Modi launches mass repression against two-month-long farmer agitation

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has seized upon the “violence” and “anarchy” that erupted in Delhi during a Jan. 26 Republic Day protest against its pro-agri-business laws to launch a long-prepared campaign to repress the farmers’ agitation through state intimidation and violence.

Representatives of different religions walk in a march in support of the ongoing farmers' protest, in Kolkata, India, Dec. 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

This campaign is being spearheaded by the Delhi Police—which are under the direct authority of Home Minister Amit Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chief henchman—and the BJP state government in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh (UP). The latter is led by Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu high priest, ardent Hindu supremacist and political thug.

On Thursday, UP Chief Minister Adityanath ordered district authorities and police to forcibly end all farmer dharna (sit-down protests) in India’s most populous state. Even before this, on Wednesday night, police had brutally attacked a group of farmers while they were sleeping and destroyed the encampment they had maintained since Dec. 19 at Baduat on the Delhi-Saharanpur national highway.

On Thursday evening, police attempted to evict farmers from the much larger protest site on the Delhi-UP border at Ghazaipur. Backed by a massive deployment of security forces and an order under Section 144 of the Criminal Code banning all gatherings of more than four people, the authorities demanded the protesting farmers evacuate their site. This they refused to do, despite a government-ordered cut-off of the protesters’ electricity and water supply, resulting in a tense stand-off.

Indian security forces, who are notorious for their brutality, are no doubt waiting for further reinforcements and, most importantly, a direct order from the Modi government to mount an all-out assault. Such action would invariably result in a bloody clash, with potentially explosive political consequences.

According to media reports, farmers flocked to the Ghazaipur encampment yesterday in response to a vow to defy the BJP government’s evacuation order that has since gone viral from Bharat Kisan (Indian Peasant) Union leader Rakesh Tikait. “There is a conspiracy against us. I will not surrender even if the police fires bullets at us,” declared Tikait.

The Delhi Police have issued First Information Reports (thereby opening criminal investigations) that identify 37 farmer protest leaders as implicated in the violence that erupted during Tuesday’s tractor parade and march. Those named include Tikait, political scientist and former Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party leader Yogendra Yadav, environmental and social justice activist Medha Patkar, eight other Bharat Kisan Union leaders, and representatives of the umbrella group the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and other kisan sabhas (farm unions).

The FIRs claim that “the rioters/protesters and their leaders had a pre-planned objective” to defy the numerous restrictions police had imposed on the Republic Day protest, including that they strictly adhere to police-designated routes far from the city centre. This, the FIRs assert, led to numerous crimes include rioting, criminal conspiracy, and attempted murder.

Delhi Police Commissioner S. N. Shrivastava has said his force is using facial recognition technology and CCTV and video footage to identify those who engaged in rioting. “Those involved in the violence will not be spared and the farmer leaders will be questioned,” he declared.

Not only is the Delhi police, under the thumb of home Minister Shah; its ranks are rife with supporters of the government and its Hindu right allies. Delhi police savagely attacked last winter’s mass protests against the government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, and stood by, and in some cases participated in, the three days of anti-Muslim violence that convulsed north-east Delhi in late Feb. 2020.

Yesterday, Delhi police facilitated a violent, BJP-instigated assault on farmers at their protest encampment at Singhu on the border between Haryana and the Delhi National Capital Territory.

Police had denied water trucks and journalists access to the Singhu protest site. But it was a different story when it came to pro-BJP goons, who were armed with stones and sticks, chanting their support for the police and demanding the farmers be expelled for “insulting” the national flag. Police allowed them to enter and set upon the farmers, then intervened with lathi charges and tear gas volleys to protect the goons.

“They are not locals, but hired goons,” 21-year-old farmer Harkirat Mann Beniwal, told The Tribune. “They were throwing stones, petrol bombs at us. They attempted to burn down our trolleys also. We are here to resist them. We won’t leave.”

As it did on Tuesday, the Haryana government cut off telecom, internet and SMS services in much of the state.

Underscoring that its campaign of repression has only begun, the BJP government used Friday’s opening of the budget session of India’s parliament to reiterate its commitment to the three pro-corporate farm “reform” laws it rushed into law last September, and to vilify the protesting farmers.

In an address to a joint session of parliament, Indian President and BJP minion Ram Nath Kovind boasted that the farm laws provide “new facilities and rights to the farmers” and enjoy widespread support among them. In a barbed, lying reference to Tuesday’s events he declared, “The national flag and a holy day like Republic Day were insulted in the past few days.” This was followed with an admonishment to the farmers that oozed with hypocrisy and ruling class malice. “The Constitution,” intoned Kovind, “that provides us freedom of expression, is the same Constitution that teaches us that law and rules have to be followed seriously.”

Other BJP leaders, including Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy, have been even more menacing, denouncing the farmers for “sedition.”

The government responded to the launch of the farmers’ Delhi Chalo (Let’s go to Delhi) agitation on Nov. 26 with a massive show of force—including mass arrests, the invocation of Article 144 across Haryana and parts of UP, and widespread cellphone and internet service cuts—with the aim of smothering it from the outset. It was able to prevent opponents of its farm laws from reaching the capital. But it was thrown into political crisis when there was an outpouring of support from workers and toilers across India for the tens of thousands of farmers who, having defied the state security gauntlet, encamped themselves on Delhi’s borders.

In the ensuing two months, the BJP government maneuvered, hoping to split and wear down the farmers with endless rounds of negotiations in which they offered to make minor amendments to the three farms laws. At the same time, it sought to lay the groundwork for state violence by smearing the agitation as China- and Pakistan-supported and infiltrated by Sikh separatists, and by supporting public interest litigation petitions to have the protest declared illegal by the Supreme Court on the grounds it was impeding traffic.

Now Modi and Amit Shah have seized on Tuesday’s events to activate and legitimize their longstanding plans for state repression by painting the mass agitation against the government’s three pro-agribusiness laws as violent and illegitimate.

In this, the corporate media has been a key accomplice. It has promoted lurid claims of the farmers plunging Delhi into violence and anarchy on Republic Day.

