UK Labour Party backs Johnson government ending lockdown in “national interest”

Robert Stevens

On the day when the UK’s Covid-19 death toll passed 75,000, Parliament voted to end the national lockdown that had been in place for just four weeks.

In its place will be the three tier system, whose limited restrictions will be made all but redundant due to the government allowing the reopening of the economy, the movement of tens of millions nationwide during the festive season and allowing Christmas family gatherings for five days. While the partial national lockdown managed to cut infections in the UK by a third, they remain very high at over 13,430 yesterday, an increase of over 2,000 on the same day last week.

An increase from 60,000 deaths to 75,000, according to whether COVID appears on the death certificate, took place during the period of the lockdown. Lifting the lockdown’s limited restrictions, as workplaces, schools and universities remain open, must see an exponential increase in fatalities.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a Covid-19 Press Conference on Saturday October 31 in 10 Downing Street. (Picture by Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street)

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020 was passed with the support of 291 Conservative MPs and comes into effect today. Expressing the insistence of big business that restrictions on making profits must end, Johnson suffered the largest rebellion of Tory MPs since the general election--with 55 voting against the Tier system out of a total of 78 MPs in opposition. Another 16 Tories did not vote.

This was despite a series of concessions Johnson made in recent days to limit a rebellion. Among the Tories opposed were senior figures including Sir Graham Brady, Greg Clark, David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, and Tom Tugenhadt.

Also voting against were 15 Labour MPs, 8 Democratic Unionist Party MPs and 2 Independents. One of the Independents was Jeremy Corbyn, who has had the Labour whip removed by party leader Sir Keir Starmer, as part of the witch-hunt of the party’s left in the anti-Semitism campaign. The Labourites voting against Johnson did so citing complaints that constituencies in the north of England were being treated unfairly, with businesses suffering and requiring more bailouts, due to being put into the highest Tier Three. They sided with several local Labour councils who are in alliance with northern based Tory MPs, including Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers.

Johnson was ultimately able to win the vote by a large majority thanks to most of Labour’s 200 MPs abstaining, with Starmer abiding by his cynical pledge to only “constructive” opposition to the government.

The Tier system will be reintroduced with some modifications from its previous incarnation. All non-essential shops, gyms, hairdressers and other personal care businesses in England will be allowed to reopen, along with places of worship. Pubs and restaurants are to be fully closed under Tier 3 restrictions and can only open fully in Tier 2 areas if they serve “substantial meals”—which could be a scotch egg.

The so-called “rule of six” will be reinstated, allowing up to six people from different households to meet indoors or outdoors in Tier 1 areas, only outdoors in Tiers 2, and in limited outdoor settings in Tier 3.

Even these limited restrictions will be scrapped for a period over Christmas, with up to three households able to meet up during five-days from December 23-27. This was agreed between Johnson and the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In a decision catastrophic to public health, the government is allowing all shops to open 24 hours a day through December and January.

The profit lust of the ruling elite means that nothing is being overlooked to wring every last penny out of the population in the run up to Christmas. This week the Acardia group retail chain went into administration threatening 13,000 jobs and was followed within hours with the collapse of the Debenhams chain store into administration, with a further 12,000 jobs at stake. Without missing a beat it was announced Tuesday that Debenhams will be open today in what has been dubbed “Wild Wednesday” in a bid to sell off all remaining stock at its 124 shops.

Areas of the country in Tier 2 will be allowed to have fans back in football stadiums for the first time in nine months, with Arsenal the first Premier League club to host home supporters for their Europa League tie with Rapid Vienna Thursday. Ten Premier League clubs are located in Tier 2 areas and will be able to allow 2,000 fans to watch their games from today.

In the debate Johnson said the lockdown was ending even as he admitted, “The latest ONS [Office for National Statistics] figures suggest that, out of every 85 people in England, one has coronavirus—far more than in the summer. Between 24 November and yesterday, 3,222 people across the UK lost their lives.”

He then reassured business and his rebels that what was being proposed was “not another lockdown, nor is this the renewal of existing measures in England. The tiers that I am proposing would mean that from tomorrow, everyone in England, including those in tier 3, will be free to leave their homes for any reason. When they do, they will find the shops open for Christmas, the hairdressers open, the nail bars open, and gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools open.”

He then declared, “I am not seeking open-ended measures… on the contrary, the regulations come with a sunset clause at the end of 2 February… they can be extended beyond 2 February only if this House votes for them.”

A review of the tier system on December 16 would be more “granular”, he added, with an aim of allowing some areas to move to an even less restrictive tiers. “We will try to be as sensitive as possible to local effort and to local achievement in bringing the pandemic under control,” he declared.

The Daily Mail reported that Tory “whips have been assuring Conservatives with constituencies in high tiers that they will be downgraded within weeks, while London Tories are pushing for a pledge that the city will not be upgraded to Tier 3.”

Starmer responded, “Labour has supported the government in two national lockdowns… We recognise the need for continued restrictions, but it is not in the national interest to vote these restrictions down today and we will allow them to pass.”

Tory MP Jeremy Wright summed up the position of the anti-lockdown, anti-tier Covid Recovery Group rebels, stating that the new measures were “profoundly damaging to hospitality businesses in particular, which will be obliged to close during the most lucrative part of the year…. a decision to relax restrictions at a review on 16 December would take effect only from 19 December, meaning that most, if not all, of the crucial pre-Christmas season would be lost in an area where the visitor economy is crucial.”

The Johnson government was the first to declare openly in favour of a herd immunity policy, before growing public opposition and a series of strikes by workers forced it into a national lockdown. But this has continued to be its undeclared policy throughout. It ended the initial lockdown within three months, with all schools, colleges and universities opened by September, vastly increasing the spread of the deadly disease.

Speaking about the number of deaths of elderly people of coronavirus, and whether the government could “protect every old person,” Tory MP Sir Charles Walker felt able to state openly, “No government can abolish death, it is impossible--615,000 people die every year in this country and not every death is a tragedy… Please can we change the narrative when we talk about death? Not all deaths are equal—there is the same outcome, but to compare the death of someone of 90 with the death of someone of 19 is not right.”

