Right-wing US Supreme Court majority again exempts large religious gatherings from COVID-19 safety measures

John Burton

Late Friday night, the right-wing Supreme Court majority enjoined California from prohibiting indoor church services in “Tier 1” counties where coronavirus infection rates and COVID-19 deaths are highest. The fractured 6–3 ruling expands the exception from public health measures first carved out for religious services last November.

The ruling comes just as California hospitals are beginning to recover from the holiday surge that caused emergency rooms and intensive care units to overflow, along with morgues, throughout the state. If California were a nation, its nearly 45,000 COVID-19 deaths would rank 15th in the world.

In this Sunday, June 7, 2020, file photo, a hundred faithful sit while minding social distancing, listening to Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez celebrate Mass at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the first Mass held in English at the site since the re-opening of churches, in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Under the ruling, California can continue to bar large, prolonged indoor gatherings such as sporting events, lectures and political meetings, but must allow indoor religious services up to 25 percent of capacity. A prohibition against singing remains in place for the time being.

Based on scientific studies and the advice of public health and epidemiological experts, California implemented complex, evolving regulations to restrict activities based on relative risks of transmitting COVID-19 and the resulting toll on the health care system. Since August, all large indoor gatherings have been prohibited within the most at-risk regions. Anticipating “free exercise” challenges, California explicitly provided for unlimited attendance at outdoor religious services and deemed faith-based streaming services “essential.”

Nevertheless, a Pentecostal denomination headquartered in San Diego County challenged the regulations, claiming that the regulations prohibiting large indoor gatherings and singing violated the First Amendment when applied to religious services. After the lower courts upheld the state regulations, the Supreme Court declined the church’s request for an injunction last May, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the decisive vote in favor of the health measures over the dissent of right-wing Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Roberts wrote at the time, “Although California’s guidelines place restrictions on

places of worship,…similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular

gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time. And the Order exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

The same 5–4 majority upheld public health regulations against free exercise of religion challenges in several other states, including Nevada and Illinois.

After Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last September, the Trump administration rammed through right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett. No longer needing Roberts’s vote, the new majority issued a late-night order the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, ruling 5–4 that New York’s public health regulations “singled out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment” and violated the “minimum requirement of neutrality” under the Free Exercise Clause.

Aligned with the three remaining moderate associate justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Roberts dissented from the New York decision, writing, “It is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.”

A renewed challenge to the California regulations proved Roberts’s support of science to be short-lived. Voting with the majority last week to strike down California’s prohibition of large indoor gatherings, the chief justice showed no reticence in substituting his judgment for that of public health officials, explained his flip-flop: “The State’s present determination—that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero—appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”

Roberts’s argument is reductio ad absurdum. Of course, a few people can sit far apart in a cathedral without posing any health risk. His ruling, however, allows services with up to one-quarter of capacity in facilities that are not necessarily “cavernous.”

Barrett’s single-paragraph concurrence, joined by Kavanaugh, her first signed opinion as a justice of the Supreme Court, upheld the “prohibition on singing and chanting during indoor services,” but only because the church and its pastor did not meet “the burden of establishing their entitlement to relief from the singing ban.”

Gorsuch’s opinion, joined by Thomas and Alito, is replete with the rhetoric of the right-wing political commentators that provided cover for Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, complaining that public health officials “have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new bench-marks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.”

Basing his analysis on a paranoid, fabricated premise that California was “impermissibly targeting” religion, Gorsuch characterized the health regulations as a “demand that individual right give way to collective interests.”

“Of course we are not scientists,” Gorsuch continued, “but neither may we abandon the field when government officials with experts in tow seek to infringe a constitutionally protected liberty.”

After bashing science, Gorsuch aimed at another perennial right-wing target, “California’s powerful entertainment industry,” which supposedly benefits from “a State playing favorites during a pandemic…while denying similar largesse to its faithful.”

“But if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry,” Gorsuch wrote.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by the two remaining moderates, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court orders California to weaken its restrictions on public gatherings by making a special exception for worship services. The majority does so even though the State’s policies treat worship just as favorably as secular activities (including political assemblies) that, according to medical evidence, pose the same risk of COVID transmission,” she wrote.

“The State is desperately trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease,” Kagan continued. “It has concluded, based on essentially undisputed epidemiological findings, that congregating together indoors poses a special threat of contagion. So it has devised regulations to curb attendance at those assemblies and—in the worst times—to force them outdoors. Crucially, California has applied each of those rules equivalently to religious activities and to secular activities, including some with First Amendment protection of their own.”

Kagan concluded with an emotional appeal. “I fervently hope that the Court’s intervention will not worsen the Nation’s COVID crisis. But if this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State said in a statement that “The Supreme Court has misconstrued religious freedom to mean religious privilege and placed the health of the American people in jeopardy.”

San Diego County, the home of the plaintiff church, recently announced its youngest COVID-19 victim, a 10-year-old boy, along with its oldest, a 106-year-old man. The Supreme Court’s ruling will lead to many more such tragedies in the coming months.

Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations

Kevin Reed

The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being “depoliticized.”

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to “reduce the amount of political content in News Feed.” He said that Facebook was “continuing to fine-tune how this works” and “we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 11, 2018 (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating “community standards” in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to “turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities” would include “groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they don’t violate our policies.”

Zuckerberg’s remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with “content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear,” and for using algorithms that “undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.”

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebook’s decision before the 2020 elections to stop “recommending that users join political and social issue groups” and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused “a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users’ newsfeeds.”

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to “divisive conversation,” turning down “the temperature,” “fringe political beliefs” and “extremist users,” make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, “as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally.” He added, “Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.”

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street Journal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, “Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul.”

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the “Capitol riot” was the product of “hyper-partisanship,” the article goes on to say that the proliferation of “extremist groups” on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of “US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities” using platform tools to build large audiences. “Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but ‘Suburban Housewives Against Trump’ appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.”

Facebook’s reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

“Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize,” Karr said. “This isn’t rocket science.”

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policies—especially the response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist system—the source of the fascist menace—and for socialism on a world scale.

Mass layoffs in Germany as companies restructure in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

On Monday, the official COVID-19 death toll in Germany rose to 61,675 and the DAX share index hit a new record of 14,169 points. The parallel rise in death tolls and share prices shows that the pandemic is good for the big banks, hedge funds and corporations.

On the one hand, this is because federal and state governments are subordinating the health and lives of working people to the profit drive of corporations and their shareholders, pumping hundreds of billions of Euros into the economy to the benefit of the financial markets and the biggest corporations.

On the other hand, large companies are using the pandemic to implement long-planned rationalisation measures and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, while smaller companies receive no government support. Not a day goes by without a corporation or business announcing job cuts and the closure of plants and branches.

Protest against job cuts at the Daimler plant in Berlin-Marienfelde in November 2020 (WSWS photo)

Workers not only confront the corporations, but the trade unions and their workplace representatives. The unions maintain a huge apparatus whose sole focus is to guarantee the highest possible return on investment to corporate owners, no matter the cost to workers’ jobs and wages.

This is exemplified by IG Metall, which likes to call itself the largest single trade union in the world. While it still has about 2.2 million members, that is a fifth less than 20 years ago. This huge loss of membership under conditions of ever-greater attacks on workers speaks volumes about the character of the union—which functions as an arm of management, not a representative of workers.

Of the €591 million in membership fees that IG Metall collected last year, it spent just €25 million on things such as strike pay and legal protections, that is about four percent of total income. The largest part of the membership fee income, €216 million, went to pay the apparatus and the branch offices. The union has set aside another €89 million for “bad times”; this money “works” for the IGM in secret. It has spent €31 million on training sessions for its workplace representatives and functionaries.

While betraying workers the IG Metall will occasionally stage toothless noisy protests, signature campaigns and other appeals to those in power to cover up its sellouts. While it simulates a “struggle,” behind the scenes it is working out plans with the corporate tops on how to implement the attacks as smoothly as possible. So-called “social” plans destroy jobs through staff turnover, early retirement and partial retirement, forced severance pay and “transfer companies,” which just delay the inevitable trip to the dole office.

Hundreds of thousands of relatively well-paid jobs have been destroyed in this way over the last two decades. Those jobs that have been created are generally low-paid and offer little security of employment.

Now, taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, the corporations are ringing the bell for the next round of cutbacks. This is hardly reported at all in the media. One must search the business press and local papers to get an—albeit incomplete—overview. We have compiled some of the latest reports here.

 About 10,000 jobs are at risk among aviation industry suppliers, about 6,300 of them in northern Germany. This is the result of a survey conducted by IG Metall among works councils in mid-December. The companies report a pandemic-related drop in turnover of 45 percent in 2020 and see no improvement this year either. According to IG Metall, small and medium-sized companies often have less strength to survive the crisis.

 The IT company IBM is planning almost 1,000 redundancies in Germany. The reason cited is “maintaining competitiveness and a realignment of the organisation and skills.” In October last year, business daily Handelsblatt had reported that 2,300 jobs were to be cut in Germany. A month later, it said that in Europe, a total of 8,000 to 10,000 redundancies were planned. IBM is in negotiations with the trade union Verdi about “social plans,” that is the best way to impose the cuts.

 Deutsche Edelstahlwerke (DEW), which belongs to the Swiss Steel Group with sites in Witten, Krefeld, Siegen, Hagen and Hattingen, is threatening to close plants if workers do not agree to pay cuts. IG Metall has agreed on a “reconstruction collective agreement” to “save the crisis-stricken company,” which provides for 400 job cuts by 2024 and the elimination of holiday pay and half of the Christmas bonus this year and next. The steelworkers had already given up 40 percent of their Christmas bonus in 2020.

