COVID Economy: A Deliberate Disaster

Bruce Lesnick

With nearly 12 million cases and a quarter million deaths in the US so far (over 55 million cases and 1.3 million deaths world-wide), the COVID 19 pandemic is ravaging civilization. The disease is on track to be the deadliest epidemic since 1918.

The economic fallout for the working class has been severe. In the US, unemployment has skyrocketed, with 45.4 million new unemployment claims since March 14. At least 1/6 of those with jobs before the pandemic are now out of work. According to The New York Times, “The economic downturn is shaping up to be particularly devastating for renters, who are more likely to be lower-income and work hourly jobs cut during the pandemic.” As many as 40 million, or up to 43% of renters, may be facing eviction by the end of the year. Breadlines not seen for generations now stretch for miles. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed; millions more are threatened and may not survive.

Strikingly, all of this was completely avoidable.

To begin with, the atrocious COVID 19 infection and death totals in the US could have been orders of magnitude smaller. How do we know? Because China, with more than four times the US population has had 1/50^th as many fatalities! (86,398 cases and 4,634 deaths.) Blame for the failed US response is shared by the President, Congress, both political parties and many corporate conglomerates. How China spectacularly outdid the US and Europe in controlling their COVID outbreak – allowing Chinese citizens to attend work and school and enjoy restaurants, theaters, sporting events and pool parties while the US continues to languish under lockdown – is a story for another time.

The question for now is this: in the midst of a raging pandemic, was immense economic hardship and disruption necessary?

The answer is a resounding no.

Five basic measures could have prevented – and still could greatly mitigate – the COVID economic nightmare in the US.

1. Full, no-cost healthcare for everyone while the pandemic lasts. This should cover all healthcare needs, not just COVID 19 related care. No one should need to delay seeking care for any reason during a pandemic. Arguably, such universal care is a right that ought to be available whether or not there’s a global health emergency, but that broader debate can be deferred. Meanwhile denying free, universal care during a pandemic is self-defeating.

2. Provide a significant monthly payment ($1,000 or greater) to each adult and child while the pandemic lasts. Among other things, the success of any quarantine depends on people being financially able to stay at home. For efficiency, there should be no means testing. Later, reclaim some of this income from those at the top through a special tax on the wealthiest.

3. Institute a moratorium on all loan, rent and mortgage payments. This is not a deferral of payments that accumulate during the pandemic but the complete suspension of those charges until the pandemic ends. At the end of the pandemic, payments would resume as if no payments had been missed; no additional back payments would be owed. (To include credit card payments in the moratorium, there would need to be a suspension in the use of credit cards for new purchases. Debit cards and cash could continue to be used.)

4. No corporate bailouts. Period. Leaving aside the irresponsible behavior of big business leading up to the pandemic, corporate titans should be able to live on the special monthly government payments like everyone else for the duration of the crisis.

5. Most small businesses would be able to survive on the money people spend from their monthly government payments. Small business owners would not be burdened by rent and loan payments during the crisis, and they and all their employees would receive their own monthly government stipend. Any small business for which this doesn’t work could apply for hardship grants. But any big business having trouble surviving should either be allowed to fail or be nationalized and run as a public utility.

Rent Creates No Value

Unlike the production of needed commodities and useful services, mortgage, insurance, interest and rent payments produce no new value. These payments (collectively referred to as “rent”) merely transfer existing wealth from one person to another or one class of people to another. So, suspending rent during the pandemic has no harmful effect on the real economy. Such a suspension only temporarily halts the upward transfer of wealth. After the pandemic, the country as a whole would not be one cent poorer for having implemented a rent holiday.

By contrast, reduced production of real goods and services – from restaurants, factories, businesses and farms whose employees and customers must shelter during the pandemic – does negatively affect the economy. The monthly government payments can offset some of this. Beyond that, the best that can be done is to defeat the pandemic as quickly as possible in order to return to economic “normality”.

Show Me the Money

The question “How will we pay for it?” is meant as a showstopper, but it’s really a red herring. The US government, as a sovereign currency issuer, can print money whenever it wishes. That’s exactly how the government funded the $6 trillion CARES Act which was touted as COVID relief but was actually a humongous transfer of wealth to those at the top. No new taxes were announced to fund this bipartisan deception. The Treasury just authorized the electronic distribution of additional money.

Not convinced? Still believe that the federal government can only spend what it has previously collected in taxes? Fine. Paying for serious COVID relief is still not a problem. We could take funds from the bloated, pugnacious “defense” budget. Or tax Wall Street and the richest 1% to generate new funds. Either way, political will, not money, is the limiting factor.

They’re Just Not That into You

The failed US response to the COVID 19 pandemic has led to unnecessary death and suffering. Comparing US results with China, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore makes this clear. China has experienced 0.34 deaths per 100,000 people, while the figure for the US (77.19) is 227 time greater!

The resultant economic hardship was also completely avoidable. The best way to ameliorate COVID-triggered economic fallout would have been to address the pandemic in a scientific, efficient manner, as some countries demonstrated was possible. Trump and the Republicans failed to provide national leadership. But the Democrats are hardly blameless. Despite previous disease-driven wakeup calls, health funding decreased for most years under the Obama administration. Though China first notified the World Health Organization of the Wuhan outbreak in December 2019, the Democrats prioritized their doomed impeachment initiative in January over mobilizing a healthcare response. Both corporate parties were asleep at the wheel when it came to early COVID mitigation.