British government to deport Jamaican “foreign nationals” after fascistic campaign

Thomas Scripps

Twenty-eight “foreign nationals” will be deported from the UK to Jamaica today, after Home Secretary Priti Patel delivered a fascistic rebuke to campaigners calling for the flight to be postponed. The number of deportees was reduced from 58 after the Home Office reached a deal with the Jamaican government not to send anyone who arrived in the UK aged younger than 12 years old.

Over 80 public figures had called on airlines not to carry the deportees. Patel responded that these were “dangerous foreign criminals [who] have no place in our society” and that she was “unapologetic in my determination to remove these convicted foreign rapists, murders, and child sex offenders from our country.”

Home Secretary Priti Patel (left) and Prime Minster Boris Johnson [Credit: Hannah McKay Pool via AP]

After 70 mostly Labour MPs signed a letter in support of the #StopthePlane campaign, a source in Patel’s department reiterated to the Times, “It is foreign national offenders that the Labour Party want to put first. Killers. Rapists. Drug dealers. Convicted foreign criminals who have no right to be in this country.”

In a debate in the House of Commons, Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith denounced “activist lawyers… trying to thwart the Government's legal efforts to deport these criminals.” Another Tory, David Davies, suggested broadening the criteria for who could be subject to deportation and Ben Bradley MP asked the immigration minister to “call out those celebrities who spent their weekends trying to use their public profiles to shame businesses into not helping remove murderers from the UK.”

The ruling Conservatives’ ability to proceed with this foul agenda rests on the thoroughly compromised and cynical opposition of the Labour Party. The majority of Labour MPs, including party leader Sir Keir Starmer, and 12 other front benchers, did not sign the open letter to Patel protesting Wednesday’s flight.

In a speech to the House of Commons, Shadow Immigration Minister Holy Lynch merely asked whether the government had “done its due diligence” with regard to the deportees, assuring the Tory government, “Of course, we recognise that those who engage in violent and criminal acts must face justice.”

Faced with this, the Labour MPs signing the letter of protest are only attempting to distance themselves from their party’s own anti-democratic agenda without making any real challenge to it. Summing up the token character of their opposition, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reproached the government for its “unnecessarily harsh approach.”

Their disagreement is framed entirely around the government’s failure “to learn any lessons” from the Windrush scandal in 2018, which saw the Tories forced to admit that scores of West Indian migrants who arrived in the UK before 1973 had been wrongly deported or denied jobs, houses, welfare, or medical care they were legally entitled to.

The MPs’ letter to Patel reads, “You have previously committed to ‘righting the wrongs’ concerning the Windrush scandal [!]… It has been reported that at least one of those already detained for this flight has a Windrush generation grandfather.”

The treatment of Caribbean migrants is despicable, and all the deportees of today’s flight have a Jamaican background. But the Labour “lefts” and others are using this to set up a self-serving agenda that absolves them from opposing all such deportations in principle. Those targeted by the government’s vicious anti-migrant agenda are not confined to West Indian “foreign nationals”, or even to “foreign nationals” at all.

Protesters outside Downing Street oppose previous deportation flights

Answering the government’s critics, Tory immigration minister Chris Philip boasted, “In the year ending June 2020, there were 5,208 enforced returns, of which 2,630, or over half, were to European Union countries, and only 33 out of over 5,000 were to Jamaica—less than 1 percent.

“During the pandemic, we have continued with returns and deportations on scheduled flights and on over 30 charter flights to countries including Albania, France, Germany, Ghana, Lithuania, Nigeria, Poland and Spain, none of which, I notice, provoked an urgent question. The clear majority of the charter flights this year have been to European countries.”

For the Labour Party, the Windrush scandal has become a platform for political posturing which allows them to stay silent on thousands of other deportations carried out with their tacit approval and using their own party’s legislation. Philip argued in the House of Commons, “If somebody comes to this country, commits a serious criminal offence and puts our constituents at risk, it is right that, once they have served their sentence, or a great part of it, they should be removed. It is not just me who thinks that; it is the Labour Members who voted for this law in 2007 who think that, some of whom are sitting in this Chamber today.”

The 2007 Borders Act was brought in by Gordon Brown’s Labour government as part of the “law and order” and anti-immigrant campaign pioneered by Tony Blair. It states that any “foreign national” who receives a criminal sentence of one year or more is liable to deportation.

Crimes that can receive a one-year sentence include shoplifting, burglary and relatively minor drug offences. Many of those ultimately deported are not informed that a one-year sentence could see them deported, meaning some plead guilty without knowledge of the terrible consequences. As the WSWS reported last month, they are then routinely denied effective access to their legal rights.

Once deported following a one to four-year sentence, individuals are barred from re-entry to the UK for 10 years. Sentences of longer than four years mean a permanent re-entry ban. Over 30 children stood to lose fathers when today’s flight was initially chartered. Some of the deportees will face threats to their life—at least five people removed from the UK to Jamaica were killed in the year to May 2019.

This amounts to cruel and unusual punishment after a sentence has already been served. It reinstates the infamous practice of penal transportation in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which saw thousands of poor men, women and children shipped to British colonies as a punishment.

As the WSWS wrote on a deportation flight earlier this year, these cases also “establish a precedent for the mass removal of foreign nationals and… the use of Gestapo-type tactics against them.

“If even the most minor conviction can become a cause for deportation on the grounds that it affects ‘the public interest’, then it is only a few steps until migrants can be kicked out of the country for demanding too much of state services or provoking fascist mobs.”

The criminality of today’s deportation flight is determined by these assaults on fundamental democratic rights. It does not hinge on whether one of the deportees has a family connection with the Windrush generation.

Nor does it depend on the crimes held to have been committed by the deportees. No one should take at face value the government’s attempt to blanketly condemn these individuals as a group of hardened criminals, which recalls US President Donald Trump’s vicious demonisation of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “animals”. But even assuming the worst, this does not change the fact that deportation is a barbaric punishment with grave implications for the democratic rights of the entire working class.

