one study of all statewide recounts conducted in the last 20 years, the largest vote swing was less than 2,600 votes, and the average shift was only 430 votes.

Given these figures, the continued refusal of Trump to concede the election and of his campaign to allege fraud become more and more provocative. As the SEP Political Committee warned two days ago, “the working class cannot be indifferent to the efforts to overthrow an elected government by a right-wing and neo-fascist conspiracy.”

There were signs Thursday of divisions within the Republican Party over how far to go in support of Trump’s campaign to discredit the election and delegitimize a Biden administration. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine became the first Republican governor of a state won by Trump to admit the obvious, that Biden is the president-elect. Only Republican governors of Democratic states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont had made such statements before.

A handful of Republican House members have made similar statements, but the number of Republican senators who have acknowledged Biden’s victory remained at four—Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

However, a sizeable group of Republican senators, speaking individually, announced their support for such token measures as giving Biden access to the Presidential Daily Brief, an intelligence summary, and other materials necessary for a presidential transition.

They cited “national security” concerns, indicating that in the event Biden enters the White House, he should be aware of whom the US military-intelligence apparatus is planning to kill, subvert or overthrow, so that there is no disruption to ongoing operations. Biden is a trusted member of the national-security elite as the former vice president in the Obama administration.

There have also been pro-Biden signals from sections of the Republican media, not merely Fox News, which has openly clashed with Trump, but from the Las Vegas newspaper owned by billionaire Trump supporter Sheldon Adelson, which published an editorial advising the president to accept his defeat, and from numerous Republican pundits.

Leading congressional Democrats continued to downplay the significance of Trump’s refusal to concede the election, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissing Trump’s efforts as “ridiculous shenanigans,” at a press briefing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking at the same press briefing, made a longer critique of Trump and the congressional Republicans, but without drawing any broader political conclusions.

“This morning I have a simple message for Senate Republicans,” he said. “The election is over, it wasn’t close. Trump lost, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States. Senate Republicans, stop denying reality. Stop deliberately sowing doubt about our democratic process and start focusing on COVID.”

He concluded, “Let us bring the country together and get things done,” without addressing the obvious fact, staring the American public in the face, that Trump and his supporters have launched a direct attack on democracy.

From an electoral standpoint, the critical step would be the intervention of state legislatures in the states under challenge, because five out of six are Republican-controlled, and the legislators could potentially take action to hijack the state’s electoral votes. Republican state legislative leaders in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two largest “battleground” states won by Biden, have said they would not intervene, but they may be challenged by Trump diehards within their caucuses.

From the standpoint of Trump’s preparation of a political coup, the attitude of the military and security agencies is of decisive importance. Earlier this week, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and three other officials and replaced them with ultra-right loyalists.

On Thursday, the purge extended to the Department of Homeland Security, although here the issue appeared to be simple retaliation against those who had undercut Trump’s claims of vote fraud. Bryan Ware, assistant director of cybersecurity for the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was forced to resign, and his supervisor, Chris Krebs, the director of the CISA, said he expected to be fired as well.

The CISA vigorously combated false claims on the internet that supercomputers were being used to “flip” vote totals during the election tabulations in critical states. On Thursday, Krebs retweeted an election technology specialist who warned people not to share “wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”

Growing opposition among educators forces closure of schools as pandemic spreads

Evan Blake

Across the United States, there is deepening anger and opposition developing among educators, parents and students to the homicidal policies of keeping schools opened as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads out of control. With cases climbing in every state, hospitals reaching or exceeding their capacity, and the death toll forecast to balloon in the coming weeks, the growing militancy of educators is forcing school districts to temporarily reverse their policies and switch to online learning.

On Monday and Tuesday, at least a third of all teachers called in sick at Southern Lehigh High School in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. With the Pennsylvania State Education Association doing nothing to organize opposition to in-person learning, it appears that teachers took action themselves and independently organized a wildcat sickout strike. In response to the sickout, school administrators herded all students into the school cafeteria instead of switching to remote learning, creating the conditions for a potential “super-spreader” event at the school. The massive Parkland High complex in nearby Allentown, which serves 32,000 area students, closed for two days.