 The chemicals company BASF wants to cut about 2,000 jobs in its “Global Business Services” by 2022 to reduce costs. At the headquarters in Ludwigshafen, almost 600 workers are to lose their jobs. The cutbacks will begin next month. The IGBCE union supports this with the usual proviso that the cuts take place without “compulsory redundancies.”

 The industrial and automotive supplier Schaeffler announced last September that it would cut 4,400 jobs at 17 locations, mainly in Germany. Six plants are to be closed, many jobs relocated and parts of the company sold. The company wants to save 250 to 300 million euros annually from 2023. Last week, IG Metall and the works council presented management in Schweinfurt with a trade union “alternative concept” for the restructuring.

 According to IG Metall, the Bavarian company Lingl, which, among other things, equips brickworks, will lay off a third of its current 400 employees. This was agreed by the union after weeks of talks with the insolvency administrator and the works council. The dismissed workers will be moved to a “transfer company.” Forty of the affected workers will retire early.

 The Austrian Mayr-Melnhof Corporation, headquartered in Vienna, plans to close its small German site of R+S Stanzformen GmbH in Niederdorfelden, Hesse, with 80 workers losing their jobs at the end of March. On 31 January, about 90 workers at crane manufacturer Tadano in Zweibrücken were also given notice.

 Deutsche Bank wants to close one in five branches—100 of its 500 branches in Germany—this year. How many jobs this will cost has not yet been negotiated with service sector union Verdi.

 The perfumery chain Douglas is closing 500 of its 2,400 shops across Europe. About 2,500 will lose their jobs. Most of the affected shops are in Italy and Spain. In Germany, the country’s largest perfumery chain wants to close almost one in seven shops, which would mean about 60 of the more than 430 branches. About 600 of the 5,200 employees in the German shops will lose their jobs. Douglas boss Tina Müller blamed the shift to online retailing, from which, however, the chain is earning well. Despite the closed shops, sales only fell by 6.4 per cent to €3.2 billion. But profits plummeted, so now employees are paying for it with their jobs.

 The Swedish fashion chain Hennes & Mauritz (H & M) also wants to cut about 800 jobs in Germany alone. The priority is to lay off young mothers in the shops because the walk-in customers and main sales quotas are in the evenings and on Saturdays, when young mothers are less likely to be available. Also, more and more customers are switching to online retail.

 Siemens Energy only recently announced the reduction of 7,800 jobs. IG Metall supports the plans in the name of cost reduction and together with the board of directors and the works council has presented the “Future Agreement 2030” to ensure a smooth reduction of jobs. It has since become known that 700 of 3,700 jobs are to be lost in its Berlin gas turbine plant alone. The IGM had made numerous concessions in the years before, supposedly to secure the jobs at the location.

The WSWS had reported previously the loss of tens of thousands of jobs at Ford, Daimler, at the engineering company Heller, at Airbus, Commerzbank, MAN Truck & Bus and Adler fashion stores.

Tamil National People’s Front collaborates with allies of Sri Lankan regime

S. Jayanth

After two local councils’ proposed budgets were defeated in northern Sri Lanka, the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), a Tamil nationalist party, joined the pro-government Eelam People Democratic Party (EPDP) to take over in those councils on December 30, 2021.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which governed Jaffna Municipal Council and Nallur local government, was defeated in the vote on its 2021 budget proposals. After this, Manivannan, the TNPF national organizer who was sacked from the party, became mayor with the support of TNPF and EPDP municipal councilors.

Similarly, one of Manivannan’s supporters contested for the chairmanship of the Nallur local government and became council chairman with EPDP support. The TNPF and EPDP thus allied to oust two widely discredited TNA local governments. However, this was only as part of an effort to tie the working class and youth to reactionary political allies of the regime in Colombo.

EPDP leader Douglas Devananda is a minister in President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) government. The EPDP not only was a partner in several previous Colombo governments, but is notorious for being Colombo’s long-time partner in the communal 1983–2009 Sri Lankan civil war. It functioned as a paramilitary ally of the Sri Lankan and Indian militaries between 1987 and 1990, during the Indian intervention in the conflict.

Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam (Facebook)

The collaboration with the EPDP of the TNPF, led by Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, is another political exposure of the TNPF’s nationalist politics. This maneuver strengthens the government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, which is moving towards a military dictatorship.

To escape criticism, Ponnambalam cynically declared he would expel the 13 members who aligned with the EPDP and Manivannan in both local governments. This is rank hypocrisy, however. Though Ponnambalam has often denounced the EPDP as a “parasite group” in order to pretend that he pursues a separate policy, he has previously proposed alliance with EPDP to take over local councils.

The above events are another expression of the political bankruptcy of all the Tamil nationalist bourgeois parties and their move to the right. This has intensified the internal factional fights of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) that leads the TNA, and the TNPF, which postures as an alternative to the TNA.

Under the leadership of Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, the TNPF was formed by the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), which is made up of forces expelled from the TNA in 2010. The TNA, for its part, was formed to cooperate with US-backed attempts by a faction of the Colombo bourgeoisie, led by the United National Party, to organize peace talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the communal war.

