Sri Lankan president orders all state employees to commit to his election manifesto

Pani Wijesiriwardena

In an unprecedented move, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse on January 1 demanded all public employees swear allegiance to his “Vision of Prosperity” election program. The manifesto was used by Rajapakse and his ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) in the November 2019 presidential ballot and the August 2020 parliamentary elections.

Sri Lanka Health Minister Pavithra Vanniarachchi (in yellow saree) and staff taking oath. (Photo courtesy: wedabima.lk)

It is the first time since the formal independence of Sri Lanka 73 years ago that a Colombo government has compelled state employees to endorse a political manifesto. The blatantly anti-democratic move is another step by President Rajapakse towards autocratic rule backed by the military.

According to the pledge, all public officers must be “committed” to creation of a “disciplined, law-abiding, virtuous and healthy society.”

A January 3 editorial in the Sunday Times, which backed Rajapakse in the presidential election, noted that state officers had previously taken an oath to uphold the constitution and the public good. This year, however, they had to endorse and “implement the President’s election manifesto.”

The editorial likened Rajapakse’s demand to fascist German dictator Adolf Hitler, adding: “Students of modern history will recall another country where civil servants (state officers) were ordered to swear a similar oath of loyalty,” which then extended to ‘loyalty for the dictator.’”

These lines reflect nervousness in sections of the ruling elite that working people will see through Rajapakse’s dictatorial moves and, combined with Colombo’s escalating austerity measures, will provoke mass opposition.

President Rajapakse’s “New Year Message” on December 31 referenced his new demand on state workers. “No room should be left for the erosion of confidence people placed in the government,” he declared.

“If each and every public servant properly performs the duties and responsibilities entrusted to them, it is not a difficult task for the government to conquer any challenge it faced.”

In other words, public employees must assume responsibility for ensuring the government’s success. Under conditions where the Rajapakse regime plans to intensify the workload of all state employees, without any pay increase, this is an impossible task.

The president’s claim that his “Vision of Prosperity” is to serve the people is a sham.

Rajapakse came to power by exploiting the widespread popular discontent against the former administration of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and its austerity measures and attacks on democratic rights.

“Vision of Prosperity” consists of empty promises to alleviate poverty, solve unemployment and give concessions to farmers, while pledging “strong and stable” rule committed to “national defence.”

Over the past year Rajapakse’s regime has demonstrated its total commitment to big business and international investors even as COVID-19 has worsened the country’s economic crisis and foreign debt.

In November, his SLPP government passed the 20th Amendment to the constitution. This anti-democratic measure granted Sri Lanka’s executive president far-reaching autocratic powers, including the appointment of top state officials and higher court judges, the dissolution of parliament and the imposition of emergency bills.

These powers go beyond the 1978 constitution, which first introduced the country’s executive presidency to impose free market economic policies and IMF-dictated austerity.

On taking power, Rajapakse quickly began inserting retired and in-service generals to key government posts, including the appointment of retired Major General Kamal Gunaratne as defence secretary. When COVID-19 began infecting the country, Rajapakse used it as a pretext to put military officers in charge of key ministries and institutions such as ports, customs, health and foreign affairs ministries.

Over the past week Rajapakse has further bolstered the political role of the armed forces. On December 31, he promoted both Defense Secretary Gunaratne and Army Commander Shavendra Silva to the rank of general.

The president then appointed 25 senior military officers as coordinators for the country’s 25 districts supposedly to oversee operations against COVID-19. This task had previously been assigned to district administrative officers. The real purpose of these appointments is not to “coordinate” logistics related to the pandemic but to tighten the military’s grip over district administrations.

Several key divisions of the department of motor traffic and the Cooperative Wholesale Establishment (the state-run shopping chain for consumer goods) were also brought under the control of retired senior military officers.

As popular concerns rose about these measures—expressed in media comments and on social media platforms such as Facebook—Defence Secretary Gunaratne issued a statement.

The military was not taking over the motor traffic department, he declared, but would institute a temporary arrangement to print driving licenses. Gunaratne would not say, however, how long the “temporary arrangement” would last.

The militarisation of Rajapakse’s administration has nothing to do with combating COVID-19, but is the preparation to suppress the rising anti-government unrest among workers and the poor.

Striking Gardmore estate workers (WSWS Media)

Last month, Sri Lanka reported nearly 20,000 coronavirus infections, which is equal to the number of infections in the previous two months. As of yesterday, the total official national tally rose to over 46,000 and the number of deaths to 219. Many of these cases are from free trade zone workplaces and other factories, and in the tea plantations.

Yesterday, around 1,000 state health service workers held protests demanding proper health protection and the payment of outstanding wages and supplements. About 100 trainee teachers demonstrated outside the public education department demanding jobs for more than 3,000 trainees. About 1,000 workers at the Gartmore plantation remain on strike against the dismantling of the estate and the threatened axing of their jobs.

These struggles provide just a glimpse of the rising tide of social unrest developing across the country.

In line with its dictatorial preparations, the Rajapakse government is attempting to divide the Sri Lankan working class by whipping up Sinhala chauvinism against the Tamil and Muslim minorities.

According to Sri Lanka’s current health authority guidelines, all those killed by COVID-19 must be cremated. This has provoked opposition and protests by Muslims who want to observe their religious burial traditions.

The government has rejected these calls, despite the fact that both cremation and burials have been approved by the World Health Organization and renowned epidemiologists. Extremist Sinhala-Buddhist groups, who are backing the government, have been holding provocative counter demonstrations against Muslim protesters.