The essential argument being made by the government is that they have no obligations to “foreign criminals”, even if they have lived and worked in Britain most, or even all their lives. If these rights can be withdrawn in any individual’s case then they are no longer rights, but privileges awarded at the whim of the most right-wing government in British history. Specifically, of the fascistic Patel—a liar, bully , inciter of violence against immigration lawyers, and admirer of the far right Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi , responsible for waves of communalist violence across India.

With this established, what is to stop other “criminals”, whether foreign or British citizens, having their rights withdrawn? Penal transportation was frequently used to punish political opponents—most notably early trade union organisers and the Chartists.

Without confronting these class questions, no successful fight in defence of migrants can be waged. That there are nearly 80 million forcibly displaced people in the world, and an estimated ten million stateless people, is proof that world capitalism is incapable of providing the basic conditions of life to the global population. Close to one and a half million lives lost to COVID-19 testify to the same fact.

Faced with rising social desperation and fearing an explosion of social opposition, the ruling class is seeking to replace democratic rule with fascist repression, directed not only against migrants, as was brutally displayed in France last week, but against all workers and young people. Overcoming these forces requires mobilising the full might of the international working class on a socialist programme, guaranteeing the right of everyone to live and work where they choose.

Biden-Harris tech policy: militarism and censorship

Kevin Reed

In the three weeks since former Vice President Joseph Biden and Senator Kamala Harris declared victory in the 2020 presidential election, it has become clear that the Democrats are assembling a right-wing administration that represents the interests of corporate America, the financial elite and US military-intelligence.

The truth of this assessment is demonstrated by the tech policy of the president-elect, which has been articulated in policy statements, media reports and comments made by Biden himself prior to the November 3 elections.

Although tech policy is not identified as a top priority on the Biden-Harris transition website, it is evident that the relationship of the new administration with Silicon Valley is a critical element of the overall of strategy of the Democrats.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

According to a report by CBS News on November 11, the Biden transition team is being advised by a “cadre of tech industry types, including executives with political data company Alloy, formed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Google chairperson Eric Schmidt’s firm Rebellion Defense.”

After leaving Google in 2019, the multi-billionaire Eric Schmidt has become an evangelist for the integration of big tech with the US military. Schmidt sits on at least two government advisory boards that promote the use of artificial intelligence technologies by the Defense Department and he has invested in military tech startups such as Rebellion Defense.

Rebellion Defense is a Pentagon contractor that specializes in analyzing video filmed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The company website says, “Artificial Intelligence is redefining the art of the possible. Consumers worldwide benefit from it—but our adversaries are using it against us. Our national defense urgently needs to harness Silicon Valley’s best technologies and talent to address this challenge. We help our defense and national security agencies unlock the power of data across all domains. … Rebellion Defense builds for the warfighter.”

Meanwhile, members of the incoming Biden-Harris cabinet are being drawn from private consulting and investment firms with deep ties to the technology sector and the military. According to a report in the New York Times on Sunday, both Biden’s choice for Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and one of the leading candidates for defense secretary, Michele Flournoy, are co-founders of WestExec Advisors.

The Times report says that among WestExec’s clients is a firm called Shield AI, “a San Diego-based company that makes surveillance drones and signed a contract worth as much as $7.2 million with the Air Force this year to deliver artificial intelligence tools to help drones operate in combat missions.”

Meanwhile, it is clear that a Biden-Harris administration will be committed to a further suppression of online speech through various forms of censorship. On multiple occasions during the 2020 elections, the Biden campaign demanded the social media platforms use censorship against the Trump campaign.

A three-page open letter from Biden-Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon on September 28 to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanded the world’s largest social media platform “protect our democracy” by removing “disinformation” and taking down “Mr. Trump’s posts.”

As we have explained on the World Socialist Web Site, the use of censorship against the far right is part of the preparations by big tech and the state to censor socialists and the working class as a whole.

Throughout the 2020 elections, the Democratic Party-backed campaign by the tech monopolies against “disinformation” was used to block online political discussion about the socialist alternative to the two parties of American capitalism, the campaign of the Socialist Equality Party candidates Joseph Kishore for US President and Norissa Santa Cruz for US Vice President.

According to a report in the New York Times on November 10, the Democrats are pursuing the regulatory and legal offensive against big tech that was launched by the Trump administration and has been underway for the past year or more. The Times noted that bipartisan support for government control of the tech industry “has grown sharply during the Trump administration, and shows no signs of going away as Democrats regain control of the White House.”

Reflecting a shift within the entire ruling elite regarding state control of big tech, the Times writes, “Mr. Biden is expected to take on the Silicon Valley giants on misinformation, privacy and antitrust, in a sharp departure from the polices pursued while he was vice president under Mr. Obama.”

Among the initiatives that a Biden-Harris administration will pursue, according to the Times, are the antitrust lawsuit against Google announced by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr on October 20, and the efforts by President Trump, the Department of Justice and leading Republicans to overturn the Section 230 immunity from prosecution provisions for online service providers.

While Biden was careful not to discuss his tech policy during the election campaign—lest he might reveal that it was indistinguishable from Trump’s—the candidate did let on that he was for abolishing the Section 230 protections that prevent prosecution of tech companies for content posted on their platforms by users, a core provision that protects online free speech.

In an interview with the New York Times in January, Biden said that the Section 230 protections “should immediately be revoked” for Facebook and “other platforms.” He went on, “It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”

As for Vice President-elect Harris, having come from California’s Bay Area, she has longstanding connections with Silicon Valley powerbrokers, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. Harris has raised campaign funds from tech billionaires for her previous campaigns for office and she has family members, friends and former staff members who are “part of the revolving door between government and the tech industry,” according to a recent report in the New York Times.

With a combination of government regulation of big tech and close connections with the financial elite of Silicon Valley, the Biden-Harris team will be able to pursue a strategy of undermining the ability of the public to utilize the platforms to organize its struggles, while protecting the vast fortunes being generated on Wall Street by the trillion dollar corporations.