After the Sri Lankan army massacred tens of thousands of Tamil civilians and crushed the LTTE in May 2009, the TNA, led by R. Sampanthan, sought an alliance with the Colombo establishment. In 2010, it supported presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka, who had commanded the offensive against the LTTE launched by Rajapakse in 2009.

The TNPF was formed by forces that feared the TNA would be politically discredited by its attempts to ally with parties who oversaw the communal massacre in 2009. Ponnambalam led the founding of the TNPF, trying to present it as the true defenders of bankrupt Tamil nationalism. There was, however, no fundamental political difference between the TNPF and the TNA. Like the separatist LTTE itself, both sought to secure the privileges of the Tamil bourgeoisie, by working out an alliance with the imperialist powers and the most powerful regional power, India.

Shortly after the TNPF was formed in 2010, Ponnambalam told the media that he was pursuing the TNA’s founding policies. “The founding principles of the TNA are the right to self-determination, sovereignty and the motherland. We are working hand in hand and friendly with India and the international community to achieve them,” he said, adding, “The international community is pressuring the Rajapakse government, and we should use it.”

The TNA was at the forefront of the Tamil nationalist parties in supporting US President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy. This extended up to the US-led regime change operation that ousted Rajapakse from power in the January 2015 presidential election and installed Maithripala Sirisena. The TNA became a leading defender of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe “good governance” government, emerging as an aid for Washington’s war drive against China.

The TNA was politically shattered, however, by the historic political crisis in the last presidential elections, that came amid an upsurge of strikes and protests by Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim workers and youth against austerity and police-state policies. The Sinhalese bourgeoisie’s traditional parties, the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, which had ruled the country since formal independence in 1947, collapsed.

The TNA backed United People Power candidate Sajith Premadasa, who sought a compromise with Gotabaya Rajapakse after the latter became president. Meeting with his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the TNA backed “herd immunity” policies in the pandemic.

The TNPF continues the TNA’s politics with at most a few tactical changes. In the 2015 elections, it called to abstain from voting for Sirisena—not because of US geopolitical strategy, but to posture as an opponent of the Colombo regime. Ponnambalam also called for an election boycott in the 2019 presidential election.

However, Ponnambalam and other Tamil nationalist parties are also aligned with the war strategy of the United States and its South Asian strategic partner, India, against China.

The crisis of these parties has erupted within the TNA, as factions led by Sumanthiran and Senathirajah blamed each other for the severe setbacks in the August general elections. In the 2015 election, the TNA received 515,963 votes or 4.62 percent of the country’s total vote, but it received only 327,168 or 2.8 percent in the last election. The number of seats won in 2015 dropped to 10 in 2019. Its sharp setback shows the growing discontent among Tamil workers and the poor with the TNA.

The ITAK, traditionally regarded as the Tamil bourgeoisie’s main party, and which led the TNA, has split over the past few years.

In the last election, though the Tamil People’s Alliance led by former Northern Provincial Council Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran and the TNPF each won one seat, they are still unpopular. These parties’ occasional statements about those killed during the war, the disappeared, political prisoners and the disasters caused by the war, are only cynical attempts to quell growing mass anger against the government.

As the crisis of global capitalism intensified with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tamil parties and the bourgeois parties in the south are exposed among workers and the poor.

Experience has shown time and again that the Tamil nationalist parties do not fight for the democratic rights of the Tamil people, but are conspiring with the capitalist regime in Colombo in the interests of the Tamil bourgeoisie, against the entire working class and poor of the island. In order to defend their privileges, they have turned themselves into outfits defending the global war strategy pursued by US imperialism.

In the context of the rapid spread of the coronavirus in Sri Lanka, the Tamil parties fully support the government’s move to force workers back to work and reopen schools to protect the profits of big business.

President Rajapakse’s regime is accelerating its efforts to suppress growing workers’ struggles, incite anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim violence and resort to military dictatorship. The government seeks to divide the working class along racial lines. Similarly, the Tamil parties’ nationalist propaganda only serves to divide workers in the north and east from their class brothers in the south.

Tamil workers, the poor and youth must reject Tamil nationalism and the bourgeois parties that promote Tamil nationalism. The abolition of racial discrimination against the Tamil people and the defense of their democratic rights is bound up with the struggle to overthrow of the pro-imperialist bourgeois regime and fight for socialism.

World Health Organization confirms natural origins of coronavirus

Bryan Dyne

On February 9, the World Health Organization confirmed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolved naturally, possibly in bats in southeast China, and passed to humans either directly or through another intermediary species. It ruled out the hypothesis that the virus had been made by humans and released into the wild.

These findings were presented in preliminary fashion at a press briefing which concluded the 12-day joint WHO-China mission to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. The mission, which included 17 medical experts from 10 countries, was a follow-up to the initial January 2020 investigation into the origins of the virus and provided more details about the path of transmission from animals to humans.