But as we’ve seen, even with infection rates raging throughout the country, the required health response did not necessitate piling economic suffering on top of illness for working people, farmers and small business owners. It’s always been possible to fix this problem without the cure being worse than the disease. Choosing a different, more onerous course was a deliberate decision by the powers that be.

Going forward, there’s every indication that the incoming Biden administration will offer nothing close to the measures required to ameliorate the COVID economic crisis. As an outspoken opponent of Medicare for All and government spending, Biden will be facing the healthcare emergency having discarded our most potent weapons in advance. The Democrats and Republicans will give us nothing; we have to organize and fight for what’s needed. As Frederick Douglass warned, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Workers Need Immediate Relief and Wider Role for Trade Unions

Bharat Dogra

Workers in India have suffered a lot in recent Covid-19 times, particularly all the workers, migrants or others, who do not have security of employment and a regular salary. Nutrition levels for most of them were inadequate earlier too, but now these have suffered a further steep decline. Access to all other basic needs has also been adversely affected for most workers, including self-employed workers.

Hence there is a strong need to make available free food and to continue the scheme for this which was earlier announced by the union government for a few months up to November 2020. This has also been demanded on the basis of surveys and reviews of the existing situation by several organizations working with the poor  and by food rights groups. Then there is also the additional and equally well-justified demand for substantial cash transfers in the accounts of  vulnerable workers to help them tide over these difficult times. While the primary responsibility for this is clearly with the government , this should be supported by various philanthropic organizations, voluntary organizations and individual efforts. There are some very inspiring examples already, but we need many more. Trade unions can play a helpful role in facilitating this timely help.

Of course all this is only in the context of immediate relief needed for exceptionally difficult times. The more basic need is to promote essential rights of workers for all times. Unfortunately these exceptionally difficult times have also seen a roll-back of some hard-fought rights of workers in the name of labor reforms. While the so-called reforms cover a wide ground and there may be some new good or potentially good features as well, but the entire exercise as a whole has rightly been criticized by most trade unions, other labor organizations  and most opposition parties as being harmful for the interests of workers.

Hence these are exceptionally important times in terms of meeting immediate essential needs of a very large number of workers facing very great difficulties, as well as for defending longer-term rights of workers in the face of growing legal setbacks and the hardening of actual field/factory-level situations in which rights have to be defended. Growing poverty makes people more susceptible to accepting exploitative conditions, and this is a clear problem in the existing and emerging situation.

In order to meet these growing challenges, a wider role and vision of trade unions should be envisaged. Although recent legal changes and existing realities seek to restrict the role and empowerment of most trade unions, the unions should respond to the  challenge with growing unity in a very creative way so that the trade unions are strengthened even in difficult times and at the same time various aspects of welfare of workers can be enhanced. In the emerging difficult challenges a strong effort should be to establish the unity of all unions and labor organizations, leaving out only those who are seen to be collaborating  with exploiter sections. This unity should ignore smaller differences and competing interests as the need just now is not for scoring points over each other or getting ahead of others but for  broad-based unity. What is more, the role of  trade unions should be much  wider in terms of  involvement with many-sided welfare of workers.

At a time when many skilled workers are losing jobs, is it not possible for trade union leaders with their wider contacts to help these workers to start some enterprises of their own in which their skills are well utilized? Scaling this up, possibilities of workers coops being formed to revive sick and closed units can also be explored. Apart from utilizing such more obvious skills, the hidden skills of many talented persons in worker colonies, particularly women can be harnessed for creative enterprises, all the more so in places where a captive neighborhood market for good quality, low priced self-made products is available. For example, if good baking skills are available, or can be easily imparted, an enterprise of mainly women for bakery products and processed food  can be started. But this is just one example, there are so many possibilities, from notebooks to snacks to hygiene/protective products to garments.

Secondly, as private school fees can be a heavy burden for workers, cannot trade unions intervene in government schools in or near worker colonies to improve these schools to such an extent that private schools are not needed? Or as an alternative, can trade unions motivate educated youth of worker households to start schools on their own which charge lower fees than private schools while at the same time providing decent jobs to worker households, perhaps even making a modest saving for other important work? These schools can provide more value-based education of commitment to justice, equality, peace and environment protection.

Thirdly, as health costs can be quite crippling for many worker households despite existence of government supported health facilities, trade unions can motivate socially committed doctors to start clinics and hospitals in worker colonies to provide very rational, good and low-cost health care including preventive care, while at the same time striving for improvement of government health facilities.

Liquor, tobacco and other intoxicants take a heavy toll on the health and meager resources of many worker households. Trade unions should support a women led anti-liquor and anti-intoxicant movement in all their units and worker colonies. Cultural activities should be organized in evenings and workers motivated to join and contribute so that evenings become creative and joyful for all instead of being ruined in alcoholism.

Such a women-led social reform effort should also work with continuity  against other social evils like domestic violence, gender and other discrimination, unnecessary ceremonial expenses, dowry system etc.

Such a broad-based involvement with many-sided welfare of workers can provide much-needed relief to workers in difficult times while also strengthening the support-base of trade unions.

