16 Mar 2021

The Crushing Environmental Burden of Greek Tourism

Evaggelos Vallianatos


Tourism is the heavy industry of Greece. It annually earns a fourth of the country’s income. The pestilence year 2020, however, was bad for Greek tourism. In 2020, some 70 percent fewer tourists visited the country. This drastic decline meant less money for debt trapped Greece. Compared to 2019, tourist receipts in 2020 dropped by 78.2 percent.

Greece was not alone in losing tourism in 2020. Tourism declined dramatically everywhere. That decline had “a profound effect around the world.”

Less international travel was beneficial to air quality and climate change. Global warming gas emissions declined by about seven percent. Experts say that kind of decline, 7.6 percent in greenhouse gas emissions, would be necessary every year for ten years to stabilize global temperature to about 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the temperature in pre-industrial age.

However, humans and nations are selfish and very unlikely to shut themselves down for another nine years for the benefit of the planet and their own survival.

Even in the pestilence year 2020, people (especially in Africa, Asia, and the Americas) took advantage of the decline in the official protection of natural parks and wildlife and, like barbarians, smuggled, trapped, trafficked, and hunted animals, including endangered species.

The natural treasures of Greece

We don’t know what happened to wildlife in Greece in 2020. But we can safely assume that the pestilence emboldened criminals to increase their wildlife depredations. Besides, the international lenders of Greece, the European Union and America’s International Monetary Fund, have practically killed Greek national sovereignty and the country is like an unfenced vineyard.

Greece, however, is blessed with biological diversity. Luc Hoffmann, founder of WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature; World Wildlife Fund), was right saying:

“Greece is the country of diversity…Zeus must have hit this area with his hammer, splashing thousand islands in the sea and tearing the mainland into pieces so that the country’s coastline became as long as the one of the whole continent of Africa. This physical multiplicity is increased by a wide gradient of climates, ranging from almost subtropical to truly alpine conditions, as well as by a variety of mountains, hills, and plains, many of which scattered with wetlands. No wonder these conditions have produced an exceptionally rich living nature, in fact the highest biodiversity known in Europe.”

Hoffmann was wise. Zeus was also xenios, the god who protected foreigners visiting Hellas. That virtue the Greeks called philoxenia / hospitality.

Philoxenia was complementary to the exceptionally rich living nature in Greece, which  inspired Greek gods and thinkers.

Zeus was a sky and climate god. He sent the rains, hail, snow, lightening, and the feared thunder and thunderbolts. Demeter, sister of Zeus, gave the wheat and grains to the Greeks. To this day, Greeks call their cereals Demetriaka, gifts of Demeter. Dionysos, son of Zeus, introduced the vine and wine. Athena, daughter of Zeus, gifted the olive tree to Athens. Her sacred bird was the owl. Artemis, sister of Apollo, protected the natural world. Aristaios, son of Apollo and the nymph Kyrene, was the god of honeybees, other insects and wildlife, and shepherding, cheesemaking, and olive growing – all vital for a healthy people and alive natural world and life and civilization.

Orpheus was so good a musician and singer that he caught the attention of beasts, even trees and stones. He joined the Argonauts searching for the golden fleece, some time before the Trojan War.

Hesiod was a near contemporary of Homer. His epic poems praised the beauty of the natural world and the work of peasants in making a living out of the riches of nature. About three centuries after Hesiod, another Greek, Xenophon, described the delights and usefulness of working with nature for national defense, democracy, and a prosperous farming.

Aristotle, a near contemporary of Xenophon, invented the science of zoology, praising animals as the perfect products of nature that does nothing in vain.

This gives us some clues and sets the context for the natural world in Hellenic culture. The natural world was sacred and essential for an independent, mostly democratic, and healthy polis. Hellas was blessed with plenty of animals and plants, mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and seas.

The International Union of Conservation of Nature estimated there are about 36,000 species of animals and plants in Greece. This represents 23 percent of animals and plants in Europe, and, possibly, more than 2 percent of the world’s animals and plants.

About 32 percent of the species threatened in Europe live in Greece. The country hosts about 42 percent of all the European mammals; 38 percent of reptiles; 27 percent of amphibians; 50 percent of the butterflies; and 58 percent of the dragonflies.