Opposition parties in Sri Lanka including Samagi Jana Balavegaya, the United National Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and Tamil National Alliance have not uttered a word against Rajapakse’s anti-democratic measures and his bolstering of the military’s power. The concern of these parties, which serve the same class interests as the current regime in Colombo, is what to do about the developing social unrest among workers and the poor.

Three Major Threats to Life on Earth That We Must Address in 2021

Noam Chomsky & Vijay Prashad

Large parts of the world—outside of China and a few other countries—face a runaway virus, which has not been stopped because of criminal incompetence by governments. That these governments in wealthy countries cynically set aside the basic scientific protocols released by the World Health Organization and by scientific organizations reveals their malicious practice. Anything less than focused attention to managing the virus by testing, contact tracing, and isolation—and if this does not suffice, then imposing a temporary lockdown—is foolhardy. It is equally distressing that these richer countries have pursued a policy of “vaccine nationalism” by stockpiling vaccine candidates rather than a policy for the creation of a “people’s vaccine.” For the sake of humanity, it would be prudent to suspend intellectual property rules and develop a procedure to create universal vaccines for all people.

Although the pandemic is the principal issue on all of our minds, other major issues threaten the longevity of our species and of our planet. These include:

Nuclear Annihilation

In January 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, too close for comfort. The clock, created two years after the first atomic weapons were developed in 1945, is evaluated annually by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, who decide whether to move the minute hand or keep it in place. By the time they set the clock again, it may well be closer to annihilation. Already limited arms control treaties are being shredded as the major powers sit on close to 13,500 nuclear weapons (more than 90 percent of which are held by Russia and the United States alone). The yield of these weapons could easily make this planet even more uninhabitable. The United States Navy has already deployed low-yield tactical W76-2 nuclear warheads. Immediate moves toward nuclear disarmament must be forced onto the world’s agenda. Hiroshima Day, commemorated each year on August 6, must become a more robust day of contemplation and protest.

Climate Catastrophe

A scientific paper published in 2018 came with a startling headline: “Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding.” The authors found that atolls from the Seychelles to the Marshall Islands are liable to vanish. A 2019 United Nations (UN) report estimated that 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Add to this the catastrophic wildfires and the severe bleaching of the coral reefs and it is clear that we no longer need to linger over clichés about one thing or another being a canary in the coal mine of climate catastrophe; the danger is not in the future, but in the present. It is essential for major powers—who utterly fail to shift from fossil fuels—to commit to the “common but differentiated responsibilities” approach established at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It is telling that countries such as Jamaica and Mongolia updated their climate plans to the UN before the end of 2020—as mandated by the Paris Agreement—even though these countries produce a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions. The funds that were committed to developing countries for their participation in the process have virtually dried up while external debt has ballooned. This shows a lack of basic seriousness from the “international community.”

Neoliberal Destruction of the Social Contract

Countries in North America and Europe have eviscerated their public function as the state has been turned over to the profiteers and civil society has been commodified by private foundations. This means that the avenues for social transformation in these parts of the world have been grotesquely hampered. Terrible social inequality is the result of the relative political weakness of the working class. It is this weakness that enables the billionaires to set policies that cause hunger rates to rise. Countries should not be judged by the words written in their constitutions but by their annual budgets; the U.S., for example, spends almost $1 trillion (if you add the estimated intelligence budget) on its war machine, while it spends a fraction of this on the public good (such as on health care, something evident during the pandemic). The foreign policies of Western countries seem to be well lubricated by arms deals: the United Arab Emirates and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel on the condition that they could purchase $23 billion and $1 billion worth of U.S.-made weapons, respectively. The rights of the Palestinians, the Sahrawi, and the Yemeni people did not factor into these deals. The use of illegal sanctions by the United States against 30 countries including Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela has become a normal part of life, even during the COVID-19 public health crisis. It is a failure of the political system when the populations in the capitalist bloc are unable to force their governments—which are in many ways democratic in name only—to take a global perspective regarding this emergency. Rising rates of hunger reveal that the struggle for survival is the horizon for billions of people on the planet (all this while China is able to eradicate absolute poverty and largely eliminate hunger).

Nuclear annihilation and extinction by climate catastrophe are twin threats to the planet. Meanwhile, for victims of the neoliberal assault that has plagued the past generation, the short-term problems of sustaining their mere existence displace fundamental questions about the fate of our children and grandchildren.

Global problems of this scale require global cooperation. Pressured by the Third World states in the 1960s, the major powers agreed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968, although they rejected the deeply important Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order of 1974. The balance of forces available to drive such a class agenda on the international stage is no longer there; political dynamics in the countries of the West, in particular, but also in the larger states of the developing world (such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa) are necessary to change the character of the governments. A robust internationalism is necessary to pay adequate and immediate attention to the perils of extinction: extinction by nuclear war, by climate catastrophe, and by social collapse. The tasks ahead are daunting, and they cannot be deferred.

Turkish government sets minimum wage at hunger level

Ozan Özgür

After the last meeting of the Minimum Wage Determination Commission in 2020, Family, Labor and Social Services Minister Zehra Zümrüt Selçuk announced the 2021 minimum wage, received by nearly ten million workers in Turkey. It is 2,825 Turkish liras (US$377) monthly—an increase of only 500 Turkish liras (US$67).

Amid the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, this minimum wage increase is far from compensating the decline in workers’ living standards. Throughout the pandemic, as workers and their families fell ill and often paid with their lives while forced back to work, they also face a severe social attack by the ruling class.