Much about what happened on Tuesday remains unclear, but whatever violence did occur has been grossly exaggerated. Moreover, the actions of the police are being whitewashed: their provocative restrictions on the protest; the violence they visited on the farmers; and their conspicuous security lapses.

In an action that demonstrates the authorities’ nervousness in this regard, the BJP governments of UP and Madhya Pradesh have issued FIRs against six senior editors and journalists for their reporting on Tuesday’s violence, including of farmer claims that one protester lost control of his tractor and died because he was shot by police.

The government-police accusations against the 37 farm leaders are a transparent frame-up—a legal-political vendetta of the type for which the Hindu supremacist BJP is notorious.

The police-government attempt to implicate the farm leaders in violence turns reality on its head. The farm leaders bowed to all of the police’s demands concerning Tuesday’s protest, only to find that the authorities had taken numerous provocative steps, including barricading the prescribed march routes. They vehemently denounced the violence as soon as it erupted.

Moreover, throughout the agitation they have been at pains to describe it as “non-political” and have made no broader appeal for support by, for example, raising demands that address the specific needs of the agricultural workers and marginal farmers. They have thus made clear that in no way do they want to challenge the authority of the Modi government and its class war agenda, of which the farm laws are only a part.

A central element in the government campaign to smear the protest as “anti-national” is Tuesday’s mysterious appearance of a small number of protesters atop Delhi’s storied Red Fort, from which the prime minister delivers the annual independence address, and their raising of a farm union flag, as well as a Sikh religious pendant. Numerous observers have pointed out that a significant security detail is normally present at the Red Fort, and access to its roof barred by lock-and-key. Moreover, as the farm organizations have noted, the Punjabi actor who led the contingent that entered the Fort, Deep Sidhu, was until very recently publicly identified with the BJP.

While the anger of the farmers at having been forced to camp out for two months in inclement weather before being allowed to demonstrate in the capital was palpable, everything suggests that elements within the police, acting at the government’s orders, connived in the “breakdown” of “law and order” to provide the pretext for state repression.

Ominously, an increasingly important element in the BJP’s campaign to delegitimize the farmers’ protest is the stoking of anti-Sikh communal sentiment.

In what they said was a show of support for the farmers, sixteen opposition parties, led by the Congress Party, till recently the Indian ruling elite’s preferred party of government, and including the twin Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and the Communist Party of India—boycotted yesterday’s opening of the budget parliamentary session and presidential speech.

The CPM and CPI are working to harness the swelling mass opposition to Modi and his BJP to the Congress Party and various right-wing regional and capitalist parties, while confining the working class to the sidelines, so as to prevent it from intervening in the crisis as an independent political force, rallying the rural toilers behind it in the fight against the Modi government and Indian capitalism as a whole.

Brazilian Workers Party, pseudolefts use COVID-19 vaccination disputes to cover up herd immunity policy

Miguel Andrade

Barely 10 days after initiating its long-announced COVID-19 vaccinations program, Brazil is already facing shortages of vaccines, with local governments announcing the decision to delay the administering of the second dose in order to maximize the number of those covered by the first dose.

Vaccination delays have been recorded worldwide, exposing previous predictions by governments of a quick rollout as another attempt to lure the working class into accepting the herd immunity policies of the ruling class. In Brazil, delays have been blamed by congressional leaders and the corporate press almost exclusively on a retaliation by Chinese and Indian authorities against the pro-US diplomacy touted by the administration the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.

Cemetery workers carry the coffin of Bruno Correia, whose family said he died of COVID-19, to his gravesite at the Campo da Esperanca cemetery in the Taguatinga neighborhood of Brasilia, Brazil, July 17, 2020 (Credit: AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

The widely held assumption voiced by editorial boards is that both China and India, responsible for a vast portion of worldwide pharmaceutical products manufacturing, were deliberately delaying the shipment of vaccines and vaccine inputs for Brazil.

The shipment delays were known a day after the country’s drug regulatory agency, the Anvisa, gave emergency approval for two vaccines in an extraordinary meeting on Sunday, January 17, broadcast live by major cable news networks. Anvisa granted emergency use for two vaccines with scheduled production in Brazil attached to a technological transfer: the CoronaVac, a traditional inactivated virus vaccine designed by the China-based Sinovac Life Sciences, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

The CoronaVac was already in production in the state of São Paulo, being sponsored by local authorities, and was the first to be available in the country, with six million doses being shipped nationwide from São Paulo following the Anvisa meeting. However, on Monday, January 18, the federal Fiocruz laboratory responsible for the tests and production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine made public that its production was still awaiting supplies from China that should be already in its possession, according to the contract with the pharmaceutical company. Shortly thereafter, the São Paulo government declared that exports of ingredients for further CoronaVac production were also facing unexplained delays.

The Bolsonaro government immediately turned to India, led by the far-right Narendra Modi, seen as a key ally in the anti-China alliance sponsored by US imperialism and portrayed by the Brazilian government as a close ally of Bolsonaro himself. India, a major producer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, gave no immediate guarantee of rescuing the Bolsonaro administration, later shipping only two million doses to Brazil.

The Chinese shipments were cleared after the Chinese ambassador spoke on separate occasions with a host of authorities, including the House Speaker Rodrigo Maia and ministers tied to leading business sectors highly dependent on exports to China, such as Minister for Agriculture Tereza Cristina.

While no official source confirmed the retaliation by either India or China, a January 27 report by Afonso Benites in El País revealed that the toning down of criticism of Chinese 5G equipment suppliers, chiefly Huawei, by the Bolsonaro administration was one of the conditions for the clearance of the vaccine exports.

Huawei is widely expected to win major contracts for 5G infrastructure to be auctioned in Brazil later this year. However, it is facing a threat of a ban spearheaded by the Trump administration, based on the unsubstantiated assumption that its equipment was purposely vulnerable or even outright integrated into China’s spying infrastructure.

In the case of India, longtime Brazilian correspondent in Geneva Jamil Chade reported that Indian authorities explicitly blamed the worldwide vaccinations shortages on the position prevailing within imperialist governments and supported by Brazil in opposition to the abolition of intellectual property rights over vaccines, advanced by India.