The threats to wildlife in Greece, as well as the rest of Europe, come from mining, deforestation, and, primarily, industrialized agriculture, its gulping down of fresh water, its invasion of forests, and its toxic pesticides. These toxic and climate change practices homogenize nature and leave not much safe habitat for insects, birds, and other wild animals and plants.

The tourism tsunami

The other perennial threat to the integrity and health of the natural world is tourism. Every year for a few months Greece is literally flooded by foreigners who are thirsty for ancient Greek culture, seeing and visiting the Parthenon and the exquisite and mind-expanding museums. In 2018, about 33 million tourists arrived in Greece.

In addition, tourists want clean waters to swim and play.

Beach in Argostoli, Cephalonia, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.

Millions of them visit the country’s natural parks to see and enjoy rare wildlife. All of them eat good food.

But Greece is barely ten million people and the tourists sometimes are double and triple that number. The trash, and especially the plastic water bottle trash, is enormous. In the summer of 2017, I came across those plastic water bottle mountains in a secluded village of the beautiful island of Kerkyra the tourists call Corfu.

Pollution is not the only threat of tourism. Millions of tourists inundate the beaches, some of which like those of the Ionian islands of Zakynthos and Cephalonia, are the resting and breeding grounds and the birthplace of the endangered turtle Caretta caretta.

The pestilence (and debt) disruption of tourism

The 2020 pandemic reduced the tourists visiting wildlife sanctuaries in Greece to a trickle. This caused stress in the protection of wildlife. Money dried up.

Did the crimes of hunting, poaching, trapping, smuggling, and trafficking of wildlife also happened in Greece?

I already said I cannot answer this question, though I suspect that the pandemic and the country’s debt have been shredding state wildlife policies. Lax environmental and wildlife protection rules are always detrimental to both nature and people losing treasures of life that give meaning and pleasures to their own life and civilization.

Changing tourism to philoxenia and zoophilia (love for animals)

I already mentioned that Aristotle invented the science of zoology and spoke eloquently about the beauty and importance of animals.

Yet despite Aristotle and the spread and advances of biology and environmental sciences, humans are daily harming nature. Their numbers alone are simply explosive needing more than one Earth. Second, the largest institutions of the world, corporations, and often governments, treat the natural world like a mine.

Climate change  has been hitting humans with tons of bricks: droughts, heavy rains, storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, wild forest fires, and the rapid disappearance of species and pestilence. Yet humans don’t get it. The pandemic especially demonstrated that humans are backwards species often walking paths of suicide.

Even if Greece were at its ancient glory, it could not alone stop the human onslaught on Mother Earth. However, it can become a paradigm for emulation: reform its practices towards nature: convert its farming to organic agriculture and produce its electricity from the boundless Sun god Helios and wind god Aiolos, both ancient Greek gods.

Tourism is secret Philhellenism. People with some acquaintance with Western civilization know that impoverished and debt-ridden Greece is behind their knowledge, science, architecture, art and culture. They visit the country and see the proof of ancient wisdom and sophisticated science splashed all over ruined and looted Parthenon, theaters, the ruins of temples, and the treasures of the museums. Greece becomes their second home.

These secret millions of Philhellenes could become Greek ambassadors all over the world.

The Geek tourist organization can facilitate this process by simple things like changing the name of Santorini to its real Greek name of Thera and labeling paths to archaeological sites worth seeing and exploring. The museums of these sites should always have a complete or partial collection of the books of the best of the Greeks – in English translation.

The tourist organization should fill the country with statues of the best of the Hellenes: heroes like Herakles, Achilles, Odysseus, Leonidas, Themistokles, Thrasyboulos; thinkers like Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Herakleitos, Parmenides, Empedokles, Demokritos, Hippokrates, Aischylos, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotos, Thucydides, Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aristarchos of Samos, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Hipparchos, Galen, Ptolemaios and Hypatia, the first martyr of science.

Another and equally important priority in making tourism more attractive, sustainable, and Greek would be to protect the country’s natural parks. The guards of these national treasures of the natural world should know the natural history of the species and ecosystem they are protecting.

The museums of these natural parks should be selling short histories of the species inhabiting the protected area. The History of Animals by Aristotle (both the Greek text and English translation) should be in each of the Greek museums.