Turkey’s Minimum Wage Determination Commission meets each December to determine the next year’s minimum wage. The 15-member commission has 5 representatives from employers’ associations (TİSK), 5 from the largest trade union (Türk-İş), and 5 officials from the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Workers are packed like sardines in mass transport every day as they go work in unsafe conditions, but commission members held their meetings safely online.

A woman cooking on a gas fired sine (hot plate) in a restaurant. Cumalikizik Village, Turkey (image Credit Denis Jarvis/Flickr

These negotiations amount to political theatre whose participants play predetermined roles to strangle anger in the working class. State officials supposedly play “neutral” or “mediator” roles but actually work to boost the profitability and global competitiveness of major banks and corporations. Big business representatives work to make the working class poorer every year with overt or covert collaboration from union officials.

While a majority of the votes is sufficient for the decision, it has been taken unanimously four times in the last twenty years. Türk-İş union officials have voted against 14 times in this period, aiming to contain and divert opposition among workers.

After the last negotiations, amid explosive anger in the working class at the government’s response to the pandemic, Türk-İş had to oppose the wage increase offer, stating: “As the workers’ side, we expected an offer above 3,000 TL from the employers’ and government sides.” However, predictably, neither Türk-İş nor any other union confederations have called for strikes to enforce this demand during and after the negotiations.

Türk-İş representatives are happy to posture as opponents of the deal, knowing that it does not depend on their vote. In reality, they work to block the emergence of independent working class opposition by spreading the lie that the working class is also at the table. Union bureaucrats, whose interests and social conditions are integrated with the capitalist class and its state, fear a mass struggle of the working class as much as do the capitalists.

As a result of the social counter-revolution implemented for nearly four decades, nearly 10 million workers in Turkey—almost 50 percent of all wage laborers—have been condemned to a minimum wage that means misery. With the aid of pro-capitalist unions, the bourgeoisie consciously sought to transform the minimum wage into an average wage in Turkey. Over 40 years of capitalist globalization, it sought to turn the Turkish working class into a cheap labor force for unfettered exploitation by international and local investors.

The minimum wage has evolved in line with the proletarianization of Turkey and rising social inequality. The minimum wage was 3.4 percent above the national income per capita in 1978, when Turkey still had a large farming population, but has since fallen to 40 percent below it. At the same time, wages were relentlessly pressed down towards the minimum wage: while average monthly wage income was about twice the minimum wage in 2006, it fell to 1.41 times the minimum wage in 2019.

As a result of a policy aiming to keep Turkish wages competitive against low wages in East Asia, Turkey has the second-lowest minimum wage in Europe after Albania. The minimum wage for 2020 was only 2,374 TL (nearly US$ 310), close to minimum wage levels in China.

The minimum wage hovers around the hunger limit—the monthly food expenditure required for a family of four to have a healthy, balanced diet. For a family of four in November 2020 in Turkey, according to research conducted by Türk-İş itself, the hunger limit was 2,516 TL (US$ 335), and the poverty threshold for a family of four was 8,197 TL (US$ 1,092). The monthly “cost of living” for a single worker was 3,073 TL (US$ 409).

With the policies implemented by the Erdoğan government during the pandemic, wages have melted compared to the cost of living: millions of workers were left unemployed or sent to unpaid leave with an only 1,170 TL (US$ 156) for a month, and the general impoverishment of the working class has seen an unprecedented acceleration.

While billions are pumped into the ruling class through low-interest loans and stimulus packages in Turkey and internationally, this debt must be paid by the working class through increased exploitation and attacks on basic social rights.

The Erdoğan government, supported by the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), has extended the forced “unpaid leave” until July 2021 for hundreds of thousands or millions of workers. They now receive only TL 1,170 (US$156) monthly from the state unemployment fund. More than two million other workers have also been forced to take a short-time working allowance.

As workers are impoverished, the government has prioritized the profit interests of the financial oligarchy over lives and social needs. On December 21, the COVID-19 death toll in Turkey has reached 254, the highest level since March 11, when the virus was first detected in the country. During November and December, Turkey saw a massive 30,000 cases per day.

At the same time, however, a tiny elite made vast fortunes profiteering from the pandemic. The BIST 100 Index stock market has risen 75 percent since its lowest level on March 23 (842 points), closing on the last day of 2020 at 1,476 points, its historic peak. In the same period, as real unemployment in Turkey rose above 30 percent, the minimum wage, which corresponds to approximately US$ 385 in January 2020, has declined by around 20 percent against the US dollar.

In January-September 2020, the Koç corporate empire, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, increased its net profits for the period to 8.481 billion TL, a 94 percent increase over the same period of 2019. Profits surged at major companies and banks in Turkey, while thousands of workers including more than 300 health care workers lost their lives due to the homicidal “herd immunity” policy the government pursued to enrich the oligarchy.

Tragically, the generalization of social misery after the pandemic has also increased suicides among workers. Recently, a musician who became unemployed after the pandemic and could not benefit from any social aid committed suicide in Istanbul. A 45-year-old man hanged himself in the northern city of Samsun after writing “job” and “food” in his hands.

Labor Minister Selçuk’s response to questions over the recent suicides epitomized the callous indifference of the ruling class on the lives and livelihood of the workers. She declared: “Poverty, in particular extreme poverty is no longer a problem in Turkey.”

From the very beginning, the World Socialist Web Site has regarded the struggle against the pandemic not only as a medical issue, but also as a social and political struggle of the working class on a global scale against the capitalist system.