Keeping the Empire Running: Britain’s Global Military Footprint

Binoy Kampmark

A few nostalgic types still believe that the Union Jack continues to flutter to sighs and reverence over outposts of the world, from the tropics to the desert.  They would be right, if only to a point.  Britain, it turns out, has a rather expansive global reach when it comes to bases, military installations and testing sites.  While not having the obese heft and lumbering brawn of the United States, it makes a good go of it.  Globally, the UK military has a presence in 145 sites in 42 countries.  Such figures tally with Ian Cobain’s prickly observation in The History Thieves: that the British were the only people “perpetually at war.”

Phil Miller’s rich overview of Britain’s military footprint for Declassified UK shows it to be heavy.  “The size of the global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.”  The UK military, for instance, has a presence in five countries in the Asia-Pacific: naval facilities in Singapore; garrisons in Brunei, drone testing facilities in Australia; three facilities in Nepal; a quick reaction force in Afghanistan.  Cyprus remains a favourite with 17 military installations.  In Africa, British personnel can be found in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Mali.  Then come the ever dubious ties to Arab monarchies.

The nature of having such bases is to be kind to your host, despite him being theocratic, barking mad, or an old fashioned despot with fetishes. Despite the often silly pronouncements by British policy makers that they take issue with authoritarians, exceptions numerous in number abound.  The UK has never had a problem with authoritarians it can work with or despots it can coddle.  A closer look at such relations usually reveal the same ingredients: capital, commerce, perceptions of military necessity.  The approach to Oman, a state marked by absolute rule, is a case in point.

Since 1798, Britain has had a hand in ensuring the success, and the survivability, of the House of Al Said.  On September 12, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that a further £23.8 million would go to enhancing the British Joint Logistics Support Base at Duqm port, thereby tripling “the size of the existing UK base and help facilitate Royal Navy deployments to the Indian Ocean”.  The Ministry of Defence also went so far as to describe a “renewal” of a “hugely valuable relationship,” despite the signing of a new Joint Defence Agreement in February 2019.

The agreement had been one of the swan song acts of the ailing Sultan Qaboos bin Said, whose passing this year was genuinely mourned in British political circles.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson called him “an exceptionally wise and respected leader who will be missed enormously.”  Papers of record wrote in praise of a reformer and a developer.  “The longest serving Arab ruler,” observed a sycophantic column in The Guardian, “Qaboos was an absolute monarch, albeit a relatively benevolent and popular one.”

The same Sultan, it should be said, had little fondness for freedom of expression, assembly and association, encouraged the arrests and harassment of government critics and condoned sex discrimination. But he was of the “one of us” labels: trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, an unwavering Anglophile, installed on the throne by Britain in the 1970 palace coup during the all but forgotten Dhofar Rebellion.  “Strategically,” Cobain reminds us, “the Dhofar war was one of the most important conflicts of the 20th century, as the victors could expect to control the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil.”  The British made sure their man won.

Public mention of greater British military involvement in foreign theatres can be found, though they rarely make front page acts.  The business of projecting such power, especially in the Britannic model, should be careful, considered, even gnomic.  Britain, for instance, is rallying to the US-led call to contain the Yellow Peril in the Asia Pacific, a nice reminder to Beijing that old imperial misdeeds should never be a bar to repetition.  The head of the British Army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, spoke in September about there being “a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia).  It’s an area that saw a much more consistent Army presence in the Eighties, but with 9/11 we naturally receded from it.”  The time had come “to redress that imbalance”.

The UK Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, prefers to be more enigmatic about the “future of Global Britain.”  To deal with an “ever more complex and dynamic strategic context,” he suggests the “Integrated Operating Concept”.  Britain had to “compete below the threshold of war in order to deter war, and to prevent one’s adversaries from achieving their objectives in fait accompli strategies.”

Gone are the old thuggeries of imperial snatch and grab; evident are matters of flexibility in terms of competition. “Competing involves a campaign posture that includes continuous operating on our terms and in places of our choosing.”  This entails a thought process involving “several dimensions to escalate and deescalate up and down multiple ladders – as if it were a spider’s web.”  The general attempts to illustrate this gibberish with the following example:  “One might actively constrain in the cyber domain to protect critical national infrastructure in the maritime Domain.”

In 2017, there were already more than just murmurings from Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, that a greater British presence in the Asia-Pacific was warranted.  Fallon was keen to stress the reasons for deeper involvement, listing them to a group of Australian journalists. “The tensions have been rising in the region, not just from the tests by North Korea but also escalating tension in the South China Sea with the building program that’s gone there on the islands and the need to keep those routes open.”

With such chatter about the China threat you could be forgiven for believing that British presence in the Asia-Pacific was minimal.  But that would ignore, for instance, the naval logistics base at Singapore’s Sembawang Wharf, permanently staffed by eight British military personnel with an eye on the busy Malacca Strait.  A more substantial presence can also be found in the Sultanate of Brunei, comprising an infantry battalion of Gurkhas and an Army Air Corps Flight of Bell 212 helicopters.  The MOD is particularly keen on the surroundings, as they offer “tropical climate and terrain … well suited to jungle training”.

Over the next four years, the UK military can expect to get an extra £16.5 billion – a 10% increase in funding and a fond salute to militarists.  “I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and ends now,” declared Johnson.  “Our plans will safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs in the defence industry, protecting livelihoods across the UK and keeping the British people safe.”