A worker wearing a hazardous materials suit takes the temperature of a passenger at the entrance to a subway station in Beijing, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The results were released at a critical stage of the pandemic. An average of more than 12,000 people are dying everyday worldwide, and a total of more than 2.34 million are now dead. There have been more than 107 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began in December 2019, and nearly 26 million people have known active infections. New, more infectious and deadly variants of the virus have spawned in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, all of which threaten a renewed surge of the deadly pandemic.

The team examined four ways for the virus to have emerged, including directly from wildlife to people, from wildlife to people through some number of intermediate hosts, from wildlife to people though food and from a laboratory.

“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research,” said Dr. Peter Embarek, a specialist in food safety and zoonotic diseases and the leader of the WHO delegation. He continued, “All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point toward a natural reservoir.”

Such natural reservoirs include local farms, where viruses jump from animal to animal, as well as the possibility of an origin in animals from another country in Southeast Asia.

The WHO-China mission also addressed concerns that the virus was circulating widely before it was detected, noting that there was “no indication” that the virus was circulating in broader parts of the world before being detected in Wuhan at the end of December 2019. At most, epidemiological teams led by Thea Fischer found that the virus had been circulating outside of the infamous Huanan wet markets, indicating more potential ways for the virus to have begun infecting humans.

Embarek also made clear that, “the findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population,” and that it would no longer be viewed as an avenue of study.

Such statements are a direct refutation of allegations first made by ruling circles in the United States and Europe last year, that the virus was made by Chinese authorities and that COVID-19 is a product of Chinese germ-warfare programs. The center of this campaign has been unfounded accusations that the virus was made and released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that the Chinese government concealed this fact while stockpiling medical supplies to whether the initial storm.

This was promoted most heavily by then-US President Donald Trump, who alluded that China was “knowingly responsible” for the pandemic. The media latched on to this narrative, with the Washington Post for example making the incendiary remark in an editorial that the coronavirus was “spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” breathlessly noting that researchers there “had carried out research on bat coronaviruses.”

Even then, the scientific evidence clearly showed such claims to be false. A study written by US and UK biologists and published in Nature stated in no uncertain terms, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” A different study from a group of US physicians wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that, “SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar.”

Those same physicians also noted the coronavirus “RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets.” They further commented on the increasing likelihood of encountering zoonotic disease. “It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by 1 percent. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1 percent in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses.”

Moreover, it is a matter of public record that Chinese health authorities reacted swiftly to the emergence of the new coronavirus. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of pneumonia cases on December 31, 2019. China informed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on January 3 and on January 7 identified the virus that causes COVID-19. Chinese health authorities updated the WHO and warned of the dangers of human-to-human transmission of the disease.

On January 22, Beijing locked down Wuhan and the entire province of Hubei to contain the spread of the disease. This allowed the country to contain and suppress the virus to the extent that there has been no reported death of the coronavirus in China since last May. It is not a statement of political agreement with the Chinese government to admit these facts.

The opposite is now taking place in the United States, Brazil, Europe and other world powers. In the face of emerging and more infectious variants, lockdown measures are being lifted as swiftly and completely as possible. It was the unimpeded circulation of the coronavirus in animals that allowed it to evolve to infect humans in the first place, and it is the unimpeded circulation in humans that is making the virus more deadly.

As WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted in remarks on Monday, “These results are a reminder that we need to do everything we can to reduce circulation of the virus with proven public health measures.” He again stated that non-pharmaceutical interventions, which include lockdowns of schools and nonessential businesses, are critical in “denying the virus the opportunity to spread, and the opportunity to change in ways that could make vaccines less effective.”

Dam disaster in India: Over 200 construction workers and villagers trapped or dead

Saman Gunadasa

On Sunday morning, part of the glacier at Nanda Devi, India’s second highest peak, burst. Massive floodwaters and silt gushed downstream along the Dhauliganga and Alaknanda rivers, virtually wiping out power plants, bridges and tunnels, and cutting off villages.

By official estimates, the disaster trapped and killed more than 200 power plant workers and villagers in Joshimath in the state of Uttarakhand, near the Chinese and Tibetan borders in India’s Himalayan region.

Floodwaters hit Uttarakhand

At the time of writing, 28 bodies had been found and another 197 people were officially missing. Rescue operations are underway to try to free around 39 construction workers trapped in a tunnel. To reach them, teams were drilling, around-the-clock, through a 12-foot high and 15-foot wide, 2.5 kilometre-long tunnel at the Tapovan Visnugad power plant site that is blocked with the debris and silt. Earlier, 16 workers were rescued from a comparatively shorter tunnel at the Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project.

Most of the victims are workers in power plants, dam sites and tunnels. The number has increased in the reports since the disaster and it could grow further in coming days. According to Uttarakhand police chief Ashok Kumar, more than 50 people working at the Rishiganga project are feared dead.

“There was a cloud of dust as the water went by. The ground shook like an earthquake,” a resident in the area told Al Jazeera. Another resident said: “It came very fast, there was no time to alert anyone.”