The way forward against the pandemic is the independent political intervention of the international working class against the homicidal policy of the ruling class. We call on all workers to organize rank-and-file safety committees independently of pro-capitalist trade unions and politically prepare an international general strike on a perspective of a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

COVID-19 deaths surge amid record new cases as Britain enters lockdown

Robert Stevens

Another 830 COVID-19 deaths were announced Tuesday, just hours before today’s national lockdown in Britain comes into operation. Daily cases hit a record of 60,916—the eighth successive day with over 50,000. In the 11 days since December 26, there were 6,035 Covid deaths and over half a million new cases (551,328).

At a Downing Street press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to acknowledge that more than 1.1 million people now had the virus in England. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty revealed that on September 10, due to the previous lockdown, only one in 900 people in England had the virus. By this week, one in 50 have it and one in 30 in London.

Whitty showed that infections were temporality stunted by the national “circuit breaker” lockdown between November 5 and December 2. But infections surged after it ended with the government allowing 24-hour shopping and travel everywhere to “Save Christmas”—and the profits of big business.

A new more contagious variant of COVID-19 was first detected in Kent in south-east England in September. The same herd immunity agenda allowed it to spread uncontrollably, with the economy fully reopened along with schools, colleges and universities that became major vectors of spread. The greater south-east area of England (London, South East and East)—covering a population of 15.7 million people, including a labour force of 8.1 million—is now an epicentre of the pandemic. According to the Office for National Statistics, the new variant may already be responsible for 60 percent of all new cases.

Mary Bousted speaking at the NEU Zoom meeting

Public health services are unable to cope, with Lincoln County Hospital the latest forced to declare a “critical situation”.

The new lockdown coming into effect today falls well short of that imposed in March last year. While instructing people to stay at home for the seven-week duration, much of the economy will remain open with Johnson insisting that people go to work if they cannot work at home. Non-essential retail, hospitality and personal care services will be closed, but restaurants are able to continue takeaway services and offer deliveries. Pubs can offer a takeaway food service, coffee and soft drinks. Hotels and holiday accommodation can remain open for a small number of guests.

Workers involved in cleaning and building work in other people’s houses are allowed to continue. Estate agents are permitted to work and property viewings can still take place.

Criminally, nurseries and early years providers offering 328,000 school-based places for children will remain open. In addition, there are 120,000 children in special educational needs (SEN) schools and a total of 270,000 children with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) qualifying them as vulnerable able to stay in school. There are tens of thousands of staff who support SEN children.

In-person tuition at colleges and universities is also able to continue for “practical courses” such as medicine, nursing, social work and education.

In the first lockdown, elite sports competition was ended, including Premier League soccer. The Premier League is being allowed to continue in this lockdown, despite reporting yesterday that 40 players and club staff tested positive for coronavirus over the past week.

With COVID-19 infections out of control and only a small fraction of the population vaccinated, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove revealed that the lockdown may still be in place during March.

The lockdown is being imposed in the absence of the necessary financial support for workers. According to the Bank of England, an estimated 5.5 million workers will require support under the government’s furlough scheme, which is scheduled to run until the end of April. The state covers only 80 percent of pay, up to a ceiling of £2,500 a month.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced further support totaling just £4.6 billion. This will enable around 600,000 retail, hospitality and leisure companies to access one-off “top-up grants” of up to £9,000 per location. A further £594 million “discretionary fund” will be available for councils to support businesses affected by the restrictions.

According to the Centre for Retail Research, nearly 180,000 retail jobs were lost in the UK in 2020. Even prior to the latest lockdown announcement, it predicted that 200,000 more retail jobs will be at risk this year.

Johnson finally imposed his partial lockdown out of fear of growing mass opposition to the escalating death toll. The decision was taken by the government’s “COVID-O” committee, based on advice from the highly secretive Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC). According to a statement by Health Secretary Matt Hancock in July, these two bodies have sidelined the government’s crisis committee Cobra and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in organising the response to the pandemic, meeting “two or three times a week” and then reporting to “Covid-S, which takes the strategic decisions and is chaired by the Prime Minister…”

On Monday, Johnson chaired a COVID-O session as the Joint Biosecurity Centre announced it would for the first time raise the “threat level” over Covid-19 to the highest level 5. In response, the UK’s four Chief Medical Officers, including Whitty, issued a statement of agreement with the Joint Biosecurity Centre “in the light of the most recent data…”

The Joint Biosecurity Centre was set up in May at a cost of £9 billion and is modelled on the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. It is overseen by spy chiefs and led by Clare Gardiner, the head of cyber resilience and strategy at the National Cyber Security Centre, part of UK's spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters).

Central to the concerns of the spies at JBC was the growing opposition among educators to being forced to work in unsafe schools. Yesterday, Public Health England reported that 26 percent of investigated Covid infection clusters—2,722 out of 10,000—were linked to nurseries, primaries, secondaries and universities in the 12 weeks to the end of December.

The government still intended that all primary schools nationally, except London, would reopen this week, with secondary schools to follow on January 18. The National Education Union (NEU) has worked alongside other education unions for months in collaboration with the government to keep schools open. Prior to the weekend, it was only asking for a two week delay to put a testing regime in place before schools reopened. But on Sunday, the NEU organised a Zoom call to discuss the crisis, which was attended by a massive 400,000 educators. The union noted that this was “The biggest political online meeting in UK history,” before noting, “The strength of feeling of our members is clear.” The sole aim of the NUE bureaucracy was to clamp down on growing militancy among its membership. Joint General secretary Mary Bousted said that the union was only advising its members not to work in unsafe buildings under relevant health and safety laws, and insisted, “This is emphatically not a strike. The union is not advising you to withdraw your labour. We have not held a ballot. We are not taking industrial action”.