The prime minister was hoping to make that announcement accompanied by the “Integrated Defence and Security Review” long championed by his now departed chief special adviser, Dominic Cummings.  Cummings might have been ejected from the gladiatorial arena of Downing Street politics, but the ideas in the Review are unlikely to buck old imperial trends.  At the very least, there will be a promise of more military bases to reflect a posture General Carter describes rather obscurely as “engaged and forward deployed”.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government builds migrant concentration camps on Canary Islands

Alice Summers

The Podemos-Socialist Party (PSOE) coalition government is erecting prison camps for migrants on the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 100 kilometres off the coast of Morocco.

Last Friday, PSOE Minister for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration José Luis Escrivá, announced that the PSOE-Podemos government aims to have built tent camps capable of holding 6,000 migrants on the island chain by the end of 2020. A further 7,000 places will be made available to imprison migrants in more permanent buildings. Thousands of migrants currently being housed in hotels or other makeshift accommodation across the archipelago will be relocated to these internment camps.

These brutal and anti-democratic measures are part of a murderous European Union (EU) campaign against refugees. At the EU’s instigation, concentration camps have been erected across Europe, one of the most notorious of which is on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Pablo Iglesias, Secretary-General of Podemos. (Image Credit: PODEMOS/Youtube)

The “left populist” Syriza government built these camps and presided over them during its four years in office. It detained refugees in hellish conditions, sending riot police to attack those who protested their incarceration with tear gas and stun grenades.

Thousands of desperate refugees continue to be interned in these overcrowded and unsanitary camps, which have become death traps with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Refugees are indefinitely detained in these facilities, with next to no chance of their asylum applications being heard by European authorities, in flagrant violation of international law. The Lesbos model is now being followed by the PSOE-Podemos on the Canary Islands.

Many of the new prison camps being created across the Canary Islands will be set up in former barracks or other sites belonging to the Spanish military. In Gran Canaria, a tent camp to house 650 migrants will be constructed in the Canarias 50 army garrison, with the first migrants expected to be detained there by December. This site will ultimately house another 1,150 people in prefabricated shacks.

A tent camp for a further 300 prisoners will be erected on the grounds of a former school on this island, the Colegio León, while an additional 400 migrants could be incarcerated in the school building itself. The Spanish bank Bankia has also “donated” a 7,000-metre-squared ship to serve as a prison for a further 500 migrants off the coast of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. Between 200 and 250 migrants were already transferred to a tent camp at the Barranco Seco military site from Arguineguín port last week.

Last Tuesday, Spanish police evicted more than 200 migrants from a temporary camp in this port, leaving them with nowhere to go and no food or other resources. “We have nowhere to go,” one migrant told the Efe press agency, while another added, “we don’t know where we’ll spend the night.” The migrants were eventually transferred to a complex in the town of Maspalomas, 12 kilometres from the port.

A judge reviewing a formal complaint about the treatment of refugees in the Arguineguín camp, Yanira del Carmen González, denounced conditions as “utterly deplorable”, but ruled that no criminal actions had been taken.

In Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, a former military barracks called Las Canteras is being repurposed to imprison up to 1,800 migrants in 10 buildings. Another tent camp will be established in a forest known as Las Raíces, a site which is on loan to the Interior Ministry from the Defense Ministry, with a capacity of around 1,500 migrants. Similarly, the El Matorral barracks on Fuerteventura island will serve to intern up to 700 migrants.

The Interior Ministry is refusing to allow migrants stranded on the Canary Islands to be transferred to the Spanish mainland, despite requests to do so from regional authorities. So far this year, the Interior Ministry has only authorised of 1,800 such transfers, around a tenth of the roughly 16–18,000 people who have arrived on the islands in 2020. The PSOE-Podemos government hopes to use the threat of indefinite detention in island concentration camps to deter others from making the crossing.

On an official visit to Morocco, PSOE Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska justified Madrid’s refusal to transfer migrants to the mainland, claiming it would provide a pull factor for refugees seeking to travel to Europe. “We have to fight against illegal immigration, and avoid establishing irregular entry routes into Europe,” he stated.

The Canary Islands have seen a more than 1,000 percent increase in the number of migrants arriving over the last year. Between 1 January and 15 November 2020, at least 16,790 migrants made their way to the islands by sea according, to the Interior Ministry, compared to a total of 1,497 people in the same period of 2019. Other estimates indicate that more than 18,000 migrants have made the journey this year.

As the Mediterranean increasingly becomes a mass graveyard, desperate refugees are forced to look for other ways to flee wars or economic deprivation in their home countries. The EU and its member governments have deliberately ignored migrants’ distress calls in the Mediterranean, allowing thousands to drown in its waters each year. Over 1,200 refugees have so far died attempting to cross this sea this year alone.

The route to the Canary Islands is deadly. According to International Organization for Migration estimates, one in 16 refugees does not survive the crossing. The number of unreported deaths is extremely high, since boats repeatedly miss the islands and drift out into the Atlantic.

The PSOE-Podemos government has long implemented brutal anti-refugee policies causing mass deaths. Spain’s supposedly “progressive” government is complicit in the actions of its right-wing Greek counterpart—sending police reinforcements to Greece earlier this year to assist the conservative New Democracy government with its savage crackdown on refugees.

Only last month it was revealed that the PSOE-Podemos government implements the barbaric policy of separating migrant children detained in the Canary Islands from their mothers—a brutal practice notoriously employed by America’s fascistic president, Donald Trump.

Last week, Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld a law passed by the right-wing Popular Party in 2015, allowing for the summary expulsion, or “hot return” of migrants from Spain, without even the semblance of legal process. The only migrants exempted from this summary expulsion policy are minors or those considered vulnerable—the elderly or pregnant women.