Floods washed away five bridges. One bridge in Raini village had connected 13 villages in Malari and Ghansali, which are presently cut off. According to the authorities, food supplies are to be dropped into these areas.

Sunday’s disaster was a result of various projects carried out in the area by successive governments, with total disregard for possible environmental hazards, in order to provide opportunities for big business investors. Having paved the way for such a disaster, the Indian ruling class is shedding crocodile tears for the victims. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) declared on Twitter: “India stands with Uttarakhand and the nation prays for everyone’s safety there.”

Modi announced a pittance of 200,000 rupees ($US2,743) for the next of kin of those who died in the disaster and 50,000 rupees for the seriously injured, from the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. Uttarkhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, a member of Modi’s BJP, announced another 400,000 rupees for the next of kin of each deceased.

Map showing Uttarakhand (Credit: Google Maps)

The magnitude of this disaster is linked to several hydroelectric projects. The Rishiganga plant (13.2 megawatt) was the first to face the brunt of the gushing waters and the debris from this plant hit other units downstream. These included the state-run Tapovan (520 MW) and Pipal Koti (4×111 MW) projects and the private Vishnuprayag (400 MW) project. Most of the casualties so far reported are from the Tapovan plant.

Indian governments have increasingly exploited this environmentally sensitive area as a resource frontier to generate corporate profits, overriding opposition from villagers over the resulting dangers.

In 2019, villagers of Raini petitioned the Uttarkhand high court against various environmental hazards emanating from “developmental” activities, including illegal stone quarrying on the Rishi Ganga riverbed and the blasting of mountains. Even though some of those allegations were proved to be true, authorities went ahead with the projects.

The upper regions of Uttarakhand already have 16 dams, with a further 13 under construction. Moreover, the state government has proposed another 54 dams. On the Dhauliganga river, eight new back-to-back hydro-electricity plants are proposed, in addition to the Tapovan project, which was badly damaged.

Many glaciers form part of India’s long northern border in the Himalayan region. Globally, glaciers are thawing. According to Sarah Das, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, “most mountain glaciers around the world were much larger in the past and have been melting and shrinking dramatically due to climate change and global warming.”

An article on the Wire quoted a 2018 policy brief from the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Bengaluru, indicating that “the average temperature in the northwestern Himalayas has risen by 0.66º C since 1991—an increase much higher than the global average.” Also, scientists from the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment in Chandigarh reported that winters in the northwestern Himalayas had been getting warmer and wetter for the past 25 years.

Research based on the study of 650 glaciers spanning 2,000 kilometres and published in the journal Science Advances in June 2019, showed that glacial melting had doubled since 2000 as compared to 1975-2000. According to this study, “following a more pronounced warming trend starting in the 1990s; from 2000 the loss accelerated to about half a metre annually.”

The present disaster has occurred less than a decade after a 2013 catastrophe in Uttarakhand, which was dubbed the “Himalayan tsunami.” In June that year, torrents of water, mud and rocks were unleashed, sweeping away homes, buildings, roads and bridges, and killing close to 6,000 people.

In 2018, Vimal Bhai of Matu Jan Sangathan, a Uttarakhand-based non-government organisation, told the media: “It has been five years since the devastating floods occurred but the conditions in Uttarakhand are as they were. The floodplains are being encroached; massive infrastructure projects, mainly large dams, are being carried out in the fragile Himalayan region in the name of development without learning any lessons from the past.”

Writing this week to the Wire, C.P. Rajendran, an adjunct professor in the National Institute of Advanced Studies said: “The Chamoli disaster is still evolving, and it will be many days, if not longer, before we know all the significant details. But there should be no doubt it’s a sign of our stupid developmental priorities and proves our inability to sustainably develop ecologically sensitive zones.”

More than a “natural” disaster, this latest tragedy is another indictment of the capitalist profit system and its disregard for working class lives and the planet’s environmental problems.

Pornhub, QAnon and the War on Sex

Kenn Orphan

This month, following an opinion piece in the New York Times by liberal political commentator Nicholas Kristof, the Canadian based porn site Pornhub was put on trial. The accusations revolve around the site allegedly allowing and profiting from sex trafficking, child, and rape porn. Without a doubt, Pornhub as well as many other similar sites, have profited from some questionable content. Like social media, it is not responsible for the content uploaded by individuals. It is only responsible for dealing with it once it is there. This is the only logical way that a free and open internet could possibly work. But there is a dark side to Kristof’s Pornhub diatribe. This crusade against porn comes at a time of unhinged QAnon conspiracy theories involving secret elite pedophile rings. And much of it smacks of a typical American-style sex panic.