Chilean public health workers go on indefinite national strike

Mauricio Saavedra

Chilean public health workers went out on indefinite strike Monday, a week after ongoing union negotiations with the Health Ministry failed to achieve any results. Amid the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic, health workers have been involved in stoppages, protests and marches for increases in the health budget, better working conditions, official recognition and unpaid bonuses. This movement is part of a wave of mobilizations reignited in the second half of November calling for the resignation of the nation’s hated ultra-right President Sebastián Piñera for unleashing police-state violence against all forms of social protest.

Port workers held a one-day stoppage to pressure the government to release funds from the privatized pension scheme for families to cope with mass unemployment and poverty caused by the economic crisis. Students and youth entered into street clashes with riot police after the police shootings of juveniles in reform centers. Their key demand is the release of some 2,000 protesters held in custody without charges for over a year.

The latest health workers strike was sparked by the nonpayment of two productivity bonuses offered every year since 2012 and another promised “COVID bonus.” Health professionals are also opposing threatened budget cuts for 2021 after this year’s expenditure on public health was belatedly and inadequately increased above a miserable 4 percent of gross domestic product for the first time in decades.

Health workers march to Congress. Banner reads “Less applause and more resources for Public Health”. (Credit: Guillermo Correa Camiroaga)

The public health system saw employees forced to sew masks, wear makeshift eye shields and don garbage bags for personal protective equipment during the pandemic. The number of health professionals testing positive for COVID-19 has reached 37,510. Seventy-two workers have died due to the lack of resources and protective attire. Staff have been working 24, 36 and even 48-hour shifts due to the high number of workers falling ill, on top of insufficient staffing levels to begin with.

The Epidemiological Department’s (DEIS) latest report showed that in the nation of 19 million, the total accumulated number of COVID-19 cases since March 3 has reached 622,165 cases (547,223 with laboratory confirmation and 74,942 probable but unconfirmed). The report, ending on November 26, found that 20,439 have died (15,322 laboratory confirmed, 5,117 suspected).

The chronically underfunded, under-resourced and understaffed public health system copes with over 80 percent of the population who subscribe to the National Health Fund (FONASA). Even prior to the pandemic, up to 21,000 people were dying yearly while on waiting lists. Hospitalized patients are obliged to bring their own bandages, medications and other supplies.

Last May, June and July—to date Chile’s worst months of the pandemic—the nation’s largest public hospital system in Greater Santiago collapsed and patients were transferred to regional centers. No patients could be transferred to the country’s second largest hospital system in the Valparaíso region as it also reached saturation point.

Ambulances were backed up for more than 15 hours with COVID patients. Staff were instructed to suspend preventive quarantines early and return to work. Lunch breaks were reduced to 15 minutes. Patients in field tents were forced to wait three to four days before being admitted into an ICU ward.

Staff and equipment shortages and the right-wing government’s overtly cavalier approach to confronting the pandemic was not merely the result of a lack of foresight, but rather a conscious state policy. From the beginning the of the outbreak, the scientific community criticized the ministry’s refusal to consult and for concealing rather than making transparent pandemic statistics. It has since been revealed that ex-health minister Jaime Mañalich deliberately downplayed the extent of contagion and provided false data to the general public.

Mañalich also categorically opposed implementing the scientific community’s call for a preventive national quarantine and social distancing measures in the urban centers from the outset of the pandemic. Instead he implemented a homicidal “dynamic” quarantining policy, which meant letting the disease spread before reacting to the outbreak and only then placing a commune in or out of quarantine based on arbitrary criteria. This was a calculated maneuver to forestall for as long as possible forking out financial resources to the ailing health system and for emergency social measures to aid the poverty-stricken population.

Arguing that the virus would become benign, Mañalich also promoted a dangerous “herd immunity” policy, claiming the country had reached a “new normal” to justify renewing economic activity, especially in the mining sector.

The hated minister was forced to resign in June. But his replacement, Enrique Paris, made clear in his first statement that his “is a ministry … of continuity.” From the very beginning of the pandemic, he excused the government’s criminal inaction and rejected total quarantine measures, calling them a “populist solution.” Paris introduced his own herd immunity policy, known as the “Step-by-Step” plan, that began reopening schools, removed quarantines and lockdowns, reignited economic activity and will be reopening the country to international tourism.

Bringing in Paris granted the government breathing space as the entire Chilean political establishment was deeply compromised by Mañalich, rightly considered in the working class as a criminally reckless, sociopathic liar and thug.

A sign of this attitude was a growing number of protests over lack of protective gear and insufficient ICU beds that broke out in hospitals across the country and, more significantly, erupting outside of the control of the unions. In September nursing technicians began staging weekly protests that were violently repressed by paramilitary Carabinero police using water cannon, tear gas and multiple arrests.

Paris claimed he would “receive divergent opinions” and called “for the entire health sector to come together and work together.” These statements were only made for public consumption, as he has stonewalled every demand made by health workers. But the approach permitted the government to use the services of the parliamentary left parties—the economic nationalists around the Socialist PSCh, the Stalinist PCCh fronts and the pseudo-left agglomeration Frente Amplio—which launched a diversionary legal campaign against the former minister.

The parliamentary left also dominates the leadership of the unions that, especially during the Chilean military dictatorship, were transformed into corporatized instruments of the employers and the government, used to drive productivity increases, wage cuts and job destruction, thereby allowing Chile to become the most socially unequal country in the OECD.

During the pandemic, it has been the unions, and the fake left that control them, that agreed to a return to work in the mining and other sectors of the economy. They accepted a freeze on collective bargaining along with wage cuts, supported the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of workers in private industry for the benefit of employers and refused to call any industrial action against poverty, hunger, insecurity and evictions impacting the working class. They have done everything in their power to suffocate any independent struggles, leading them into stunts and promoting empty parliamentary appeals to demoralize the workers.