According to Escrivá, speaking during a visit to the Canary Islands last Friday, “90 percent” of migrants who arrived on the archipelago in 2020 “can be expelled back to their countries of origin.” This is a promise of mass illegal deportations.

While Podemos and the PSOE have both claimed to oppose some or all aspects of this brutal and anti-democratic practice, these summary expulsions have continued apace and actually increased since the PSOE entered government in mid-2018—first with the support of Podemos, and then in direct coalition with this party.

In 2017, 607 “hot returns” were carried out of migrants detained at Spain’s borders, rising to 658 in 2018. No figures are available for 2019: the PSOE-Podemos government refused to release them.

These brutal attacks on desperate migrants constitute an indictment of the “left populist” Podemos and other middle class parties of its ilk, who across Europe impose fascistic anti-refugee policies indistinguishable from those of the far-right. The working class must unconditionally defend all migrants and asylum seekers and their right to live and work in safety wherever they choose. This requires making a conscious break with pseudo-left parties, as part of a struggle against the reactionary policies of the entire EU.

Greek government bans protests, imposes authoritarian measures utilising pretext of pandemic

John Vassilopoulos

Greece’s conservative New Democracy (ND) government is imposing dictatorial measures using the COVID-19 pandemic as justification. Last week it mounted a huge police mobilisation in the run-up to the November 17 anniversary of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic student uprising against the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.

Using the pandemic as a pretext, Chief of the Hellenic Police Michalis Karamalakis banned all public gatherings of four or more people between November 15 and November 18, which is the period during which commemoration events traditionally take place.

On November 17, the police deployed 5,000 officers in the capital. Despite the ban, protesters still attended commemorations protests, only to be met with water cannons and tear gas, with the police utilising overhead drones to transmit live footage to police headquarters.

Riot police walk next a water cannon vehicle in central Omonoia square central Athens, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020. Police have detained several people and fired tear gas during scuffles in Athens as hundreds of protesters defied a ban on gatherings of more than three people to mark the anniversary of the crushing of a 1973 student uprising against the military junta then ruling Greece. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

The claim that the right to assembly was banned on public health grounds does not hold water. Cases in Greece have been steadily rising since the summer following the government’s decision to prematurely lift restrictions to kickstart the economy. With no significant resources allocated to counter the dire effects of this reopening, Greece’s advantage of having had relatively few deaths in the first wave of the pandemic—as a result of going into lockdown earlier than other European countries—has now been undone.

People are routinely crammed on public transport with only a mask as protection. The current death toll as of November 24 stands at 1,815. This compares to 192 registered deaths on July 1, when the tourist sector was recklessly flung open for business. The health care system, decimated over the past decade by European Union mandated austerity—carried out by social democratic, ND and SYRIZA governments alike—is already struggling to cope, with 85 percent of intensive care beds currently occupied.

In an interview with SKAI TV on the evening of November 17, Minister of Citizen Protection Michalis Chrysochoidis admitted that the ban had nothing to do with public health: “The city needs to operate like it’s a normal day and we will continue in order to end this situation with protests that destroy social life.”

Following protests in parliament by some opposition parties, a number of small demonstrations in the centre of Athens—separately organised by Syriza, Diem25 and the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE)—were allowed to go ahead by Chrysochoidis. Later that day, however, riot police attacked a separate gathering of around 1,500 KKE members and supporters with tear gas and stun grenades. The group were planning to march through the centre of Athens. Among them were KKE members of parliament such as Thanos Pafilis, who was reportedly beaten as he tried to protect KKE General Secretary Dimitris Koutsoumbas from the police attack. Five people were arrested during the assault.

Koutsoumbas was prepared to come to terms with the police within the narrow, restrictive framework of the new anti-protest law. Explaining the events, he said, “The law states that a [police] negotiator engages with the person in charge of the demonstration. I was on my way at that time and they could have communicated with myself as KKE leader or the rest of the party’s parliamentary group to ask us what our intentions were… So we could explain to you and of course let you know what we were planning to do.”

Chrysochoidis stated that he was “disappointed” with the KKE, adding of a party that is a safe known quantity to the ruling elite that “I have honoured the KKE since I was a small child.” On previous occasions he has described the KKE’s conduct in demonstrations as “exemplary”. In this instance, after holding talks with the KKE’s parliamentary group, Chrysochoidis ordered that the five arrested during the demonstration be released.

While the KKE found itself at the receiving end of the increase in state repression last week, the ultimate target of the new authoritarian measures are Greek workers and youth who do not have the benefit of friends and allies within the government and state apparatus.

On its Facebook page, Menoume Energoi (We will stay active), a social activist group set up at outset of the pandemic, stated that since November 17 they have received tens of reports from people all over Greece who have received €300 on-the-spot fines by the police. According to the post: “in many cases fines were imposed arbitrarily because citizens were simply in the vicinity of organised gatherings. A friend of our page from Rhodes was fined €300 along with his girlfriend even though no demonstration had been called in the town. When they complained they were told that they were within a forbidden zone.”

Another group of 50 protesters were arrested in central Athens and kept for a long time next to one another without any regard for social distancing rules, before being taken into custody at central police headquarters.