The following morning many educators refused to turn up for work with schools closed in at least 29 counties, towns and cities.

Just hours later, Johnson announced the national lockdown. As always, he was assured of the backing of the Labour Party with Sir Keir Starmer declaring, “These measures are necessary and we support them.”

As was the case in March, it is only due to fear of an explosion of the class struggle that the government carries out even the most minimal measures to contain the virus. The sole aim of the Labour Party and the trade unions is to work alongside Johnson and the employers in preventing such an eruption of opposition.

Brazilian workers exposed to infections and death as meat-processing industry reaps record profits

Tomas Castanheira

Brazil entered the year 2021 surpassing the terrible milestone of 195,000 COVID-19 deaths. This death toll, exceeded only by the United States, is growing at a ferocious pace, with the highest number of deaths since mid-August being recorded on December 29, 1,224 in total.

Amid this spiral of deaths, workplaces and economic activities in general remain entirely open. A recent coronavirus outbreak in a meat-processing plant in Brazil’s southern region sounds the alarm over the serious dangers confronting the working class.

On December 19, a plant owned by Seara in Seberi, in the northern region of Rio Grande do Sul, received a court order to test all its employees after 127 of them tested positive for COVID-19. The facility employs 1,241 workers in total, all of whom have potentially been exposed to the virus.

A number of criminal conditions in the operation of the plant led to the mass infection of workers. Rio Grande do Sul’s Public Ministry of Labor (MPT-RS), which filed a lawsuit against the company, found: “[S]ymptomatic employees who continued working; absence of dismissals from work in 157 cases of outpatient care related to symptoms compatible with COVID-19, of which 19 were related to members of risk groups; dismissal orders for periods of less than 14 days in 43 cases, of which 32 remained less than 10 days away from work; increase in the rhythm and working hours, reaching shifts of more than 12 hours a day... .”

Workers at JBS meat processing plant in Rio Grande do Sul. (Credit: MPT)

Since November, the company summoned women up to 27 months pregnant to work. The MPT’s lawsuit states that two pregnant workers were seen in the company’s outpatient clinic, presenting symptoms of COVID-19, and were advised to continue working. The same occurred with workers with comorbidities such as obesity, hypertension and heart disease.

Workers treated by the municipal health care system, who were on medical leave waiting for the results of their COVID-19 exams, were harassed by the company, given “rapid tests” in their own homes, and forced to return to work if the result was negative. There were cases of workers who tested negative, returned to the factory, and then had infections confirmed in the RT-PCR test, “a serious conduct that propitiates the explosion of contamination in the facility,” the MPT noted.

These facts reveal in a sinister way how the company’s management consciously adopted a policy that leads to the systematic contamination of workers. This policy is not restricted, however, to the Seberi plant.

Referring to the functioning of the meat-packing industry as a whole, the MPT’s lawsuit observes: “Despite being an activity where hygiene is essential, the focus of these sanitary measures is on the product, and the way the work is developed in these companies exposes the workers to a risk of contagion considerably higher than in other activities: It has a large number of employees, who work remarkably closely, in closed, humid and air-conditioned environments, are transported by the defendant’s vehicles, in confinement over long distances and can crowd both at the beginning and end of the workday (and at rest stops).”

The meat-processing plants were responsible for spreading COVID-19 not only among their own workers, but throughout municipalities and entire regions of Brazil. In Rio Grande do Sul, which concentrates an important part of this industry, these impacts are striking.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to the MPT-RS prosecutor who filed the lawsuit against Seara, Priscila Dibi Schvarz, also a member of the MPT’s national project on meat industry working conditions. Schvarz said: “The first case in several cities of Rio Grande do Sul was of meat industry workers, even before health professionals. We crossed the employment links in the sector with COVID-19 cases, and the relationship between workers in the sector and confirmed cases was very clear.

“Today we have 54 meat processing plants in the state with confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic. There are 10,448 cases [of infected workers] in total. There were 10 direct deaths and 11 secondary deaths.”

Even as several meat plants have adopted routine tests, recommended by the MPT, their results greatly underestimate the reality. “As in any activity, not all people are tested, it is a percentage,” said Schvarz. “We cannot know how many workers have already been exposed; but it is very likely that we do have this gap. Especially considering that when we did long-term serological surveys, the results were up to 10 times higher.”

The outbreak at the Seara’s plant in Seberi coincided with a new surge of COVID-19 cases in Rio Grande do Sul, which began in late November. On December 23, the state registered the highest number of cases and deaths in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic—6,362 new cases and 144 deaths.

The interrelationship between this new rise in infections and the activity of the meat industry is openly recognized by the Secretariat of Health of Rio Grande do Sul. In its December 16 epidemiological bulletin, it pointed out that the three regions with “higher rates of confirmed cases... also concentrate 71 percent of outbreaks occurring in meat-processing plants and dairy product factories.”

According to Schvarz, the JBS group, the largest meat-processing company in the world, and owner of Seara, is the most resistant to adopting the recommendations issued by MPT in late March. “We have already filed 29 public civil lawsuits [against meat-processing plants], 20 of which against the JBS-Seara group. Only then did companies like JBS conduct tests,” she said. A hundred other meat processing plants, on the other hand, have signed the so-called Adjustment of Conduct Terms (TAC).