The apparently quick resolution of the crisis, with the frenzied mobilization of what are deemed “moderate” and pragmatic elements within the Brazilian government and Congress, did not stop the leading conservative paper in the country, the Estado de S. Paulo, from calling for the first time for Bolsonaro’s impeachment. Two days later, it was followed by a positive nod to his removal by its main “progressive” rival, Folha de S. Paulo .

Both papers, which have repeatedly called for Bolsonaro’s resignation in favor of his vice president, reacted strongly to the crisis in their editorials. They reacted to Bolsonaro’s endorsement of the January 6 fascist coup in Washington D.C. with soporifics about the “checks and balances” of Brazilian democracy. They have found it unbearable that Bolsonaro has led Brazil into a diplomatic crisis with its main trading partner, China, without having a backup plan after being frustrated by his pro-US turn after Trump’s electoral defeat.

Estado de S. Paulo editorialized: “The most inept president in the nation’s history only hangs onto his office, which he was never up to, because there are not yet political circumstances for his constitutional removal.”

But the paper also made it clear that the Brazilian ruling class finds itself in a blind alley.

“These political circumstances depend chiefly on an understanding not regarding the many crimes against the office he has already committed, now more than enough for a robust impeachment trial, but regarding the project for the country that one intends to substitute for the angry populism of Bolsonaroism.”

Two days later, Folha editorialized in its typical spineless fashion: “For this paper, an impeachment trial is an extreme recourse, as well as slow and always traumatic. Unfortunately, there is no ignoring Bolsonaro’s indignant attitude, nor the almost 60 impeachment petitions already presented.”

On the same day, Estado struck a tone of urgency in its impeachment call with special focus on diplomatic relations, stating, “Jair Bolsonaro’s remaining in office makes impossible the recovery of the country’s image and resuming of positive and peaceful contacts with all nations.”

Last Thursday, in an unprecedented move exposing a widening crisis within the government, Vice President Hamilton Mourão said the government could fire Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo. A fanatical ultraright anti-Chinese Bolsonaro loyalist, he was commended by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo two days before the Washington putsch with a tweet reading: “There is no more freedom-loving FM than you. You, me, liberty. Game on.” Araújo’s head is viewed as the strongest signal that could be sent to Chinese authorities of a change of course by the Brazilian government.

In a further sign of the negotiations taking place in Congress, yesterday Mourão fired an aide who had leaked messages to the press in which he discussed with congressional aides the need to “be prepared” for an impeachment, implying the need to articulate support for a caretaker administration by the vice president.

Most significantly, the leading opposition party in Congress, the Workers Party (PT), immediately reacted to the opening rifts by attempting to solve the conflict laid out by Estado regarding the divisions that would follow Bolsonaro’s impeachment. The former chief of staff under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, José Dirceu, told the Poder360 website that “our task is to transform the impeachment into a popular movement,” that is, to provide a “democratic” cover for the backroom deals in Brasília and the right-wing forces vying for state power.

On Saturday, the PT-controlled unions organized small motorcades in 30 cities. In São Paulo, the rally was led by Guilherme Boulos of the pseudoleft Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), who led PSOL to an electoral breakthrough in the mayoral elections in São Paulo in 2020, placing second with 41 percent of the vote.

Attempting to give a left cover to the conflicts expressed by the corporate media, Boulos declared that “the day was coming” for Bolsonaro’s removal. On Sunday, the far-right movements, which had spearheaded demonstrations in 2015 and 2016 appealing to the military and even Donald Trump to “rescue” Brazil from the PT government, held their own rallies against Bolsonaro.

These rifts are emerging as the country records the highest rolling average of COVID-19 deaths since July of 1.055 deaths a day, along with more than 51,000 new cases a day. Brazil has already recorded over 221,000 COVID-19 deaths and 9.1 million cases, and trails only the United States in the number of dead.

The country is also on track to face its worst moment in the pandemic so far, as the north of the country faces a horrific collapse of its health care system, with patients dying for lack of oxygen in ICU units, and doctors reporting the need to administer morphine to those suffocating to alleviate their pain before death.

Brazil’s health minister, Gen. Eduardo Pazuello, was dispatched to the Amazonian capital of Manaus, the epicenter of the crisis, on Saturday, January 23. Just two days before, Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski authorized the Attorney General’s Office to investigate Pazuello for ignoring repeated warnings by state authorities that the city’s oxygen supplies were running low.

On Friday, Pazuello declared that no less than 1,500 patients would have to be flown out of the city of two million, which is cut off by land from the rest of the country by the Amazon jungle. The transfers are certain to spread the virus to the rest of the country as a newly identified strain of the virus, which shares many of the genetic characteristics with the English and South African variants, is believed to be more contagious than the original one.

Support for impeachment has grown to include a majority of the population for the first time since the height of the pandemic in May, without a doubt a reaction to the vaccination debacle and the government’s indifference towards the suffering in Manaus. But the pompous rhetoric about this debacle within ruling circles is just a cover for their fundamental unity around the policy of herd immunity.

All factions of the ruling class opposing Bolsonaro—as well as their petty-bourgeois acolytes such as Boulos, the PSOL and union leaders—claim their opposition is driven by Bolsonaro’s criminal and sadistic handling of the pandemic. Yet none of their representatives ever mentions the only urgent measure capable of avoiding the horrific tragedy unfolding in Brazil: a full shutdown of nonessential sectors of the economy, with full income compensation for workers and ruined small businesses.

Nothing makes such unity clearer than the corporatist demand by the PT-controlled São Paulo teachers union, the APEOESP, that teachers should be vaccinated before the reopening of schools scheduled for February 8. While the union feigns concern for teachers’ health, it does not oppose the essential objective of the reopening of schools, i.e., to facilitate a deadly reopening of the economy in the name of capitalist profits being hurt by limited closures still in place.