In a telling statement, Patricia Valderas, president of the National Federation of Health Workers (Fenats), said recently that the union was going on strike until there were answers to demands “made for years,” that is, the terrible conditions suffered by health professional predate by “years” the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

“After eight months of conversations with the Ministry, three national mobilizations and two days on strike without any satisfactory response from the current government, we have decided to call for an indefinite national strike,” she said, threatening to continue until “we get a decent response from the government.”

Paris gloated that the mobilizations “has an adhesion of 0.49 percent, and that makes me happy.” Only a third of the workforce has been called out in sporadic stoppages.

The parliamentary left and the political, economic and social organizations they dominate constitute the greatest barrier to health workers asserting their independent interests. Workers must break the grip of these nationalist and opportunist organizations and their attempt to tie the working class to the capitalist state.

Podemos silent on Spanish generals’ coup threats

Alejandro López

It is over 48 hours since El País published extracts of a letter signed by 73 retired officers, appealing to King Felipe VI to act against the elected Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. They blame what they call “the social-communist government” for “the decomposition of national unity.”

It comes weeks after 39 retired Air Force commanders sent a similarly incendiary letter to both the European Parliament and the king. The letter asserted that the PSOE-Podemos government is overseeing the “annihilation of our democracy,” and assured the king of their “deep loyalty” to him.

While sections of the military are all but openly discussing a coup to install a dictatorship aimed against the working class, the “Left Populist” Podemos party has remained deafeningly silent. The government’s only official public reaction was that of Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Margarita Robles, who intervened to defend the king in yesterday’s budget debate in parliament. Her intervention was loudly applauded from the Podemos bench.

Robles said: “The head of state belongs to everyone, not to some who with certain letters implicate the king.” The letters’ signatories, she said, “are not doing what they have to do as public servants or defending the values that characterise the military and military family.”

That is, the PSOE-Podemos government is passing over in silence the fact that sections of the officer corps are discussing a coup. Instead, they aim to protect the king’s reputation, even though the king has neither disavowed the letter nor explained why the Royal House had previously not disclosed the letters.

Robles did not announce any investigation of the letters’ signatories, their links with potential coup plotters among active-duty officers, or the extent of fascist sentiment in the army. Instead, she extended her “recognition” to retired generals who are now parliamentarians of the fascist Vox party. Calling their fascist politics “a legitimate option,” she claimed that they are defending what “they think are the interests of the citizens. My gratitude goes to them even though we are so distant.”

The PSOE-Podemos government’s applause for Vox, whose leaders have hailed the bloodstained fascist dictatorship of general Francisco Franco, exposes its own reactionary role. The PSOE and Podemos are far more afraid of explosive opposition to their policies building up on their left among workers and youth, than they are about far-right coup plots against their own government.

This applies to an entire layer of political satellites of Podemos who are silent on the officers’ coup threats. The Pabloite Anticapitalistas, which left Podemos barely six months ago, has said nothing on the issue on its online paper Poder Popular or its online magazine Viento Sur. Revolutionary Left, the Spanish affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International, which works in Podemos, issued no statement.

Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Workers’ Revolutionary Current), the Spanish section of the Morenoite Trotskyist Fraction—Fourth International (FT-CI), has published a dozen articles in the past two days on the Spanish national edition of its online daily Izquierda Diario. However, not a single one of these articles on Izquierda Diario even refers to the generals’ letter.

Spanish soldiers of the Airborne Brigade in Afghanistan (Wikimedia Commons)

They are silent because, while they technically remain outside Podemos, they are a barely-disguised wing of the PSOE-Podemos government. Rooted in the affluent middle class, they hope to benefit from close integration into the capitalist state machine and work to suppress left-wing opposition among workers.

Podemos recently joined the commission that is distributing €140 billion in European Union (EU) bailout funds to the banks and corporations. It is implementing the EU’s “herd immunity” policy on Covid-19 that has led to over 1.5 million infections and over 65,000 deaths in Spain alone, while claiming “there is no money” for a scientific fight against the virus. More broadly, it is continuing EU austerity, while showering the armed forces with billions of euros in military spending increases.

Moreover, Deputy Prime Minister and Podemos general secretary Pablo Iglesias also sits on the Intelligence Affairs Commission, the body that directs the activities of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI).

As such, Iglesias receives regular reports from officials spying on all forms of political opposition in Spain. As El Confidencial recently reported, the CNI receives a report every 15 days from its Digital Observatory, which monitors thousands of web sites and social media for “disinformation,” especially sites opposed to capitalism, the Spanish government, NATO and the EU.

The PSOE-Podemos government has used this information ruthlessly against left-wing opposition. Podemos joined the PSOE government just after the PSOE ordered a brutal police crackdown on mass protests by workers and youth against the jailing of Catalan nationalist political prisoners. At the outset of the pandemic this year, it sent police to assault steelworkers striking for the right to shelter at home to avoid infection.

Against far-right generals discussing a coup, however, Podemos has taken no public action. In 2018, over 1,000 retired top officers, including 62 former generals, signed a manifesto hailing Franco. A year later, retired Army Chief of Staff General Fulgencio Coll Bucher, a leading Vox member, wrote a piece in the right-wing daily El Mundo calling for the army to oust the PSOE. In September, a Vox-backed military protest to raise soldiers’ wages and conditions marched through Madrid, for the first time since the Franco era.

The last thing Podemos wants to do is to alert workers to fascist conspiracies within the army. They are terrified that an event which brought together the mounting discontent among workers and youth at the official handling of the pandemic and austerity, with the anti-fascist traditions of the European working class could lead to a political radicalization of the working class aimed against them.

They are consciously opposed to discussion of Francoism and the danger of a coup by Francoite elements in the Spanish ruling class. In a 2015 discussion with “post-Marxist” writer Chantal Mouffe, published in the book Podemos in the name of the people, Podemos co-founder Iñigo Errejón opposed discussing the lessons of Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and of working class struggles against the Francoite regime:

“I don’t think many people would be interested in such a critique, and it is not very productive in political terms, either. Quite possibly at some point we will have to start a historiographical discussion, but I don’t think that a revised form of nostalgia—let’s say, moving away from the melancholy of the loser—is ever productive.”