Following the publication of Kristof’s piece in the NYT, credit card behemoths Visa and Mastercard discontinued their service to the site, adversely affecting the livelihoods of scores of sex workers and performers. In addition to this, far right groups, such as Exodus Cry, have seen the article as a clarion call in their crusade for sexual “purity.” Morphing from the early Puritans into today’s evangelicals, this war has never ended for them. Exodus Cry claims that its aim is to stop human trafficking, an admirable goal. But the organization never addresses decriminalizing sex work or the inhumane immigration laws and policies which are at the root of the problem. They also exclude gay men and transgender people as victims of sex trafficking and assault, even though this is a well documented problem. In addition to this, the founder Mike Bickle and the president Benjamin Nolot have expressed their antigay and anti-choice positions on several occasions, with one comparing being gay to opening “the demonic realm.”

Pornography has always been a charged topic in America, and it is often painted with a broad brush. Most people understand that exploitation of children or non-consensual sex are abusive and thus designated as crimes. Certainly, the modern porn industry is rife with abuses. But beyond this, who decides what is acceptable for adults? Back in the late 1980s, Robert Maplethorpe’s art works were censored in the US because they were labeled “obscene” by some politicians. And the genre of erotica is often lumped in with more explicit, hardcore pornography. Indeed, sexual expression in the visual medium has been a part of human culture for millennia. In fact, to many evangelicals and other religious conservatives all or most displays of public nudity or eroticism are considered offensive or perverse.

But this crusade against a pornography giant cannot be understood outside of the context of the rise of QAnon, a cult that centers around an antisemitic conspiracy about an elite, pedophile ring run by prominent Democrats who sacrifice children to extract a life prolonging chemical called adrenochrome. It is reminiscent of the debunked satanic ritual abuse scandal of the 1980s and 90s. Both panics were over the top and deranged in their allegations and accusations. Both rallied around the noble cause of “protecting children.”  But, as in the panic of earlier times, there is no other reason for this other than the reactionary elements of a society being confronted with the agency of groups who have been historically oppressed.

The liberation movements of the 70s which saw great gains for women and LGBTQ people were seen by many conservative Christians to be the ultimate evidence of America’s denigration. Traditional gender roles were being challenged. Children were suddenly being taken care of by others while women joined the workforce. Today, there is a similar dynamic at play. Transgender people are challenging the very notion of a fixed gender. Sex workers are demanding recognition and labor rights. And once again, the hegemony of reactionary sections of society are feeling threatened. The difference now is that there is a marked disconnect from reality in a huge section of the population.

QAnon is perhaps one of the most dangerous of all conspiracy phenomenon in recent history thanks to its enormous influence. There are now sitting members of congress who are adherents. And it gained momentum thanks to the slow and steady chipping away of scientific education. But it should not come as a surprise that it arose in the United States. This is a country, after all, where many politicians still blame natural disasters on gay marriage or supposed sexual immorality.

Without a doubt, the pornography industry was given a significant boost by technology this century. The internet has enabled access to images and videos with ease and in the comfort of one’s own home. And it is no wonder that it has become one of the most lucrative industries on the planet. Sex, after all, sells. And capitalism has created a market where virtually everything, including sex, can be stamped with a barcode. But although pornography is, at best, a poor facsimile of sexual intercourse and relations, it sells because of its power to remove a person from the staleness and monotony of modern life. Like opioids, internet porn serves as a temporary release from the crushing reality most Americans deal with daily. But the latter is far less damaging to the individual and society in general.

To be clear, Pornhub is not a victim in this battle. It will still rake in millions of dollars off the backs of underpaid sex workers. And its content is not likely to change very much from the standard porn it profits from. Sex workers, an already marginalized community, will continue to lose their livelihoods and be demonized as societal degenerates. The real victims of sex trafficking will not see any justice in this crusade against porn either, because ultra-conservative organizations like Exodus Cry are only interested in promoting their rigid and reactionary mores regarding human sexuality. But QAnon has brought this issue to a different level, one fraught with both hysteria and idiocy. No one should kid themselves that the attacks on a prominent porn site are without a broader agenda. This has never been about pornography or “saving” children or women. Conservative evangelicals have an axe to grind. And this is only the beginning of their renewed war on human sexuality and the diversity of its expression.

Farmers’ Protest in India: Price of Failure Will Be immense

Colin Todhunter

Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who sells it. This model involves highly processed food adulterated with chemical inputs ending up in large near-monopoly supermarket chains or fast-food outlets that rely on industrial-scale farming.

While the brands lining the shelves of giant retail outlets seem vast, a handful of food companies own these brands which in turn rely on a relatively narrow range of produce for ingredients. At the same time, this illusion of choice often comes at the expense of food security in poorer countries that were compelled to restructure their agriculture to facilitate agro-exports courtesy of the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and global agribusiness interests.

In Mexico, transnational food retail and processing companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.

Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition in 2012. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of overweight women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 25 to 35 per cent and the number of obese women in this age group increased from 9 to 37 per cent. Some 29 per cent of Mexican children between the ages of 5 and 11 were found to be overweight, as were 35 per cent of the youngsters between 11 and 19, while one in ten school age children experienced anaemia.

Former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, concludes that trade policies had favoured a greater reliance on heavily processed and refined foods with a long shelf life rather than on the consumption of fresh and more perishable foods, particularly fruit and vegetables. He added that the overweight and obesity emergency that Mexico faces could have been avoided.