There is no single faction of the ruling class or the self-styled opposition and its supporters in the pseudoleft willing to raise that demand. The Morenoites of Esquerda Diário, who recently doubled down on their defense of quack cures for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, posted an editorial in response to the Brazilian political crisis entitled, “Against Bolsonaro and [São Paulo governor] Doria, let us fight for a universal vaccination.” It simply repeats, with radical-sounding phrases, the criticisms in the corporate press about the vaccination debacle without ever mentioning the shutdown of production.

Stopping the carnage of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the herd immunity policies of the ruling class requires the organization of workers into rank-and-file committees independent of the trade unions in a conscious struggle against the bankrupt and homicidal system that places profits above human lives.

Lethal crackdown on protests as Lebanon’s economy collapses amid pandemic surge

Jean Shaoul

Security forces used lethal force to disperse demonstrators in the northern port city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s poorest city. At least two people died, and hundreds were injured during several nights of riots.

Angry protests and clashes with security forces erupted Monday as workers, furious at the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, poured onto the streets of Tripoli and other cities around the country. A 24/7 curfew has worsened an already calamitous economic situation for working people.

The protests spread rapidly across the country, including the capital Beirut where protesters set fire to tyres near the parliament, and the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern towns of Jiyeh and Tyre. Demonstrators blocked major roads on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

The protests followed caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s January 14 announcement of a stringent round-the-clock nationwide curfew in a desperate attempt to control a surge of COVID-19 cases. The country of nearly 6 million people has reported almost 300,000 infections and 2,680 deaths, widely assumed to be a gross underestimate given the lack of testing facilities.

Healthcare services, already inadequate, have collapsed, with severely understaffed hospitals unable to treat patients. At least three hospitals were destroyed in the August 4 explosion at Beirut port. Hundreds of medical staff have emigrated, while those who remain are getting reduced salaries that are often paid late. Volunteers are filling the gaps. Hospitals are running out of breathing devices and oxygen supplies. There are reports of patients queuing outside hospitals for hours until their families take them home again. Patients who are admitted must bring their own food and bedding, and many who need ventilators are unable to get connected.

The explosion that hit the Beirut port, Wednesday August 5, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Bilal Hussein]

The lockdown was implemented without any economic support under conditions where at least 55 percent of the population are living in poverty and 25 percent in extreme poverty following the country’s economic and financial collapse and the pandemic restrictions. Last year, the economy contracted by 19 percent. As the Lebanese pound lost 80 percent of its value, causing the price of medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and imported foods to soar, the banks prevented small depositors from accessing their savings, even as their value plummeted.

Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs—the unemployment rate is now 30 percent—while thousands of street traders and day labourers have lost their livelihoods. People are dependent upon remittances—accounting for a massive 36 percent of GDP—from family abroad, mainly in the Gulf States, which fell by more than 6 percent last year.

France24 reported that angry crowds gathered outside the homes of some of Lebanon’s top politicians in Tripoli on Thursday, torching rubbish and smashing surveillance cameras. Omar Qarhani, an unemployed father of six, said, “We want to burn down all their houses the way they burned our hearts. Let any politician dare to walk on the streets of Tripoli.” He said that the city’s politicians had done almost nothing to help, adding “They have shamed this city.”

Following a partial lockdown earlier in the month enforced via hundreds of police checkpoints and thousands of fines, the 24 hour curfew has now been extended to February 8. No one is allowed out, even to buy food or essential medical supplies. People are dependent on home deliveries by the grocery stores, a service not widely available, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods.

The Lebanese Health Ministry’s first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine is not expected to arrive before the end of next month and at best will only vaccinate one fifth of the population of nearly seven million.

This latest crackdown on protesters coincides with the publication of a report by the London-based human rights group Amnesty International, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Essex in the UK, that calls on France, the former colonial power, to halt weapons sales to Lebanon. It says that a range of French-manufactured rubber bullets, pepper sprays, tear gas grenades—some even of military grade—and launchers had played a “shameful” role in suppressing peaceful demonstrations in the country between 2015 and 2020.

Amnesty accused Lebanon’s security forces of firing tear gas canisters directly at protesters and shooting rubber bullets at chest-level during anti-government protests between October 2019 and August 2020, leading to serious injuries to the head, eyes and upper body.

Lebanon’s economic crisis is rooted in decades of corruption and looting by the ruling elite that has created one of the world’s most heavily indebted countries, with a sovereign debt equal to 170 percent of GDP, owed in the main to Lebanese banks owned by leading Sunni and Christian politicians.

In October 2019, mass protests against poverty and the government’s rampant corruption and mismanagement of the economy swept the country, forcing billionaire Sa’ad Hariri’s coalition government to resign. Diab, an engineering professor, was chosen by President Michel Aoun to head a “technocratic” and “independent” government in January 2020. His government had the support of Hezbollah—the largest parliamentary bloc—President Aoun’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement, and the Shi’ite Amal Movement led by Nabih Berri, the parliament’s speaker.

The Christian and Sunni oligarchs allied with Hariri’s Future Movement were bitterly opposed to the government and it suited them to obstruct its work at every turn and blame Diab and Hezbollah for the economic crisis, the country’s default on its sovereign debt and their failure to carry out any measures to alleviate poverty and social distress.

The lockdown measures to deal with the pandemic, while compounding the misery and stoking the widespread anger against the political elite, served briefly to disperse the protest movement.

However, last August’s massive explosion at Beirut port that killed more than 200 people and caused about $4.6 billion of damage to buildings and infrastructure, deepened the economic and political crisis. The disaster was the result of the criminal neglect and callous indifference displayed by successive governments and the ruling elite, which for years ignored repeated warnings about the dangers of storing ammonium nitrate without proper safety controls near residential areas.

Diab resigned in the wake of the explosion as it became clear that his government would be forced to bear full responsibility. French President Emmanuel Macron sought to intervene and restore the direct rule of the plutocracy via a Hariri-led government in the service of imperialism, and limit or eradicate the influence of Hezbollah. The bourgeois-clerical party, which is backed by Iran, has played a key role in supporting the Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad against the Gulf monarchs, Turkey and Washington’s efforts to engineer regime change via their Islamist proxies, as part of the US’s broader campaign to overturn the Iranian government.