Errejón insisted that discussing a perspective and strategy for the working class to defeat fascism was of no particular relevance to contemporary Spain. Talking about the Spanish Civil War, he said,

“scares the elderly, and doesn’t mean much to the young, as it happened a long time ago. While we’re clear on what side we’d take in such an argument, we also know that nostalgia doesn’t win battles, but that defeats unfortunately build defeat. This is not an appeal to bury the whole subject, it’s an appeal to fight within the terms of the time.”

In fact, the danger of a fascist coup targeting mounting working class anger at social inequality, austerity and “herd immunity” policies is very much part of contemporary politics. The lessons of the 1930s are of burning actuality. These are first and foremost the necessity to mobilize the working class independently of the union bureaucracy and reactionary petty-bourgeois parties like Podemos, and to build a revolutionary political leadership in the working class to lead the struggle against capitalism and authoritarian rule.

Health care workers in the US speak out: “We have PTSD”

Bryan Dyne

By early Wednesday, the number of men, women and children currently hospitalized from COVID-19 will surpass 100,000. Even during the dip in reporting caused by the Thanksgiving holiday, the number of daily coronavirus cases never fell below 160,000. The cumulative total since the beginning of the pandemic now exceeds 14.1 million cases in the US alone. Similarly, for deaths caused by COVID-19, at least 1,500 lives are lost each day, with a cumulative death toll of more than 276,000.

Such mass death is reflected internationally. An average of more than 570,000 cases are reported each day with more than 10,000 deaths. The overall total now stands at 64.1 million cases and 1.48 million deaths worldwide. Projections currently estimate another 400,000 deaths by the end of December and a near doubling of coronavirus deaths to 2.75 million by March.

Such numbers, however, do not always paint the most complete portrait of the human toll of the pandemic. Hospital workers in particular fear an oncoming “tidal wave” of new cases in the wake of the immense amount of travel surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday. Hospital workers in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced plans to reopen schools with no medical justification, and New Jersey recently spoke to the WSWS and described the steadily worsening pandemic on the front lines. Their names have been changed to protect their anonymity.

EMT Giselle Dorgalli, second from right, looks at a monitor while performing chest compression on a patient who tested positive for coronavirus in the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

Sam works at a medium-sized regional hospital in New Jersey, less than an hour’s drive from New York City. “Basically, we have seen a dramatic rise in coronavirus patients in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “Before, we were down to single digits. In a matter of two to three weeks, we got back up to 80 or so patients. They just brought in two freezer trucks because the morgue can’t keep up. They’re inundated like back in the spring. Basically, the hospital is trying to figure out where to park the trucks so they’re not so visible to the community.

“On the units, we are making preparations because things are back to where they were in the spring,” Sam said. “Back in the spring, 17 out of the 20 units were all for COVID-19. At the other hospital where I pick up shifts there were only two ‘clean’ units during the worst of it. Right now, the intensive care units are filling up fast and they are starting to designate other units for COVID-19 patients. So, what we have to do now is convert the [post anesthesia care units] into ‘clean’ units to compensate for all of the other units being designated for the coronavirus.”

Sam continued, explaining, “Just like in the spring, we are anticipating an end to all elective surgeries. So, what we’re going to have to do is use those units for non-COVID patients.

“They’re also reorganizing nursing staff to prioritize,” he said. “Last week they activated the proning and positioning teams again as well. These are the teams that lay patients on their stomach, which we learned in the spring helps them breath better when they are on ventilators. Basically, about 4 or 5 people come in to turn the patient onto their stomach because they are sedated. If the patient is not sedated, the positioning team comes in and helps the patient move into positions that help with breathing. This is a big help and really important for coronavirus patients, but it takes a lot of staff.”

Alex works at a hospital in New York City, where new cases and hospitalizations have doubled over the past month. “We have been preparing and definitely what you are hearing on the news is not the half of it. It’s a lot worse than what they are saying in city hospitals,” Alex said. “You know from the calls that go out all day. They’re more frequent. And there is the same kind of reorganization going on with the units and we are seeing them fill up again too. At my hospital, we can’t even eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore. They set up a tent outside of emergency, so we eat outside.”

Asked whether the hospitals had enough personal protective equipment for the ongoing and oncoming surge, Alex responded, “We already have to ration. In the spring, it was the wild west because whenever there is a shortage people are going to be scared and think about themselves, protecting themselves and their families.”

Sam then noted, “I work at two hospitals, so it’s uneven. At one hospital, we have to reuse N95s three days and they sanitize them. We are already seeing shortages and the last time they got those duck bill ones to replace the N95s but those don’t always fit properly.”

Both workers also spoke on the harsh toll the resurgence of the pandemic in their areas has had on the morale of health care workers, after months of it being relatively suppressed. “Look, basically nurses have been calling out sick a lot more,” Sam said. “We can’t take it. It’s like you know what is coming and you don’t know what else to do. We have PTSD. A lot of staff are being called in for double shifts again so that just adds to the stress and then you have your family to think about too.”

Alex had similar experiences: “At my hospital they put together this team to talk to us because of the stress and the mental health issues with nurses and all the staff. People are like, ‘this is happening again,’ and it is scary. My friend was crying the other day because she had three people die during one shift.”

Such conditions are emerging across the country. Alabama, for example, reported 1,785 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Tuesday, up from 1,422 the week before. Commenting on the sharp spike in hospitalizations to the Montgomery Advertiser, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo from the University of Alabama at Birmingham said, “This is a really, really scary inflection point. … Our health care workforce is continuing to work valiantly and struggling very hard. One of the things that keeps me up at night, among many, is if we’re going to have enough people to actually take care of what I think might be a tidal wave of patients in the next month. We haven’t seen the effect of Thanksgiving travel and socialization.