A 17-year-old girl from the Saranta Ekklisies neighbourhood of Thessaloniki was taken into custody by plain clothes policemen on November 17 on her way back from a walk with a friend. According to Parallaxi, the Thessaloniki-based magazine that broke the story, Saranta Ekklisies has a large student population and as a result “resembled an impregnable fortress with tens of policemen and riot police vans being stationed on backstreets as well as main roads”. According to the report, while in custody the girl “was subjected to a body search and had to stay in her bra for a long time without ever being told where she was and what she’d done.”

Another incident involved an entire family living in the working-class neighbourhood of Sepolia, located 6km north-west of Athens city centre. According to reports, members of the notorious DIAS police motorcycle unit began an unprovoked attack against people who had attended a peaceful march to commemorate the 1973 uprising.

The march began at the Larissa Train Station, Athens’s railway terminal, and finished at Sepolia metro station. A video released on the Menoume Energoi group page documents one of these attacks when a man, Orestis Katis, was arrested by a DIAS squad outside the block of flats where he lives after having attended the demonstration with his immediate family. In the video, police are seen handcuffing and roughing up Katis in front of his parents and his sister, whom police manhandled, along with others who were coming to his aid. Katis’s mother was reportedly injured and had to be hospitalised.

Katis’s sister, father and two family friends later went to the Kolonos police precinct where they were informed Katis was being held, even though he was subsequently transferred to central police headquarters. They were all arrested after an altercation with police outside the precinct during which the father had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in handcuffs and under police guard. A video of the incident was posted on the Menoume Energoi page.

Any event seen as a potential focal point for popular anger is regarded with alarm by the ruling elite. Referring to the upcoming anniversary of the murder of teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos, whose murder by a policeman on December 6, 2008 sparked riots that lasted for nearly a month, Chysochoidis made clear that no protests will be allowed to take place this year.

The escalation of state repression must be seen in the context of increased militancy in the working class and among youth over the authorties’ criminal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just two months ago a nationwide wave of school occupations against the reckless opening of schools amid a huge spike in cases rocked the country. At the end of October, Labour Minister Yiannis Vroutsis announced a new labour law bill based on a “flexible eight-hour workday,” which seeks to give employers the power to increase the working day from eight hours to ten hours without paying additional overtime. Further obstacles to the right to strike are also proposed in the bill, including a requirement for the introduction of electronic voting by organisations calling a strike.

As anger mounts over the government’s disastrous COVID policies, in a country unable to cope with the pandemic due to the destruction of its health care and social services infrastructure, the ADEDY trade union has called a general strike in the public sector to be held Thursday. Among ADEDY’s demands are protective measures for employees and mass hirings in the health sector. Yet it is the Greek unions, as with the unions internationally, who are responsible for the horrendous situation their members face. They have collaborated with governments of all political stripes to herd workers into unsafe workplaces and keep open schools, universities and colleges—which have been critical vectors for the spread of the virus.

Refugees season at the Imperial War Museum in London: A century of crises, but the real causes ignored

Paul Mitchell

The ambitious “Refugees” season at London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM), explores “refugee experiences throughout history and ongoing issues faced by those affected... through two major exhibitions, a new artistic commission and a series of immersive events.”

IWM curator Simon Offord declares, “The world is witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record, but with media attention less prevalent than it was in 2015, now more than ever it’s important for IWM to bring 100 years of refugee voices and experiences back to the forefront.”

Refugees - Forced to Flee exhibition, London

According to data from this year’s UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Global Trends report, almost 79.5 million people had been forcibly displaced as of the end of 2019. This accounts for 1 in every 97 people on the planet (or almost 1 percent of the global population)—the highest level recorded in 70 years. The largest group among these are 45.7 million Internally Displaced People (IDPs)—meaning people displaced to other areas within their own country. According to a Global Report on Internal Displacement—issued by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, part of the Norwegian Refugee Council—these tens of millions were internally displaced as a result of conflict and violence in 61 countries. The majority are displaced in Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Yemen and Afghanistan. Another 5.1 million people in 95 countries are displaced because of natural disasters.

At the Refugees: Forced to Flee exhibition, objects from the museum's collection are used to illustrate the refugee crises arising from World War One, World War Two, the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). The continuing wars in Afghanistan and Syria and the attempts by refugees from these countries to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe are also featured.

Destruction (Naturally dyed wool and cotton), Shorsh Saleh, 2019

The exhibition asks the questions “But what drives this displacement? Why do people leave their homes?”

The IWM should be well placed to answer. The museum considers itself “a global authority on conflict and its impact on people's lives.” It has incredible resources, an unparalleled collection of artefacts, access to the most modern interactive techniques and exhibition design and can call upon the world's leading artists and commission new artistic works.

Mrs Schumacher and the Gordons (Clay, glaze and audio), Grace Schwindt 2019

Grace Schwindt's intriguing ceramic sculptures are based on a conversation with an individual refugee reminiscing about home-life before conflict. For “Mrs Schumacher and the Gordons”, Schwindt talked to her own grandfather Gerhard Süssmann whose family lost their Berlin flat in 1938. Süssmann recollects demonstrations, Nazi-Communist street fights and his neighbour “Mrs. Schumacher” who had once helped Vladimir Lenin to travel from Zürich to revolutionary St Petersburg in 1917 in the so-called “sealed train”.

On display are several paintings by Shorsh Saleh depicting his experiences as an Iraqi refugee who spent two years “illegally” crossing borders and eight years waiting for asylum in the UK. His strikingly designed carpets, hand-woven by Kurdish women in Iraq, are also on show.