Months later, Hariri has still been unable to form a government in alliance with the fascistic Lebanese Forces led by former militia leader Samir Geagea, and the Druze-based Progressive Socialist Party of Walid Jumblatt, leaving Diab in a caretaker role.

Hariri is waiting to see whether the new administration in Washington will lift the Trump administration’s conditions that precluded any Hezbollah appointees in his coalition—thereby preventing him from forming a government—as part of President Joe Biden’s supposed desire to resume negotiations with Iran.

It is impossible for workers, whose demands for economic security and social equality are diametrically opposed to the interests of all factions of Lebanon’s kleptocracy, to resolve the crisis they face without a direct challenge to capitalism and its state apparatus. It needs an international perspective that focuses on building a political leadership to unify the working class across sectarian, ethnic, and national divisions—not just within Lebanon’s borders but throughout the region—in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

NPA calls to reopen French universities as COVID-19 deaths mount

Samuel Tissot & Alex Lantier

Last week the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste’s (NPA) youth wing published a statement on the NPA’s Révolution Permanente web site demanding the immediate reopening of universities. Titled “Student misery, emergency: we need funding to be able to reopen universities,” the statement aligns the NPA with President Emmanuel Macron’s “herd immunity” policy. It states:

“The closure of universities for several months must end. Students’ perennial isolation, the lack of social life except on Zoom plunge most of us into distress. What Covid has shown is that that lack of university funding is a structural problem that thus connects the reopening of schools to the need for mass personnel hiring, requisition of new infrastructure, the installation of a coherent health plan starting with free masks and testing centers in each institution. We should not wait for directives from a government who believes that opening windows is enough to keep schools open, we should collectively work out coherent health protocols with staff, teachers and students, as many secondary schools in the Paris region did in the autumn.”

Students leave their school in Cambo les Bains, southwest France, Thursday November 5, 2020 (AP Photo / Bob Edme)

The immediate consequence of what the NPA is proposing would be a surge of Covid-19 infections and deaths both among students and in the wider population. The reopening of schools in France has been a catastrophe: two-thirds of clusters occurred in schools and workplaces that Macron kept open in the autumn and winter. The result of this “herd immunity” policy, pursued across the EU, is that 200,000 Europeans contract COVID-19 each day, and 100,000 die every three weeks. Yesterday, 22,858 people contracted the virus and 513 died of it in France.

The danger, including specifically to students, is increased by the rapid spread of the more infectious B.1.1.7 (or “UK”) variant. According to Santé Publique France, 47 people under 30 have died of COVID-19 and a further 35 people in that age range are on ventilators in France. Testimony from nurses and doctors in the UK suggest that the new variant is deadlier among younger people than the previously dominant strains.

Universities have undoubtedly been starved of necessary resources over decades of austerity, but more personnel and funding will not make universities safe. Scientific studies have shown that even with proper protective equipment and social distancing, significant spread in educational settings is inevitable. Even if universities reopened with the best possible “additional measures,” they would still significantly accelerate the contagion.

The NPA’s claim that fighting COVID-19 means having a few more masks on hand echoes the lies of Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. Time and again, Blanquer has denied results of scientific studies and ignored mass outbreaks, telling parents and teachers that schools are safe. Many lives have already been lost as a result. The reopening of schools and workplaces after lock-downs were ended last spring, in France and EU-wide, led to dramatic resurgence of the virus.

The NPA’s attempt to justify its support for the Macron government’s “herd immunity” policy by citing students’ mental health reeks of cynicism and bad faith. On January 18, it published an article titled “New student suicide. The policy of the government is criminal!” This article tried to exploit the tragic suicides of two students, after results of first-semester exams were published, to justify the NPA’s murderous “herd immunity” policy:

“Both of them were studying medicine, and their deaths came at the same time as the first semester exam period, which is particularly elitist in this discipline. Effectively, increased selectiveness in recent years, and especially the economic crisis and the specter of mass unemployment have tended to intensify student unhappiness, as one sees from student distress expressed since the exams in January after the end of the holidays.”

The NPA concluded that “it is crucial to reopen the universities to end the enforced isolation of students.” Because the Macron government has imposed distance learning in the universities, the NPA asserted, “the government has blood on its hands.”

The government has blood on its hands, but not because of the few limited social distancing measures it has adopted. It is because Macron ended the spring lock-down prematurely and without preparing proper contract tracing, and then pursued an EU “herd immunity” policy. This has led to over 75,000 deaths in France, and 700,000 in Europe. While scientists and doctors tried to halt the pandemic by adopting stronger social distancing, Macron’s “herd immunity” policy could rely on the support of the NPA—which also has blood on its hands.

Relieving student stress and preventing suicides requires first and foremost ending the pandemic. This will eliminate students’ fears they will contract and die of COVID-19 and, by ending the current economic recession caused by the pandemic, make more jobs available to graduates. However, this requires first of all ending the murderous “herd immunity” policy advocated by both Macron and the NPA, which only spreads and prolongs the pandemic.

The fight to halt the pandemic requires the political mobilization of the working class and the youth in France, and across Europe and internationally. Independent committees of rank-and-file workers in workplaces, and students and staff in universities, are necessary to oversee security and fight for a scientifically-guided lock-down policy. However, for such bodies to be effective, they must be organized in opposition not only to capitalist governments like that of Macron, but to petty-bourgeois supporters of “herd immunity” like the NPA and the union bureaucracies.

Obtaining the resources to properly fund a safe lock-down, with every member of society receiving a full living wage, halt a post-lock-down resurgence of the virus, and rebuild the economy requires a revolutionary and socialist struggle to expropriate the financial aristocracy. The French and European ruling class has gorged itself on trillions of euros in public funds given to them by EU and European Central Bank bailouts. As 700,000 people died across Europe and tens of millions fell into poverty, the wealth of Europe’s billionaires skyrocketed.

Affluent petty-bourgeois layers of the union bureaucracy, academia and middle class professionals which the NPA represents stood to gain, however, from these bailouts. The CGT, CFDT, FO, CFTC, and UNSA union confederations issued a statement to “expressly welcome” the EU bailouts designed by Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2020. Indeed, they no doubt received their share of the billions of euros in bailout funding pouring through the coffers of corporate management and works council offices.