“We start to see cases, we start to see hospitalizations rise, and then we start to see deaths about three weeks later,” she said. “The fear is we have this constant level of surge, we see this spike right now, and now we’re going into the holiday season. We could really be in a situation in two to three weeks that compromises our ability to provide health care. I don’t want to undersell that, to underemphasize that. We’ve been cautious not to use alarmist terminology, to be scientifically accurate in our communications. But I think this is a time where we need to start thinking about tidal wave imagery, tsunami imagery.”

The coronavirus pandemic and the case for expropriating the financial oligarchy

Eric London

The month of November was record setting in the spread of the pandemic. Seventeen million people tested positive for the coronavirus worldwide and over 272,000 died of the virus this month, almost equal to the total number of soldiers killed in World War I’s deadliest battle, the five-month Battle of the Somme.

While billions of people prepare for a winter of hardship and disease, the global stock markets are celebrating their best month in 33 years, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting 30,000 for the first time in November.

As the deaths pile up in every country, the ruling class has taken advantage of the pandemic to orchestrate an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.

According to a recent survey by the non-profit Save the Children, 75 percent of households worldwide reported income loss since the beginning of the pandemic. Extending these percentages to the world population, that means 5.25 billion people are substantially poorer in November than they were in January. Of these, 1.05 billion people lost 100 percent of their income, 1.7 billion people lost over 75 percent of their income, and another 1.7 billion people lost between 56 and 75 percent of their income.

Share of world population reporting no receipt of government support (Credit: Save the Children)

The same survey reported that 3.7 billion people, or 70 percent of respondents who suffered economic loss, had not received any government support.

The degree of social immiseration represented in these figures is almost unfathomable. Ninety percent of respondents in the survey said they have reduced access to health care compared with a year ago. Almost two-thirds of respondents—equaling 4.3 billion people if the figures are accurate—are having difficulty providing their families with basic food staples.

Over 25 percent of parents say their children do not have any learning materials at all for distanced learning—not even a single textbook or reading book. Save the Children estimates “conservatively” that 10 million poor children will never return to school when the pandemic is over because long-term poverty will force them to work instead of study. Rates of teen pregnancy and family violence are increasing.

Workers in the “wealthier” countries are by no means spared from the devastation. According to US Labor Department data, there are now more high paying jobs than there were in January, while there are 25 percent fewer jobs that pay under $15 an hour. Official figures still put the total unemployed at over 10 million.

This money did not “disappear,” it was funneled into the bank accounts of the super-rich.

The bipartisan CARES Act transferred on average $1.6 million each to 43,000 wealthy Americans whose income was already over $1 million—a total $135 billion handout to those who did not need it.

Fiscal stimulus 2009 and 2020 (Credit: World Economic Forum)

The major imperialist countries provided a total of $10 trillion in fiscal stimulus to support the banks and corporations this year, already massively outpacing the size of the bank bailouts of 2008–2009. In the US, this year’s corporate bailout amounted to over 12 percent of GDP, double the 2009 bailout, which cost less than 6 percent of GDP. In Japan, Germany, Australia, the UK, Canada and France, governments similarly doubled, tripled or quadrupled the size of the bailout.

This has made the rich obscenely richer. According to a November report from Inequality.org, “Between March 18—the rough start of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—and October 13, the total wealth of 644 US billionaires increased from $2.95 trillion to $3.88 trillion, a rise of 31.6 percent.”

The wealth of the 10 richest people increased by $141 billion over this period, or by $46,850 each minute!

So much for the claim, repeated in every language by capitalist politicians from right to so-called left, that “there is no money” to provide the world working class with food, full income, health care and books.

It is a glaring contradiction, inherent in capitalism, that such obscene wealth is generated by corporations like Amazon and Microsoft that make use of the most advanced technologies and logistical systems known to man.

These transnational corporations, which tower over most governments in terms of power and ability, possess knowledge and tools that represent the pinnacle of human ingenuity, determination and innovation, the product of thousands of years of scientific and social development.

These innovations hold the key to the coronavirus crisis, if only they were used to save lives instead of exploit for profit!

In 1880, Friedrich Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that socialism “presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination … by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.”

Engels continued: “The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.”

Freeing the productive forces from the constraints of the capitalist for-profit system and expropriating the wealth of the rich are urgent and immediate necessities, required to combat the pandemic and save millions of lives.

There are roughly 230,000 people who qualify as “Ultra-High Net Worth Individuals,” whose wealth is over $30 million. Combined, this richest .0003 percent of the population has roughly $35.5 trillion. In addition, the world’s 10 largest stock markets contain corporations with a combined market value of $71.6 trillion.

This massive sum of hoarded wealth must be used to provide $4,000 per month for five months for every single adult on the planet, enough to cover the full income of workers during lockdowns until the vaccine is produced in sufficient quantities to be made available to the whole world. No worker or small proprietor should be forced to chose between death by starvation and death by the coronavirus.

The resources hoarded by the rich must be used to immediately hire and train nurses and build additional hospital space on demand. In the world’s “richest” countries, hospitals are overrun and patients forced to die in the hallways. It is the height of capitalist irrationality that Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, which serves the impoverished working class on the city’s South Side, is slated for closure in the coming months because it cannot turn a profit in the midst of the pandemic.

The possibility of a vaccine further shows that the technological and logistical resources of corporations like Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla must be reallocated to ensure the rapid mass production and dissemination of safe vaccines to all corners of the world, including the most impoverished and difficult to reach.

Accomplishing these urgent tasks requires the mobilization of the working class internationally in a full-frontal attack on the wealth of the world aristocracy. Saving lives requires putting an end to the capitalist system and breaking the stranglehold that the capitalist class operates over all aspects of social and political life.

Mass farmer protest rattles India’s far-right BJP government

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

An agitation by farmers demanding the repeal of recently adopted agrarian “reform” legislation has become a major political crisis for India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Tens of thousands of farmers who police had blocked from entering the Delhi National Capital Territory and bringing their demands to the seat of India’s government late last week have been encamped at Delhi’s borders for the past six days. Their tractors and trucks are blocking several major roads into Delhi from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, and the farmers have vowed to remain until their demands are met.