Constellations (Neon), Indre Serpytyte, 2019

In Indre Serpytyte's neon light artwork “Constellations”, seven refugees’ journeys across the Mediterranean are represented as stars in the sky, where “the collections of lines and circles denote the stops and starts along the way, but also allude to a universal language of astronomy.”

Moria refugee camp after September fire

“Life in a Camp” is a 30 square-metre film installation, where the visitor is surrounded by scenes from the Moria refugee camp on the Greek Island of Lesbos. Designed to hold 2,200 people, Moria became home to more than 18,000, mainly Syrian, refugees. The footage also includes the effects of the devastating fire in September 2020, which left more than 12,000 people without shelter.

Life in a Camp installation

The future for refugees becomes even more grisly in the “Face to Open Doors” interactive installation by the creative studio Anagram, where the visitor can experience an interrogation in an imaginary future by an artificial intelligence (AI) border guard.

Face to Open Doors installation, Anagram

We are told that in 2014 on the US-Mexican border there were a series of trials with a machine called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time) and the European Union (EU) has funded an AI-based lie detector project, iBorderCtrl, to detect whether asylum seekers are lying.

There is no doubt the exhibition succeeds in creating greater sympathy for the terrible plight of refugees. But it covers for the callous attitude of successive British governments to refugees, suggesting, falsely, at one point that they have “welcomed people with initiatives intended to help them settle and find work”.

The exhibition also makes much of the “welcome” to just 10,000 Kindertransport children reluctantly granted asylum in Britain, and then only after the 1938 Nazi “Kristallnacht” pogrom. The children had to leave their parents behind and have a “guarantor” in the UK to provide for their upkeep. The fact that Britain, like governments internationally, turned their back on millions of Jews fleeing the Nazi regime—consigning them to a near-certain death in 1930s Europe and during the Second World War—is ignored.

Kindertransport guarantor form

Today, the UK accepts fewer refugees than most other European countries and is the only country in Europe that does not have a statutory time limit on the detention of migrants. The UK has been key to the EU's creation of a Fortress Europe that keeps desperate families apart and condemns thousands to death, including the 20,000 migrants who have perished while crossing the Mediterranean and the almost 300 asylum seekers that have died trying to cross the English Channel since 1999. The exhibition's only comment on these inhuman policies is a brief mention of some research that has shed “critical light on the European Union’s migration policy agenda”.

Similarly, the exhibition downplays the role of the media in fomenting xenophobic sentiment. It criticises some outlets for “seeking to demonise” refugees, but the only examples on display are a couple of newspapers from small far right outfits—the National Association (1939) and British National Party (2001). The filthy history of the mainstream press, from the Daily Mail’s support for Hitler's brownshirts to the lurid anti-migrant hysteria whipped up during the Brexit referendum campaign by the right-wing tabloids, is ignored.

Daily Mail, "Hurrah for the Blackshirts," 1934

As to the causes of the continuous refugee crises over the last century, the exhibition answers with the obvious “conflict”, “modern war”, “threats of violence” and “social breakdown” but this begs the question, what causes these phenomena?

The huge numbers of refugees produced in the twentieth century compared to previous periods of history coincides with the development of imperialism; the struggle between the major capitalist nation-states for global hegemony in an increasingly integrated world; the sharpening contradiction between the world economy and the nation-state system upon which capitalism is based; and the ever more fundamental incompatibility of socialised productive forces with private ownership of the means of production.

UK press coverage during Brexit referendum campaign

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US ruling elite sought to exploit America’s unrivalled military might as a means of countering US capitalism’s long-term economic decline. By means of military aggression, Washington sought to establish its hegemony over key markets and sources of raw materials, starting with the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. Britain, once the leading imperialist power, saw its global interests best secured through a military alliance as a junior partner of Washington.

Decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq waged under the pretext of the “war on terror”—a piece of propaganda perpetuated by the exhibition—and justified with a pack of lies about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” devastated entire countries and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

Then followed the US-NATO war for regime change in Libya, turning it into a so-called “failed state”, and the Syrian civil war—with proxy armies armed and funded by US imperialism and its allies in an attempt to replace the country’s President Bashar al-Assad with a more pliant Western puppet.

The continuous refugee crisis is the result of this criminal imperialist policy pursued over the last decades. No one has been held accountable for it and the terrible suffering caused the world over. The “Refugees” exhibition continues to let the real criminals off the hook.

French police launch violent crackdown on Paris refugee camp

Will Morrow

French riot police went on a fascistic rampage on Monday evening, brutally assaulting a peaceful tent camp of some 500 refugees at the Place de la République in central Paris.

Police used teargas, kicked and beat migrants with batons, tipped refugees out of their tents and assaulted them on the ground. Journalists filming the crackdown were also assaulted. The riot officers threw dozens of confiscated tents into trucks and drove them away.

After the square was cleared, a group of several hundred homeless refugees were forced to march north until they reached the outer suburbs around the city, pursued by police throwing teargas canisters as they went. Other groups were forced south towards City Hall, repeatedly assaulted and tear-gassed by police units along the way. Police surrounded and kettled the refugees, also kettling a group of elected Paris officials whom police prevented from speaking to the refugees.