The MPT’s declared objective with these TACs is not to interfere with capitalist production, but to ensure that it obeys certain operating standards. “At first, the sector understood that they were unfeasible measures,” said Schvarz, “but with the growth of cases, they began to be implemented in a more receptive manner... All these measures, which they said that would halt the production, had zero impact on productivity. On the contrary, the sector has hired many people.”

In order to not interfere with production, the measures tolerate practices that are eminently unsafe. At first, the TACs determined that workers should wear fabric masks, because appropriate face masks (of the PFF2 type) were lacking in Brazil.

The measures do not even require the closure of a facility in the case of confirmed infections among workers. “It depends, if there are a certain number of cases and the people were in activity, there may be a stoppage,” the prosecutor declared. “But when the system is well controlled in a company, it is not necessary to close it.”

Schvarz also noted that companies have complained to the MPT that “many workers end up getting tired [of the measures], and it is perceived that it generates an increase [of infections].” One can only imagine what it is like to maintain these strict measures while carrying one of the most arduous jobs, in conditions of intensification of production and under strenuous shifts of up to 12 hours.

Why, despite their recognized homicidal potential, are these plants being kept functioning under such conditions? The fundamental interests of two different social classes are here in irreconcilable conflict.

From the standpoint of the capitalists, the mass deaths of the working class represent no more than collateral damage in the massive generation of profits. According to the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), “[Brazil’s] agribusiness trade balance had a record trade surplus and exports from January to November 2020.” Celebrating a positive balance of US$ 81.9 billion, they highlight beef as the main export product after soybeans.

The JBS group, in particular, closed the third quarter of 2020 with a net profit 778.2 percent higher than that recorded in the same period in 2019. Its Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was up 35 percent, driven by the operations of JBS USA Pork, up 64.7 percent, and Seara, up 55.4 percent.

The socially destructive interests of this capitalist oligarchy find their most direct spokesperson in Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. On December 28, during a “charity event,” Bolsonaro attacked journalists for wearing face masks, saying: “Now it’s no use hiding from the virus, ...this virus will stay with us for all of our lives. We can’t stand lockdowns anymore, more restrictive measures that break up the economy.” There is a sinister parallel between this profoundly sociopathic declaration and the murderous policy adopted in meat processing plants like the one in Seberi.

The interests of the working class, on the other hand, find no expression in any official political force. The cowardly bourgeois opposition to Bolsonaro, led by the Workers Party (PT), is incapable of challenging the government’s central policy towards the pandemic, since it also insists that the social interest in preserving lives should not interfere with the capitalist economy.

In their first public statement in months, on December 17, the trade unions that claim to represent the meat industry workers, the CNTA and CONTAC, demanded that government prioritizes the vaccination of workers in the sector. Their main and only argument is that production in the meat plants cannot stop.

Covering up the social murder policy of the ruling class, the CNTA and CONTAC argue that “the food industries, during this period of pandemic, not only maintained their production, but also raised their productivity level,” criminally confusing the capitalist drive for increased profits with the “responsibility of guaranteeing food, for the maintenance of Brazilian food security.”

While a vaccination schedule is awaited, thousands of lives are being lost daily in Brazil. The situation demands emergency action by the working class:

•  Nonessential workplaces must be shut down;
  
  
• What production should be maintained must be decided by the workers themselves, based on the interests of society and not of individual accumulation;
  
  
• The conditions under which this production is carried out must maintain the full security of workers and their families;
  
  
• Safety protocols should be developed with the assistance of scientists and medical professionals and should be implemented under worker control.

To be implemented, these measures require that workers break from the control of the trade unions, establishing rank-and-file safety committees in meat-processing plants and every other workplace. The most fundamental task is the development of an independent political movement of the working class to put an end to capitalism and take the reins of society into its own hands.

Germany’s federal and state governments keep workplaces open despite surging COVID deaths

Marianne Arens

All serious virologists agree that to bring the pandemic under control, a complete Europe-wide lockdown is required to reduce infections to a fraction of their current level. But in spite of increasing deaths, political leaders remain unwilling to pursue this course. That was made clear by the conference between Germany’s federal and state governments yesterday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the minister presidents of Germany’s 16 states once again via video conference. The result was a mere continuation of the existing inadequate measures until the end of January, combined with a few new restrictions that can only be described as cosmetic.

These include the restriction of free movement to a 15-kilometre radius around one’s place of residency in regions with an incidence of over 200 infections per 100,000 inhabitants over the previous seven days. It is less than clear what such a measure will accomplish in large cities such as Berlin, Munich and Cologne.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, and French President Emmanuel Macron give a joint press conference after a bilateral meeting, at the German government's guest house Meseberg Castle in Gransee near Berlin, Germany, Monday, June 29 2020. The meeting takes place ahead of Germany's EU Council Presidency in the second half of 2020. (Hayoung Jeon, Pool via AP)

To ensure the uninterrupted flow of profits, workplaces and production sites will be allowed to continue operating. Only hotels, restaurants, shopping centres, certain service providers, museums and cultural institutions will remain closed.

Even the option of working from home depends on the good will of the employer. The official conference agreement states: “Employers are urgently requested to create generous opportunities to work from home so as to implement the principle ‘we stay at home’ nationwide.”

As a result, schools and childcare facilities will remain open. In order to keep production running, the large number of exemptions and emergency care offers in schools and childcare facilities will ensure that hundreds of thousands of teachers, children and young people are forced to attend in-person classes and take packed buses and trains to get there.