In 2015, the non-profit organisation GRAIN reported that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to the direct investment in food processing and a change in Mexico’s retail structure (towards supermarkets and convenience stores) as well as the emergence of global agribusiness and transnational food companies in the country.

NAFTA eliminated rules preventing foreign investors from owning more than 49 per cent of a company. It also prohibited minimum amounts of domestic content in production and increased rights for foreign investors to retain profits and returns from initial investments. By 1999, US companies had invested 5.3 billion dollars in Mexico’s food processing industry, a 25-fold increase in just 12 years.

US food corporations began to colonise the dominant food distribution networks of small-scale vendors, known as tiendas (corner shops). This helped spread nutritionally poor food as they allowed these corporations to sell and promote their foods to poorer populations in small towns and communities. By 2012, retail chains had displaced tiendas as Mexico’s main source of food sales.

In Mexico, the loss of food sovereignty induced catastrophic changes to the nation’s diet and many small-scale farmers lost their livelihoods, which was accelerated by the dumping of surplus commodities (produced at below the cost of production due to subsidies) from the US. NAFTA rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small businesspeople into bankruptcy, leading to the flight of millions of immigrant workers.

Warning for India

What happened in Mexico should serve as a warning as Indian farmers continue their protest against three recent farm bills that are designed to fully corporatize the agrifood sector through contract farming, the massive roll-back of public sector support systems, a reliance on imports (boosted by a future US trade deal) and the acceleration of large-scale (online) retail.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

And if you want to know the eventual fate of India’s farmers, look no further than the 1990s when the IMF and World Bank advised India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture in return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time.

India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops for export to earn foreign exchange. Part of the strategy would also involve changing land laws so that land could be sold and amalgamated for industrial-scale farming.

The plan was for foreign corporations to capture the sector, with the aforementioned policies having effectively weakened or displaced independent cultivators.

To date, this process has been slow but the recent legislation could finally deliver a knock-out blow to tens of millions of farmers and give what the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations have wanted all along. It will also serve the retail/agribusiness/logistics interests of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and its sixth richest, Gautam Adani.

During their ongoing protests, farmers have been teargassed, smeared and beaten. Journalist Satya Sagar notes that government advisors fear that seeming to appear weak with the agitating farmers would not sit well with foreign agrifood investors and could stop the flow of big money into the sector – and the economy as a whole.

And it is indeed ‘big’ money. Facebook invested 5.5 billion dollars last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested 4.5 billion dollars. Currently, Amazon and Flipkart (Walmart has an 81% stake) together control over 60% of the country’s overall e-commerce market. These and other international investors have a great deal to lose if the recent farm legislation is repealed. So does the Indian government.

Since the 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration.

Little wonder the government needs to be seen as acting ‘tough’ on protesting farmers because now, more than ever, attracting and retaining foreign reserves will be required to purchase food on the international market once India surrenders responsibility for its food policy to private players by eliminating its buffer stocks.

The plan to radically restructure agrifood in the country is being sold to the public under the guise of ‘modernising’ the sector. And this is to be carried out by self-proclaimed ‘wealth creators’ like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Ambani who are highly experienced at creating wealth – for themselves.

According to the recent Oxfam report ‘The Inequality Virus’, Mukesh Ambani doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. The coronavirus-related lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent, while 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

Prior to the lockdown, Oxfam reported that 73 per cent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent, while 670 million Indians, the poorest half of the population, saw only a 1 per cent increase in their wealth.

Moreover, the fortunes of India’s billionaires increased by almost 10 times over a decade and their total wealth was higher than the entire Union budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19.

It is clear who these ‘wealth creators’ create wealth for. On the People’s Review site, Tanmoy Ibrahim writes a piece on India’s billionaire class, with a strong focus on Ambani and Adani. By outlining the nature of crony capitalism in India, it is clear that Modi’s ‘wealth creators’ are given carte blanche to plunder the public purse, people and the environment, while real wealth creators – not least the farmers – are fighting for existence.

The current struggle should not be regarded as a battle between the government and farmers. If what happened in Mexico is anything to go by, the outcome will adversely affect the entire nation in terms of the further deterioration of public health and the loss of livelihoods.

Consider that rates of obesity in India have already tripled in the last two decades and the nation is fast becoming the diabetes and heart disease capital of the world. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), between 2005 and 2015 the number of obese people doubled, even though one in five children in the 5-9 year age group were found to be stunted.

This will be just part of the cost of handing over the sector to billionaire (comprador) capitalists Mukesh Ambani and Gautum Adani and Jeff Bezos (world’s richest person), Mark Zuckerberg (world’s fourth richest person), the Cargill business family (14 billionaires) and the Walmart business family (richest in the US).

These individuals are poised to siphon off the wealth of India’s agrifood sector while denying the livelihoods of many millions of small-scale farmers and local mom and pop retailers while undermining the health of the nation.