This underlies both the NPA’s support for “herd immunity” and its malign indifference to workers struggles against Macron’s pandemic policy. Indeed, the unions isolated teachers’ wildcat strikes in November, which were violently attacked by Macron’s riot police.

The course of the pandemic has vindicated the warnings of the Parti de l’égalité socialiste on the necessity of determined, scientifically-guided lock-down and social distancing measures, and on the petty-bourgeois and reactionary character of the NPA. The PES appeals to workers, students and youth in struggle to end the nightmare of the pandemic to support it against the NPA and its “herd immunity” policies.

Shadow ministry reshuffle underscores Australian Labor Party crisis

Mike Head

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese brought forward a reshuffle of his parliamentary frontbench on Thursday in a desperate bid to shore up his increasingly besieged position.

Anthony Albanese [Credit: @AlboMP, Twitter]

Every aspect of the manoeuvre pointed to a deepening political crisis, not just for his leadership but for Labor and its associated trade union apparatus as a whole, and for the entire capitalist establishment, which has long depended on Labor to contain working class discontent.

Above all, the moves against Albanese reveal concerns in ruling circles that Labor has failed to recover any ground since its May 2019 federal election debacle—its vote plunged to a near-record low of 33 percent, allowing the widely detested and unstable Liberal-National Coalition government to cling to office by a narrow three-seat majority.

The corporate media is currently doing its best to boost Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a political strongman. But there is nervousness that the worsening global COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, and the accompanying corporate offensive against workers’ jobs, wages and conditions, could trigger a social explosion that would threaten to erupt out of the control of the Labor and union machine, which has provided Morrison with bipartisan backing throughout the pandemic.

For the ruling class, it is necessary to maintain the Labor Party as a viable alternative governing party, in case the Coalition unravels in the face of such a development. It should be remembered that the media, including Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, initially backed the coming to office of previous Labor governments—that of Whitlam in 1972, Hawke in 1983 and Rudd in 2007—as a means of containing and stifling working class movements against Coalition governments.

Compounding the instability is the Biden administration’s rapid moves to escalate the US confrontation with Beijing. This will place Australia even more on the frontline of a potentially catastrophic and highly unpopular US economic and military conflict with China, Australian capitalism’s biggest single export market.

Albanese was compelled to announce the re-arrangement of his shadow ministry on Thursday, two days earlier than intended, because his opponents had leaked key details to the corporate media. That alone indicates his loss of grip over the faction-riddled party leadership.

Albanese’s changes were a transparent effort to both sideline his perceived leadership challengers and appeal for the support of big business and the Biden administration. He elevated party deputy leader Richard Marles—who is particularly close to Washington—from defence to take on a super portfolio focused on the “post-COVID-19 recovery” under the title of “national reconstruction,” with responsibility for employment relations.

That is, Marles will lead the deepening attack on workers, in close partnership with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), whose secretary Sally McManus was proclaimed by the Morrison government last year to be its BFF (“best friend forever”) for enforcing cuts to wages and conditions while billions of dollars were poured into the pockets of the corporate elite.

Marles’ promotion was intended also to undercut the standing of two mooted leadership contenders. Tanya Plibersek, who was deputy leader under the most recently failed party leader Bill Shorten from 2013 to 2019, had vocational training and skills stripped out of her education portfolio. Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers lost some responsibilities for Labor’s economic plans to Marles and was relegated to a lowly seventh on the shadow ministry list, despite having a leading portfolio.

In announcing his reshuffle, Albanese again sought to portray himself, and Labor, as the best placed to tighten the US alliance in partnership with Biden’s Democratic Party administration.

Albanese even compared himself personally with Biden, the Obama administration’s former vice-president, who supposedly defied critics to become his nation’s leader. Albanese said his new team would win the next election, regardless of reported internal concerns the party is on track to lose parliamentary seats under his leadership.

“I can think of a couple who told me it was absolutely certain, that Donald Trump would win re-election. Absolutely certain,” Albanese, a former deputy prime minister under Kevin Rudd in 2013, said. “But a bloke who was a former deputy leader and an experienced politician who had held a wide range of portfolios and who was underestimated by some is now president of the US. And I will be the leader of this country after the next election.”

These words were uttered as Biden and his cabinet continued to lay out a big business and militarist agenda, and appeal for bipartisan unity with the Republican Party, seeking to cover up the mounting evidence of its high-level participation in ex-President Trump’s fascist coup bid in the violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6.

Whether Albanese survives the plotting against him or is replaced by one of his rivals, the Labor and union leadership will pursue a similar agenda as Biden, rushing to fully reopen the economy and impose the burden of the ever-more disastrous global pandemic on the working class, while shoring up the political establishment, paving the way for further far-right agitation and mobilisations.

One of the main pretexts for the efforts to dump Albanese is his poor public opinion polling compared to Morrison. As always, media polls are being manipulated and exploited to achieve desired political results. But insofar as the polls provide a pale reflection of the continuing working class disaffection with Labor, the issue is not just Albanese. The Labor and union bureaucracy as a whole has propped up the Coalition government by suppressing all opposition to its measures to bail out the financial elite and restructure the economy at the expense of the working class.

Over the past year, Albanese’s line of “constructive” support for the Morrison government through the 2019-20 bushfire disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic has been Labor’s unanimous response. At the start of last year, Morrison was so loathed for his contemptuous response to the climate change-related bushfire crisis that he could not find people to shake his hand. Then the state and territory Labor government leaders joined hands with Morrison in a de facto coalition “national cabinet,” while the unions went into overdrive to isolate and suppress working class resistance, such as that of the locked-out Coles warehouse workers at Smeaton Grange in outer southwest Sydney.

That is not an aberration. Labor and the unions have played an equally repressive role for decades, especially since the ACTU Accords with the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s, which were the vehicles for destroying workers’ jobs and conditions, and breaking up rank-and-file organisations, such as workplace shop committees.