Virtual learning at a school in Phoenix, Arizona, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2020 (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

On Thursday, Detroit Public Schools announced the halting of all in-person learning beginning Monday and lasting through at least January 11, in response to a major surge of the pandemic in the city and throughout Michigan. On Wednesday, the state had the fourth highest number of new COVID-19 cases in the US at 6,620.

In recent weeks, outbreaks at K-12 schools in Michigan have skyrocketed, with 44 new outbreaks the first week of November 2 and another 50 new outbreaks last week, including four outbreaks in Wayne County, where Detroit is located. Other districts in the state have also switched to online learning in recent days, including Grosse Pointe, Holly, Huron Valley, Pontiac, Rochester and Utica, while others that began online and had considered reopening have chosen to continue remote learning.

On Tuesday, Philadelphia School District officials announced that they will delay plans to reopen schools under the hybrid model, which had been scheduled to begin on November 30. The following day, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia urged surrounding districts to switch to remote learning as well, warning of a “catastrophic situation” developing in the region. Pennsylvania recorded 6,023 new cases Thursday, the 13th highest figure in the US, with 1,159 in Philadelphia County.

Per state guidelines, all districts in Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties should be closed, as there is “substantial transmission” throughout these regions. However, Pennsylvania’s health secretary, Rachel Levine, stated earlier this week that the state will not mandate school closures as it did in the spring.

There is growing pressure among New York City educators to stop in-person learning in the largest school district in the US. Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to make an announcement in the coming days about whether he will abide by his own policies as the infection rate in the city approaches the three percent mark, which would technically require schools to close.

In an effort to forestall the closure of schools, New York Times education writer Eliza Shapiro penned a column Wednesday urging de Blasio to reconsider, writing, “Transmission of the virus in schools has been strikingly low, with a positive-test rate of just 0.17 percent according to the most recent data.” She omits the fact that these figures are based on testing a tiny fraction of the district’s students and staff, and that the test positivity rate among children under four years old in the city is 3.2 percent, while that of 13-17 year olds has ranged from 2.6-3.9 percent in recent weeks.

The Times Editorial Board issued a statement Wednesday urging de Blasio not to close schools. “Ending in-person instruction right now would be a mistake, given the evidence of how little the virus has spread there so far and the devastating consequences that would follow for academic progress as well as for working parents like subway operators and nurses.” The real concern of the Times and the Democratic Party establishment is not the academic progress of the city’s youth—who have long been the victims of bipartisan budget cuts, supported by the Times—but that the closure of the nation’s largest school district would cut across the back-to-work campaign by Trump and both parties and undermine corporate profits.

In contrast to the false narrative pushed by the Times and other major outlets, the reopening of K-12 schools has been an unmitigated disaster which has already caused nearly 150,000 infections and at least 50 deaths of educators and students since late July. These figures are likely significant underestimates, given that there are no national agencies tracking outbreaks or deaths connected to school reopenings.

On Thursday, news broke that 38-year-old Iowa teacher Jason Englert died November 8, three days after testing positive for COVID-19. Last week, five-year-old Tagan Drone, a kindergartener in Texas, died of COVID-19 after being turned away from a hospital. Her death is the latest in a growing number of students that have succumbed to the virus after the reopening of schools, including 13-year-old Peyton Baumgarth of Missouri.

There is a large body of US and international evidence demonstrating the obvious fact that schools are major vectors for the spread of COVID-19. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that in October alone there were nearly 200,000 COVID-19 cases among children in the US. In the first week of November, there were a staggering 73,883 recorded child COVID-19 cases, while there was a 17 percent increase in child cases from October 22 to November 5.

The moves to close schools have predominantly taken place in Democrat-led cities, while Republican-controlled districts have largely opted to remain open, including in states across the South and Midwest that are experiencing the most severe spread of the virus.