Classes began this week in the states of Berlin and Hamburg, which are governed by coalitions of the Social Democrats, Left Party and Greens, and Social Democrats and Greens, respectively. Even though infections are reaching record highs, education facilities are full.

In Hamburg, 700 infections were registered within 24 hours. Nonetheless, according to media reports, Hamburg day care centres were “comparatively well attended for the start of the new year.” Around one-third of day care-aged children and 20 percent of primary school children were present on Monday morning because their parents had to work.

In Berlin, the Senate informed parents in writing about emergency care options in day care centres and all but demanded that they send their children there. In its letter of 30 December, the Senate noted that it had not bothered to “compile specific lists of system-relevant occupations.” It continued: “We explicitly advise that avoiding a loss of earnings represents an extraordinary need for care.” In this way, parents and teachers are put under pressure to comply with the obligation to go to work.

Under these conditions, it comes as no surprise that teachers and childcare workers must be present in the education institutions each day, regardless of the coronavirus risk. Yet even nine months after the beginning of the pandemic, there is still a lack of FFP2 masks, air filtration devices, and mass rapid testing. The transition to online learning and smaller groups has also fallen well short of expectations, and there is a lack of equipment, technical expertise and teachers.

The sentence in the governments’ agreement according to which “childcare facilities and schools have the greatest significance for children’s education,” is being transformed into its opposite. Schools and day care centres are being turned into mere holding pens, drivers of the pandemic, and centres of death.

Germany’s education ministers already agreed on Monday that primary schools and childcare facilities should be the first to be opened fully, and that the so-called lockdown would not apply to older students in their final year. The chancellor’s meeting with the minister presidents confirmed this on Tuesday.

The governments are continuing to pursue a policy of death to protect the profits of big business and the banks, and justifying this with long-exposed lies, such as the claim that younger children are not infectious. In Baden-Württemberg, Education Minister Susanne Eisenmann (Christian Democratic Union--CDU) categorically demanded that primary schools and day care centres be open as of 11 January.

Amid all of this, coronavirus infections and deaths remain shockingly high. The Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s federal agency for infectious diseases, reported close to 11,900 new infections and a further 944 deaths on Tuesday. The holiday period, during which the figures were somewhat lower due to some local health agencies not reporting new infections and fewer tests being conducted, is definitively over. Daily deaths are close to 1,000, which is the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing every day.

More than 1,000 European scientists have signed the statement “Scientists demand a European strategy for a rapid and sustained reduction of COVID-19 cases,” which appeared in the Lancet medical journal on 18 December. They call for a strict and coordinated Europe-wide lockdown.

On Saturday, 2 January, DIVI President Uwe Jansens, Professor Melanie Brinkmann from the Helmholtz Centre for Research on Infectious Diseases in Braunschweig, and Viola Priesemann, the head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, elaborated on the statement in a webinar.

“We are not an island,” said Viola Priesemann in justifying the call for a “real reset.” It is urgently necessary to adopt Europe-wide coordinated measures against the pandemic. How high the numbers in one land are depends upon how high the figures are in all countries.”

As is evident from social media, these demands enjoy broad based support among the population.

According to Dr. Priesemann, one can talk about “low case numbers” only when there are around 10 infections per 100,000 inhabitants over a seven-day period. With significantly higher rates of infections, local health agencies lose control and are no longer able to trace all contacts, test their periphery, and send each new case into isolation. The virus then spreads unhindered and exponentially. And this leads to the mutations seen in Britain, which are now spreading all across Europe.

But the chancellor and heads of state governments totally ignored this. In their agreement from 5 January, they write that the goal is “to reduce the seven-day incidence to below 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants,” a goal that cannot be achieved without the full closure of all nonessential businesses, schools and childcare facilities.

The current incidences are two, three and in some areas 20 times greater than this target. The current seven-day incidence for Germany as a whole is 135 per 100,000; three-quarters of Germany’s 410 local districts have incidences of over 100, as the government itself acknowledges, and 70 have incidences above 200. The Vogtland district in Saxony has an incidence of 929 per 100,000 inhabitants, which means that over the past week, almost one percent of the population has been infected with the coronavirus.

Like every government across Europe, the Merkel government, together with the minister presidents and education ministers from the states, is ignoring all scientifically grounded advice and pursuing the murderous policy of mass infection.

This is shown in the policy for vaccinations. The government boasts in the agreement, “With the mobilisation of all the forces of science and research, it has been possible to develop, test, and deploy vaccinations with good tolerability and high effectiveness in record time.” However, the vaccination strategy is a prime example of the government’s criminal neglect.

The vaccination programme began on 27 December, and the Robert Koch Institute reports that only 265,000 people were vaccinated during the first week, less than 40,000 per day. The vaccine is in short supply everywhere, and the large vaccine centres unveiled with great fanfare in halls, airports and sports centres cannot operate at full capacity. Many doctors and nurses who volunteered have complained that they have had nothing to do.

If an adequate supply of vaccines was available, it would be possible to immunise up to 60 percent of the population. However, it is already clear that the government failed to order enough vaccines. This is not only true of Germany, but of the entire European Union.

Even the government-aligned National Academy of Sciences, the “Leopoldina,” sharply criticised Merkel and federal Health Minister Jens Spahn. “Recently there were still official commemorations for the dead,” Leopoldina employee Frauke Zipp told Die Welt newspaper. “Now, apparently, every day that lives could be saved does not count.” If the vaccine strategy is to succeed, it must be implemented swiftly to ensure that new mutations of the virus do not undermine it, she added.