Another revealing aspect of Labor’s reshuffle relates to the global warming disaster threatening humanity. Having earlier refused to do so, Albanese removed Mark Butler from the climate portfolio and swapped Butler’s post with that of health spokesman Chris Bowen. As a former finance minister and treasurer from the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, Bowen has been assigned the task of presenting climate policy as an “economic opportunity.”

The truth is that none of Labor’s factions have any policies to avert climate change, because that requires a total socialist restructuring of economic life to take control out of the hands of the profit-driven and national-based financial oligarchies.

Again, in line with Biden, Albanese has been seeking to align with those sections of the corporate elite—now including major energy and auto companies—that are turning away from fossil fuels in order to boost their profits in supposedly “greener” industries, while strengthening their geo-strategic interests and derailing the opposition of working class and young people to their destructive activities.

One of the instigators of the moves against Albanese is Joel Fitzgibbon, who quit Labor’s frontbench last November to demand Butler’s axing from the climate portfolio. Fitzgibbon is championing the interests of the coal and gas companies that have significant operations in his Hunter Valley electorate, north of Sydney. He almost lost his seat in 2019, largely due to Labor’s lack of policies for workers, including coal miners, and fears doing so at the next election, which could be held later this year.

For now, Albanese and Bowen are refusing to commit to Fitzgibbon’s demand for Labor to endorse building a gas-fired electricity generator in the Hunter Valley. But Albanese tried to placate the fossil fuel interests by installing Madeline King as Labor’s resources and trade spokesperson. King is one of Labor’s most outspoken supporters of the coal industry.

In an editorial yesterday, Murdoch’s Australian cautiously welcomed Albanese’s effort “to restore unity” in Labor’s ranks, because “doing so would make the opposition more competitive and effective in holding the government to account in the interests of the nation.” However, it warned that “shuffling the deck chairs is not enough,” demanding even more explicit pro-business policies from Labor.

Trade war erupts over vaccine supplies between Europe and UK

Samuel Tissot & Will Morrow

With last night’s announcement by the European Union (EU) banning the export of vaccines to Northern Ireland, the nationalist conflict over access to vaccines has developed into a trade war between the EU and the UK.

Earlier this week, vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca informed the EU that it could not fulfill its pledge of 100 million vaccine doses by March. It expects to provide only 31 million doses in this period, with further delays expected for 200 million more on order. The company cited problems in production at its manufacturing site in Belgium.

The AstraZeneca Corporate HQ in Cambridge UK [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

In response, the EU demanded that a portion of the vaccines produced at two UK-based plants in Oxford and Staffordshire be reallocated to replace the shortages from the Belgian plant. The Johnson government dismissed the EU request for vaccines, and cited the fact that the UK agreement with AstraZeneca was signed three months earlier than the EU’s, arguing for “first come first serve.”

A frenzied nationalist campaign is underway in the British media and political establishment. Minister for Cabinet Office Michael Gove told Good Morning Britain that “the really important thing is making sure that our own [UK] vaccination program proceeds precisely as planned.”

Last night, the EU briefly announced a ban on vaccine exports to Northern Ireland, invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol. While exports to the country are not supposed to be subject to checks, the EU has claimed it could be used as a backdoor for exporting vaccines from the EU to UK. It stated the invoking of Article 16 was necessary to “avert serious societal difficulties due to a lack of supply threatening to disturb the orderly implementation of the vaccination campaigns in the member states.”

The EU withdrew the move late last night, however, after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson called EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to express his “grave concerns” over the attempt to block shipment of vaccines to Northern Ireland.

Earlier this week the EU Health Commission sent officials to the company’s Belgian plant after EU officials accused AstraZeneca of diverting vaccines destined for the European market to other parts of the world where it had agreed higher purchasing prices. On Thursday, the German health minister announced that AstraZeneca vaccine would not be used on over 65-years-olds, claiming this was due to concerns over the lack of older participants in the drug’s clinical trials.

AstraZeneca has claimed that its obligations to the EU in the deal were only an agreed “best effort” target. Earlier yesterday, the EU published a redacted version of the contract agreement with AstraZeneca. Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen stated that it was “crystal clear” that the company was contractually bound to deliver the doses.

The EU action has exposed the deep-going inter-imperialist conflicts between the major European powers that underlay Brexit and has only been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. The working class across the continent has nothing to gain from either side in this reactionary conflict. It has only laid bare the bankruptcy of an economic order based on the private ownership of the productive forces and the nationalist division of the world economy, and the inability and refusal of capitalist governments to organize the most essential program of vaccination and combat against a deadly pandemic.

It is now clear that the vaccine companies agreed to contracts for hundreds of millions of doses that were far too large for them to meet, as part of a cutthroat struggle to secure contracts worth billions. In December, Pfizer announced that it would be unable to meet its promised outlay of 12.5 million vaccines to the EU for the end of the year. It pledged to increase production in Europe, but announced that this would be subject to its ongoing private negotiations with five to six manufacturers.

AstraZeneca was likewise aware of production shortfalls in early January, but only informed its customers this week. On Friday, Moderna announced that its supplies to Italy would be 20 percent lower than agreed upon, with a similar shortage expected for France.

Several European countries have already announced delays in their vaccination programs, which were already proceeding in a chaotic and incompetent manner, due to a lack of supplies. Reuters revealed on Thursday that French officials have delayed vaccines for at least one month in three regions, including in the densely-populated Île-de-France region surrounding Paris.

Portugal has confirmed that its vaccination schedule will be moved back to at least April. German officials have predicted that their schedule will be pushed back at least two months.

The world’s working population depends upon the rapid and coordinated distribution of a vaccine. But these needs are entirely subordinate under capitalism to the profit interests of pharmaceutical giants and their hedge fund backers. The need for a rational, scientific plan for the global distribution of a vaccine is hampered by the nationalist struggle among the major powers over who will be able to vaccinate and restart its economy the most rapidly.

This has a particularly grotesque expression in this week’s revelation that South Africa is paying more than double the price per dose for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared to the EU, at €4.32 instead of €1.78 per dose. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Curevac have all charged wildly varying prices for the vaccine, depending on the country making the purchase, highlighting the extent of vaccine profiteering.