The only reason some Democrat-led districts have closed schools is because these officials are attuned to the mounting opposition and determination to struggle among educators, particularly amid the unprecedented political crisis in which Donald Trump is seeking to nullify the elections and establish a personalist dictatorship. The Democrats’ greatest fear is the development of any movement of the working class outside of their control and independent of their allies in the unions.

Whatever their tactical maneuvers, the Democratic Party is equally beholden to Wall Street and will reopen schools as soon as they deem it politically viable, in order to force parents to continue working in unsafe factories and workplaces where the virus is running rampant. On Thursday, the Biden transition team publicly distanced itself from statements made by Dr. Michael Osterholm advocating renewed lockdowns to contain the pandemic, stating that such policies are not “in line” with their program. Osterholm was forced to walk back from his statement.

In order to prevent the future reopening of schools that have switched to online learning and to ensure that all schools and nonessential workplaces across the US close immediately to contain the pandemic, educators and the working class as a whole must take matters into their own hands. That means forming rank-and-file safety committees, which are independent of the unions, which have fully collaborated in the reopening of schools in New York City, Houston and other major urban centers, while pursuing impotent legal appeals in Republican-led states that have amounted to nothing.

Trump’s efforts to carry out a coup, which take place amid a vast expansion of the pandemic, make clear that the public health and political dangers confronting workers are enormous and deeply intertwined. The struggle facing educators and all workers is inherently political and must be animated by a determined opposition to both big business parties.

Victims of Nuclear Bomb Tests on U.S. Soil 75 Years Ago Continue to Seek Justice

Satya Vatti

“They thought the world was coming to an end,” Genoveva Peralta Purcella explains.

On July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity.” It is the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come.

Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero—the Trinity test site—Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74 years old, she solemnly recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever.

Genoveva’s sisters had come to visit their father and pregnant mother at the ranch. At precisely 5:30 a.m., as dawn broke, the sky suddenly went pitch dark. Having no other point of reference, they mistook the abnormally loud roaring and rumbling in the sky for thunder. The entire house began to shake. Fear-stricken, the family huddled together in a corner.

When the sky cleared, her father stepped outside the house and found himself being showered with a white powder. The powder was everywhere and covered everything around them. Nothing escaped it, not the cows the family had raised, or the vegetables in the garden, or the rainwater they stored in the absence of running water. Like other families who went through this experience, Genoveva’s family also dusted off the powder and consumed their vegetables and the stored water.

The blast produced so much energy that it incinerated everything it touched and formed a fireball that rose to more than 12 kilometers into the atmosphere. The fireball created ash that snowed over the communities surrounding the blast site. The people did not know it then, but this ash that covered thousands of square miles was the radioactive fallout from the explosion.

Dread gripped the communities in Tularosa Basin who either witnessed or experienced the phenomenon they could not make sense of. Meanwhile, the immediate reaction of the staff of the Manhattan Project, which created the bomb, was of “surprise, joy, and relief.”

Paul Pino, Genoveva’s cousin, who was born nine years after the Trinity blast, says that his family, which lived 33 miles from the blast site, was one of many who were unaware of what had transpired on that day. In the days and months leading up to the blast, U.S. government officials did not notify anyone who lived in the region about the imminent nuclear bomb test. Nobody in the Tularosa Basin was evacuated to safety.

In the aftermath of the nuclear test, officials began to cement a false narrative into the consciousness of the nation; the region was remote and uninhabited. Tens of thousands of people, in fact, lived in the Tularosa Basin in 1945. For a long time, the people of the basin believed that the blast was an ammunition explosion. “We were lied to by the government,” said Pino.

It takes 24,000 years for half of the radioactive plutonium used in the Trinity bomb to decay. The people of the region have inhaled and ingested radioactive particles for 75 years because of environmental contamination. Those in power refuse to accept responsibility and take any corrective action. To this day, there have been no cleanup efforts.