Demonstrators march with a banner that reads "Vote for Macron they said", during a rally on the Place de La Republique in Paris, Tuesday, Nov.24, 2020. France's interior minister ordered an internal police investigation Tuesday after officers were filmed tossing migrants out of tents while evacuating a protest camp in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Videos of the assault have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, provoking disgust and outrage in France and worldwide. Last night, in an expression of mass opposition to the Macron government’s policies, thousands joined a protest at the Place de la République, despite the coronavirus lock-down, to express solidarity with the migrants and denounce the police attack.

The encampment was set up on Monday afternoon to draw attention to the horrendous conditions facing refugees. On Tuesday last week, riot police had forcibly evacuated an encampment of 3,000 people in Seine-Saint Denis, north of Paris. After waiting for hours for a bus that was to take them to temporary accommodation centers, between 500 and 1,000 people were told by police that there was no room for them, and ordered to leave the area on foot.

“The police told us to go towards the Porte de la Chapelle, without telling us why,” a young Afghan migrant who had been at the camp for two months told Le Parisien. “There was teargas, we had to run. That night, there were many of us trying to find a place to sleep on the streets.”

Thousands of refugees sleep homeless in France every night. They receive no accommodation, no income, no food, have no legal right to work, and no government support of any kind, under the anti-refugee policies upheld by the entire French political establishment and the European Union. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the government’s only response to the danger of the virus spreading throughout the tent camps has been to repeatedly disperse the largest camps with violent police crackdowns. They have provided little or no support to the migrants.

As anger at the police crackdown grew on Monday evening, the Macron government was forced into damage control. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who in August said he “chokes” at hearing protesters use the words “police violence,” hypocritically claimed that he was “shocked” by the images of the operation, and was requesting a “report” from the Paris police chief.

In reality, the police assault is the putting into action of the policies of the Macron government. It follows years of brutal police crackdowns on “yellow vest” protests against social inequality, workers’ strikes and protests by students and youth. Videos of protesters being beaten, shot with beanbag bullets, dragged and kicked, have been shared on social media and viewed by millions.

Since the 2015-2017 state of emergency suspending democratic rights, successive governments have given the police a green light to use ever more draconian violence. Brutal assaults on migrants, such as the dismantling of the Calais and Grande Synthe refugee camps, served to develop police forces capable of bloody violence against the entire working class. Under Macron, police units that assaulted peaceful elderly women at protests, killing Zineb Redouane and badly injuring Geneviève Legay, received police medals.

In 2019, the French army was authorized to open fire on “yellow vest” protesters—the first time the army had received such authorization since the 1948 miners strike in the aftermath of the fall of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime.

Monday’s police rampage took place just hours after the National Assembly voted to approve the government’s “Global security law,” which now goes the Senate to be voted on in January. Under this law, anyone publishing images of a police officer at a public event, in a way that might “harm the officer’s physical or psychological well-being,” can be jailed for a year and fined €45,000. It also permits police to deploy drones using facial recognition technology over protests.

The law, which criminalizes documenting the crimes and actions of police, has been denounced by international human rights organizations and the United Nations. The UN stated that, if approved, it would violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the European Convention of Human Rights.

These events constitute a sharp warning. Broad layers of the ruling class, in France and worldwide, are preparing a fascistic police state to suppress mounting working class opposition.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a trigger event, accelerating the bourgeoisie’s turn to authoritarian rule. It has led to an unprecedented economic collapse and, thanks to murderous “herd immunity” policies pursued by the bourgeoisie across Europe, a horrific death toll. With over 1.4 million dead worldwide, the number of officially-recorded COVID-19 deaths in France just topped 50,000, including 592 yesterday alone.

Last week, in the neo-fascist magazine Valeurs actuelles, retired General Pierre de Villiers argued that these crises would require scrapping the rule of law—that is, turning to dictatorship.

He said, “Today there is not only the security crisis but the pandemic, all amid an economic, social and political crisis and with our leaders no longer enjoying any broader confidence. When we put together these threats, there is every reason to be afraid in the short term. I fear these suppressed resentments can all explode at the same time. Yes, this is a historic tipping point, not just in France but in the whole world. … I think the changes we are facing mean that we will see profound transformations. We must think the unthinkable.”

Asked what this meant, he said: “Changing apparently immutable norms on social organization. The rule of law is obviously a nice thing, but sometimes you also have to think strategically.”

Fighting the bourgeoisie’s accelerating turn to dictatorship requires the construction of an international movement in the working class fighting for socialism, against nationalist hatreds and for the unity of the working class. This requires first of all defending immigrants against the EU’s far-right, police-state policies against migrants. Such a struggle of necessity must be completely independent of the capitalist political establishment.

Monday’s police assault, supported by the Republican Party and the far-right National Rally, was denounced by the Greens, the Socialist Party (PS), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France party. Their criticisms of Macron are, however, completely cynical. All these parties voted for the two-year state of emergency under PS President François Hollande and helped implement the build-up of police powers since then.

In a press conference on Monday, Mélenchon said videos of the police attack shows “scenes of a rare barbarism signaling a slide toward an authoritarian regime by the President of the Republic.” Yet in Spain, Mélenchon’s ally, Podemos, is part of a Socialist Party-led government that is building prison camps on the Canary Islands to detain thousands of refugees. Like its EU counterparts, it shut down rescue operations for refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, letting thousands drown each year to deter others from exercising their right to claim asylum.

This underscores that the adoption of a humane policy towards migrants, like a scientific policy against the pandemic, requires building a political movement to transfer state power and control over the resources of the world economy to working people.