The farmers are protesting three laws that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP rushed through parliament in September, at the same time as they were attacking workers’ right to strike and gutting restrictions on plant closures and mass layoffs. Long demanded by big business, the IMF and World Bank, the BJP’s agrarian “reform” laws are aimed at strengthening the power of agri-business at the expense of farmers and consumers. They promote contract farming, undermine the government-regulated system of agricultural markets (known as mandis ), and will open the door, farmers fear, to abolishing the Minimum Support Price for certain basic commodities.

The farmers are also demanding the government abandon its proposed Electricity Bill 2020, which would eliminate or greatly reduce subsidized power rates for farmers.

The Narendra Modi-led national government orchestrated a massive security operation last week to prevent the farmers from bringing their protest to India’s capital and largest city and, if possible, from ever reaching Delhi’s borders.

The BJP state government of Uttar Pradesh and the nearby BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh deployed paramilitary forces to block convoys of protesting farmers from approaching the capital. In Haryana, which borders Delhi to the south, west, and north, the BJP-led government was even more aggressive. Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar ordered the state’s border with Punjab, one of the principal centres of the protest movement, sealed as of Nov. 25, and invoked Section 144 of the Criminal Code under which all gatherings of more than four people are illegal. Several dozen leaders of farm organizations were taken into “preventive custody” and police were mobilized throughout Haryana to block farmers from traversing the state.

Nevertheless, by Friday, the day that the “Delhi Chalo” (Let us go to Delhi) mobilization was to converge on the capital, tens of thousands of farmers from Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand had reached Delhi’s border near Tigri in the south and Singhu in the north. There they were met by barricades of barbed wire and sand-laden trucks, tear gas and water cannon.

The authorities succeeded in preventing the protest from reaching Delhi. However, their actions have only served to anger the farmers and muster sympathy for them among broad sections of working people across India. According to media reports, the numbers camped at Delhi’s borders have grown to well in excess of 100,000 people. At one border point, the line of protesters reportedly stretches for 30 kilometres (19 miles).

The head of a farmers’ union in Uttar Pradesh who intends to join the agitation later this week told CNN, "We are trying to be wary of COVID but we don't have an option. It is a question of life and death. We are the ones who have provided food, milk, vegetables when the whole country was in lockdown. It is the government who has put us at risk by introducing these laws during COVID."

The Modi government has clearly been rattled by the militancy and determination of the farmers. BJP representatives have oscillated between suggesting that the farmers have been duped by the opposition or are led by treasonous elements. Last week, Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP’s IT cell, sought to whip up communal animosity against the protesting farmers, many of whom are Punjabi Sikhs, when he blamed the agitation on Maoists and “Khalsitanis.” The latter is a reference to the reactionary movement to create a separate Sikh state, Khalistan, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Indian state during the 1970s and 1980s.

Initially the government refused to meet with leaders of the Delhi Chalo protest, which is supported by more than 500 kisan sabhas (peasant unions) and other farm organizations, until the agitation was called off. Later it made talks conditional on the farmers agreeing to move to a large field and fair ground in north Delhi, the Nirankari Samagan Ground. Some accepted the government’s offer. But the vast majority of farmers have refused, arguing that relocating their protest to a field far from the heart of Delhi and where they will be surrounded by security forces would be akin to agreeing to their jailing or kettling.

The government’s greatest fear is that the farmers’ protest will serve to fan growing social opposition within the working class.

The launch of the Delhi Chalo was timed to coincide with the Nov. 26 one-day general strike called by the country’s major central labour federation and supported by numerous independent unions. Tens of millions of workers walked off the job across India to demand the scrapping of the BJP’s “labour” and “agrarian” reforms, a halt to privatisation, and emergency financial support for the hundreds of millions whose meagre incomes have been slashed as a result of the government’s ruinous handling of the pandemic.

On Sunday evening, Home Minister Amit Shah met with Agriculture Minster Narendra Singh Tomar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to discuss the crisis. Rajnath Singh’s involvement underscores that the BJP government is preparing to deploy the military and, if need be, use lethal violence to suppress the farmer agitation.

But the BJP recognizes such action could backfire, serving to set India ablaze, and thus is now maneuvering to find “a political solution” to the crisis.

Yesterday, Tomar and the Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Pyush Goyal held talks with protest leaders, and a further round of talks has been scheduled for Thursday.

On the government’s part, the talks are a charade. Big business is adamant that no substantive changes be made to the “reform bills,” and Modi and his chief henchman, Amit Shah, are keenly aware that any retreat would derail their drive to restore the profitability of Indian capitalism through a promised “quantum jump” in “pro-investor” reforms. On Sunday, Modi used his monthly radio address to once again sing the praises of the farm bills that the government rammed through parliament with virtually no debate in September.

The government will use the offer of further talks, perhaps a handful of cosmetic concessions, and veiled threats of repression to try to prevail on the protest leaders to call off the agitation.

It will also seek to exploit the class and political cleavages within the farmer movement and among the rural masses. Many marginal farmers who eke out a livelihood on tiny plots of land are supporting the protest movement. But it is politically led by prosperous farmers with close connections to sections of the political establishment. Moreover, the farm agitation fails to address the crying social needs of the landless peasants and agricultural workers, who constitute the majority and most oppressed section of the rural masses.

Last but not least, the Hindu supremacist BJP will rely on its ruling class political opponents, whom it routinely vilifies as “anti-national,” to help bring the agitation to an end.

All the major opposition parties are claiming to support the agitation for the repeal of the farm bill, and the Congress Party state governments in Punjab and Rajasthan encouraged the Delhi Chalo movement. But the Congress Party, true to its historic role as the premier party of the Indian bourgeois, is now pressing the farm leaders to wind down their agitation.

The Congress Chief Minister in Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh, urged the farmers to accept the government’s “offer” to relocate their protest to the fair ground and hold talks. He is now claiming that the farmers have “already won half the battle” because they have brought “the Union government to the negotiating table.”