Radiation exposure has caused high rates of aggressive cancers, thyroid disease, infant mortality, and other health abnormalities in generations of families in the Tularosa Basin region. The scale of the health impact cannot be determined accurately as long-term epidemiological studies have only been undertaken recently. The findings of the latest research studies by the National Cancer Institute were published in September 2020 in the journal Health Physics.

“There were 10 of us; now only one is surviving,” Genoveva says, speaking of herself. She has lost everyone in her family to cancer.

In a country without universal health care, debt from medical expenses has brought economic ruin to the communities near the Trinity site. “All the pain and suffering we have had to endure, and not a speck of help from the government,” Pino says. “Meanwhile, it has spent trillions on thousands of nuclear weapons.”

Genoveva’s story is not an exceptional one. It is the story of tens of thousands of families in the United States.

More than 1,000 nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in the U.S. between 1945 and 1992. A total of 100 above-ground tests were conducted at the Nevada test site from 1951 to 1962. The winds carried radioactive fallout for thousands of kilometers. Hundreds of millions of people living in the U.S. have been exposed to varying levels of radiation over the years, unknown to them.

New Mexico was downwind of the Nevada test site, and the people living there continued to be exposed to radioactivity for decades after the initial exposure during the Trinity nuclear test.

People from the impacted communities founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005 to fight for justice for the survivors and their descendants. Tina Cordova, one of the group’s cofounders, was shocked to find out that a few of the impacted states neighboring New Mexico were receiving financial compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act since 1990. The communities in New Mexico, however, were left out of the act.

When asked why, Cordova responds with, “It is the billion-dollar question. I think we are being left out because we are mainly Mexican Hispanics, Natives, and Latinos. We are minorities and we are poor.”

Cordova herself is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer. She has joined with others like her to educate and organize the affected communities, to fight to establish the truth. “In their [the government’s] rush to bomb Japan, we were sacrificed in the process. We were enlisted in the service of our country, unknowing, unwilling, and remain uncompensated.”

China is Working to Expand Its Ties to Latin America

Vijay Prashad  & John Ross

In mid-January 2020, 800 people gathered at Mexico’s Ministry of Economy to celebrate “China Day” with a seminar on Chinese-Mexican relations. Mexico’s Minister of Economy Graciela Márquez Colín, who has a PhD in economic history from Harvard University, said, “China and Mexico have to walk together, to build a stronger and more solid relationship.” In July 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement went into force. At the January event, Márquez Colín said that despite this agreement, Mexico must “redouble its efforts” to draw investment from other places, such as China.

Zhu Qingqiao, China’s ambassador to Mexico, said that his country agrees, and has “many plans to invest in Mexico,” including the $600 million needed by the state-owned Dos Bocas petroleum refinery in Tabasco; this money was put together by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Bank of China, and other international partners.

On June 4, 2019, just after he arrived in Mexico City, Ambassador Zhu wrote an opinion piece in a leading financial newspaper, El Financiero. “The trade war,” he wrote, “will not stop China’s development. Faced with risks and challenges, China has the confidence to face them and turn them into opportunities.” The U.S.-China economies, he noted, are highly integrated, which will make decoupling next to impossible. Meanwhile, China is prepared to increase its interaction with other countries, both through investments into those countries—such as Mexico—or by welcoming investment into China. China, he wrote, is not the author of this “trade war,” and China would like this conflict to end.

Three Pillars of China’s Approach

China has developed three distinct pillars toward Latin America: purchases of Latin American goods, Chinese investment in Latin America, and Chinese political solidarity with key Latin American governments.