Trump intensifies coup plot as Congress meets to certify election results

Andre Damon

The United States Congress is meeting today to formally count the Electoral College votes in the 2020 US presidential elections. Under normal conditions, this process is a formality. Today’s vote, however, takes place under conditions of an active and ongoing effort by President Donald Trump to stage a coup d’état, nullify the results of the election and establish a presidential dictatorship.

Trump, with the active support of a majority of Republican House delegates and a substantial number of Republican Senators, is seeking to block the certification of the votes. He declared on Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence, who acts as president of the US Senate, “has the power to reject” electors. Such an act would be blatantly unconstitutional.

President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Speaking in Georgia on Monday, Trump declared, “They are not taking this White House. We are going to fight like hell.”

Outside of Congress, tens of thousands of Trump supporters are gathering in Washington D.C., led by neo-fascist and paramilitary organizations like the Proud Boys. On Tuesday, Trump lent his full support to the demonstrations and said he would speak at a rally in front of the White House Wednesday morning.

In the face of Trump’s active effort to overthrow the Constitution, the Democratic Party and its defenders are doing everything possible to conceal and downplay the threat posed by Trump’s actions. Their main concern is to avoid taking any action that might alarm the public and set into motion an oppositional movement that could get out of control.

On Monday, Biden called Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “whining and complaining.” He referred to a group of conspirators seeking to overthrow the constitutional order in the United States as “our opposition friends,” and he repeated his call for both sides to “unite” and “put the divisive politics behind us.”

More than just spinelessness and prostration, Biden’s remarks express a basic class reality. While they have differences, primarily centered on foreign policy, Trump and his Democratic opponents are, in the final analysis, representatives of the same capitalist class. As former president Barack Obama put it, the conflict is an “intramural scrimmage.” The Nation, the flagship publication of American left liberalism, with its historic association with Stalinism and Popular Front politics, exemplifies the Democratic Party’s efforts to lull the population to sleep.

Referring to Trump’s actions as “crazy,” The Nation declares categorically that Trump will not succeed in his coup attempt. “The good news is that Trump seems to have shot his bolt. He has enough juice left to create mayhem but not enough… to subvert the election.”

Another article in the Nation calls Trump’s actions a “clown coup” that is “doomed to failure.” It concludes, “Trump is diminishing in political power with every passing day and there is no need to make unrealistic claims about his ability to overturn the election.”

The Nation’s unshakable belief that everything in American politics will return to normal on January 20 is an expression of its faith in the impregnable nature of American capitalism. Inasmuch as it believes capitalism is invincible and invulnerable, it seems to them inconceivable that there is any need for the ruling class to even consider carrying out a coup d’état.

This is the voice of sclerotic American liberalism, without a program, whose only response to the crisis of capitalism is to stick its head in the sand and hope that everything goes back to the way it was.

Writing of the fascist street demonstrations that brought down the government of Édouard Daladier in 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote:

The French people for a long time thought that Fascism had nothing whatever to do with them. They had a republic in which all questions were dealt with by the sovereign people through the exercise of universal suffrage. But on February 6, 1934, several thousand Fascists and royalists, armed with revolvers, clubs and razors, imposed upon the country the reactionary government of Doumergue.

Now too, fascist violence and extraconstitutional coup plotting has become an objective factor in American politics.

Let us be blunt: Trump’s coup is not guaranteed to fail, and workers must take his threats with utmost seriousness. He remains president for two weeks and is determined to use all the powers at his disposal—enumerated and unenumerated—in his effort to cling to power.

While the Democrats pull their punches, Trump is not afraid to draw blood. He speaks for sections of the ruling class arguing for a preemptive counter-revolution amid the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s. He is warning the ruling class that time is running out: Either crush social opposition in the working class, or it will engulf you.

Anyone who believes that “it can’t happen here”—that the United States is immune from fascism and dictatorship—is blinding themselves to the reality of the crisis of American capitalism. It not only can happen here, but it is happening here.

The commentary within the official media and the likes of the Nation is marked above all by its superficiality, as though Trump’s actions were caused by his mood swings. But Trump does not just speak for himself. The very fact that he has already gone so far means that a substantial section of the financial oligarchy is prepared to break with the trappings of democracy.

Ultimately, January 20 is just a date. Even if Biden were to limp into office, Trump would remain a dominant political figure in the United States, and there are others waiting in the wings to take his place. It remains unclear whether Republican-controlled states will even recognize a Biden presidency.

This crisis is unfolding against the backdrop of the expanding pandemic, which has already killed more than 350,000 people in the United States alone. Hospitals throughout the country are at capacity, and Los Angeles County has instructed paramedics to begin rationing care.

In the face of this disaster, all sections of the ruling class have doubled down on their policy of “herd immunity,” demanding that businesses remain open in order to continue pumping out profits. Amidst mass death and social misery, Wall Street continues its relentless rise, along with the wealth of the financial oligarchy.

These homicidal policies reflect a social order so unequal that the most basic interests of the oppressed classes cannot be taken into consideration in creating policy. The decay and putrefaction of American democracy is ultimately the expression of the crisis and death agony of American capitalism. And Trump is only the most visible symptom of the disease.

In the fight to defend democratic rights, just like the fight to save lives in the pandemic, the remedy is the same: The power of the financial oligarchy must be crushed and overthrown by a mass movement of the working class fighting for the socialist transformation of society.