Last October, India and South Africa asked the World Trade Organization to waive patents on vaccines, so that they could be manufactured generically. The request was rejected by the EU, UK, and US.

Many of the world’s poorest countries do not expect to receive vaccinations until 2022 or 2023. The US has ordered 1.1 billion vaccine doses, almost double what is required to vaccinate the US population. The EU, UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia have also ordered more doses than needed to protect their populations.

The straitjacketing of global vaccinations is only one expression of the criminal character of capitalist governments’ criminal response to the coronavirus pandemic. It has not been conditioned by the desire to save as many lives as possible. Their overriding concern has been to protect the wealth of the financial elite, first through massive corporate bailouts beginning in March last year, then through their drive to keep schools and non-essential workplaces open, despite this poses to hundreds of thousands, to ensure that profits can continue to flow.

A scientific policy in response to the pandemic will only be secured through a unified movement of the working class on an international scale. The gigantic pharmaceutical corporations must be taken out of the hands of the financial speculators and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working class. Vaccine production and distribution must be coordinated and organized on a global scale, not subordinate to private profits or the interest of national capitalist elites, to ensure that the entire world’s population can be freely and rapidly vaccinated.

This must be combined with keeping the population safe until vaccines can be administered. This includes the closure of all non-essential workplaces and schools, and the provision of a high living wage to the entire population, including sufficient resources to all small businesses. The resources for such a policy exist; they are simply monopolised by a corporate and financial elite. The alternative is the struggle for socialism, and the organization of the economy on an international scale according to social need, rather than private profit. In Europe, this means the fight against all forms of nationalism, and the struggle by the working class for the United Socialist States of Europe.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg says company will “depoliticize” its News Feed

Kevin Reed

In a fourth quarter financial earnings call with investors on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media platform was preparing to implement measures to permanently depoliticize the Facebook News Feed of billions of users around the world each day.

Mark Zuckerberg giving keynote address at F8 2018 conference [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Zuckerberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO Dave Wehner also discussed during the call the fact that the company beat analysts’ predictions and increased revenue over last year by 33 percent between October and December, taking in $28.1 billion. A transcript of the call has been published online by The Motley Fool.

After reporting that Facebook has 2.6 billion daily active users and 200 million business users, he went on to review “communities” on the platform. He said that Facebook had helped users “find and participate in communities that are meaningful to them” and that 600 million people are “now members of a group on Facebook that they consider to be meaningful in their lives.”

Zuckerberg reported that the company had taken down more than one million groups during 2020 that “break our rules against things like violence or hate speech.” He then acknowledged that Facebook had also shut down groups “that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they don’t violate our policies,” and, for example, he said, “we stopped recommending civic and political groups in the U.S. ahead of the elections.”

He went on to say that Facebook had been working “for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities.” Zuckerberg then arrived at the crux of his point with the investors, saying, “Now, along these same lines, we’re also currently considering steps that we can take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. We’re still working through exactly the best ways to do this.”

As the World Socialist Web Site and its affiliated organizations, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth & Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are well aware, Facebook’s efforts to “turn down the temperature” and “reduce the amount of political content” are part of a broader campaign against socialist and left-wing ideas on its platform.

On January 23, the WSWS reported that Facebook had targeted left-wing and socialist pages, groups and users and deleted their accounts with no explanation. Among those who had their accounts terminated were leading members of the SEP and the page of London Bus Drivers Rank-and-File Committee which was set up with support from the SEP (UK).

On January 25, the WSWS reported that the page of the University of Michigan (U of M) chapter of the IYSSE had been terminated by Facebook, along with the user accounts of its administrators, including among them Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the IYSSE, and Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site, who are also members of the national leadership of the SEP.

A review of the work of the U of M IYSSE leading up to the elections holds clues as to why Facebook—along with its intelligence state advisors—would target the organization. First, the club was actively involved in the strike by the graduate student teachers at the university during the second week of September. The IYSSE fought in the course of the strike to unite the grad student-workers with the broader struggle of the working class.

In the middle of November, less than two weeks after the US presidential elections, the U of M IYSSE organized an online meeting entitled, “Trump’s electoral coup and the threat of dictatorship,” which Facebook blocked from being posted on its platform claiming that it “goes against our Community Standards.”

In response to this attack, the WSWS, SEP and IYSSE launched a global campaign to mobilize the working class to demand that Facebook reverse its actions. The campaign won widespread support internationally and forced Facebook to restore the IYSSE page and administrator accounts. Of course, the company claimed—in a statement to the Financial Times in Britain—that the shutdowns were the result of an “automation error.”

The report in the Financial Times included a statement from David North, the chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, who said, “Even though this particular ban has been [reversed], it’s a warning we don’t know what might come next.”

The statements from Mark Zuckerberg give an idea of what Facebook’s plans are. While the reports in the capitalist press focus exclusively on his remarks as a response to the right-wing assault on the US Capitol on January 6 and the role that social media played in enabling the fascistic organizers, none of them has pointed to the coordinated assault on the left that followed.

The Guardian, for example, referred to the antitrust probes in Washington and the lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 states accusing Facebook of abusive business practices as a means of the government forcing through policy changes at the number one social media monopoly. The Guardian said nothing of Facebook’s censorship of the left.

In its report on Zuckerberg’s comments, Politico refers to the impact of the Facebook depoliticization policy on “grassroots” movements that have relied on the platform to win supporters. Politico says that advocacy groups leaders fear that the policy change “will disadvantage organizers who help to usher new people into new movements, like the Trump-era women’s marches or Black Lives Matter protests.”

Among the first publishers to report on Zuckerberg’s conference call statement, the UK-based Independent, quoted the statement of US Senator Ed Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts) in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg calling Facebook groups “breeding grounds for hate, echo-chambers of misinformation, and venues for coordination of violence, including explicit planning for the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.”

Markey also pointed to an investigation by The Markup—a publisher focusing on data-driven journalism—that revealed that the pre-election claims by Facebook that it would stop recommending “political or social issue groups” turned out to be false and never occurred.