Over the past two decades, China has emerged as one of the most important markets for Latin American countries. For example, in 2019, 32 percent of Chile’s exports went to China, 29 percent of Peru’s, 28 percent of Brazil’s, 27 percent of Uruguay’s, and 10 percent of Argentina’s. The mutual reliance of China and Latin America has meant that despite changes in regime, neither China nor the Latin American governments have disrupted this relationship. When Jair Bolsonaro was president-elect of Brazil, he flirted with Taiwan before coming to power; but once he was in office, the economic imperatives made any break with Beijing impossible. Far too much remains at stake. In November 2019, Bolsonaro met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who said that China and Brazil will increase their trade “on an equal footing.” Tsung-Che Chang of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Brazil conceded in September 2020 that there are “many barriers” for Bolsonaro to break with Beijing. Brazil simply does not have the latitude that Australia has, since Australia—reliant upon the Chinese market—nonetheless joined with the U.S. in a military alliance against China known as The Quad (along with India and Japan).

After the election victory in Bolivia of Luis Arce’s Movement for Socialism (MAS), Chinese President Xi sent Arce a message of congratulations. In that message, President Xi recalled the 2018 strategic partnership agreed upon by the Chinese government and the then President Evo Morales. That partnership led to the choice of China’s Xinjiang TBEA Group to hold a 49 percent stake in a planned joint venture with Bolivia’s state lithium company YLB. “Why China? There’s a guaranteed market in China for battery production,” Morales said at the signing ceremony. Bolivia’s new president Arce was Morales’ head of economic policy; he has signaled that he would continue the policy of cooperation with China, particularly in the context of the pandemic. There is no indication that Chinese investment will be slowed, certainly not to Bolivia.

Finally, on the political front, China has indicated in various diplomatic forums that it will provide a shield as much as possible to prevent regime change operations against Cuba and Venezuela. China and Russia have openly spoken out against the U.S. unilateral sanctions against Venezuela, and the Chinese government is currently holding talks with Venezuela about a new oil-for-loan deal. China maintains very close ties with Cuba; when Fidel Castro died in 2016, President Xi went personally to the Cuban embassy in Beijing to pay his respects by bowing three times (Fidel is the only foreign leader who has received this treatment).

U.S. Pressure on Latin America

In September 2019, Trump’s daughter Ivanka visited Argentina. She traveled to Jujuy, which is toward the border with Bolivia. Ivanka Trump came there with John Sullivan (then deputy secretary of state) and other members of the U.S. government (from the Defense Department and from USAID). She met in Purmamarca with Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales, and then alongside David Bohigian of the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) announced $400 million toward road construction along what is known as the “lithium route” (Argentina, with Bolivia and Chile, form the “lithium triangle”). This was widely seen across the border in Bolivia as a statement about the MAS orientation toward China.

Bohigian transitioned OPIC into its current incarnation as the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The DFC’s project—América Crece—is directly designed as a challenge to Chinese investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. In September 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Guyana, where he championed the investment of ExxonMobil and other oil companies into the South American country. Pompeo said that Guyana should make a deal with U.S. oil companies, which—he claimed—are not corrupt; “You look at that,” Pompeo said in reference to their record, “and then look at what China does,” implying that Chinese firms are corrupt and that a country like Guyana should shun China.

On April 26, 2019, Kimberly Breier, the assistant secretary for the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs in the U.S. State Department, made a full-fledged attack on Chinese investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Chinese, she said, came to the continent with “bags of cash and false promises”; she made sly allegations, but did not back these up with any factual examples.

All of these attacks on China make little headway in Latin America. For example, a Pew survey from 2019 shows that 50 percent of Mexicans have a favorable opinion of China, while only 36 percent have a favorable opinion of the United States; more Mexicans had a favorable opinion of President Xi than of President Trump.

In September 2020, Luz María de la Mora, a senior official in Mexico’s Ministry of Economy, said that China is a “great example” for Mexico. China, she said, is a “partner to boost our economic recovery” and help Mexico “emerge from the pandemic as soon as possible.” No doubt that the United States is and will be for a long time Mexico’s largest trading partner; but the new affinity between China and Mexico, particularly because of next year’s anticipated economic growth in China, is also important. Despite pressure from Washington, and there is no indication of a major change when Joe Biden becomes president in 2021, these Latin American countries such as Mexico know that they cannot break with China; that would be reckless.