In short, the silver lining of the pandemic and its devastating impact on tourism is a necessary rethinking of tourism. Is tourism simply a business? Should debt-humiliated Greece facilitate the export of tourist earnings to debt-collectors or should invest this money to create a more powerful and ecological country with a more Hellenic future?

Tourism could be redesigned to spread Hellenic culture and ecological consciousness while earning a good living for Greece.

Done properly in the Greek tradition of knowledge, philoxenia, and deep respect for nature, tourism has the potential to strengthen Greece while avoiding the adverse effects of business as usual, the monster ships carrying thousands of tourists from port to port, pollution, and the degradation of the natural world and its treasures.

Lula Is Back

Manuella Libardi


Brazil’s former president Luiz InĂ¡cio Lula da Silva showed on Wednesday that his political career is far from over. Lula, as he is more commonly known, returned to address the nation after the annulment of his corruption convictions.

Lula was previously known for his casual attire, including many red shirts, in honor of the Workers’ Party, which he founded in 1980. This time, sporting a sharp dark suit with a powder blue dress shirt, the 75-year-old’s message was clear. He is back.

Last Monday, a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled Lula’s two bribery convictions, clearing the way for the former president to run in the 2022 elections and challenge the far-Right president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula, who led Brazil between 2003 and 2011, said he remained unsure about whether to seek a third term.

Barely looking down at his notes during a speech that lasted nearly two hours, Lula showcased his trademark confidence and charisma throughout. A metalworker who rose to prominence in the 1980s as a union leader, Lula used everyday language to discuss the economy and to criticize Bolsonaro for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis that has besieged the country, claiming that Brazil currently “has no government”.

Although it remains unconfirmed whether his name will be on the ballot next year, many pundits and members of the public are certain it will. Certainly, his public appearance this week bore all the hallmarks of a presidential campaign.

Addressing journalists while standing in front of a famous picture of himself being held aloft by a crowd of supporters, and with a banner in the top right-hand corner reading; “Health, jobs and justice for Brazil”, Lula immediately took aim at the injustice that had been bestowed upon him.

Declaring himself “the victim of the biggest judicial lie told in the country’s 500-year history”, Lula went on to describe the suffering he endured in prison from April 2018 to November 2019, when the Supreme Court ruled that defendants may remain free while their appeals are pending.

Lula was sentenced to 26 years after being convicted of accepting bribes from Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned, multinational oil company, in two separate corruption and money-laundering cases.

He was investigated as part of the largest anti-corruption effort in Brazil’s history, Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato), which was led by a mega taskforce from the federal police’s Curitiba branch.

Scandal, ambition and Operation Car Wash

Lula’s conviction and subsequent arrest prevented him from running in the 2018 presidential elections, which took place six months after his sentencing. While sitting in jail, Lula still led Bolsonaro in the polls, with many harboring suspicions that his arrest was engineered to ensure a Bolsonaro victory.

While Lula’s star dimmed in jail, the man who was hailed by many to be the solution to Brazil’s deep-seated corruption problems, Sergio Moro, shot to stardom. The former judge gained widespread recognition for his active role in the taskforce and for ordering Lula’s arrest. He became a hero in the eyes of half of the population in a divided nation.

The other half believed him to be a self-serving careerman with political aspirations. When Bolsonaro announced he had picked Moro as his justice minister, the accusations of bias grew louder. Nevertheless, admirers of Operation Car Wash stood by his decision to accept a political office.

However, the situation changed in mid-2019, just six months into Bolsonaro’s presidency and Moro’s new role. On 9 June, the online publication The Intercept Brasil, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, began publishing a series of leaked messages exchanged on Telegram between figures involved in the taskforce. Many of them seemed to suggest that Judge Moro communicated frequently with prosecutors and that he even counseled the team behind Lula’s corruption charges.

That was to prove the beginning of the end for Moro. After falling out of favor with Bolsonaro, the former judge resigned in April 2020, less than a year after the scandal that became known as Vaza Jato (roughly translated as Car Wash Leaks).

Even before The Intercept’s bombshell revelations, jurists often pointed out the inconsistencies and contradictions in the case against Lula. In the eyes of his supporters, Lula was a political prisoner, and inspired the Free Lula movement (Lula Livre). The leaked messages renewed hopes among his supporters that his convictions would be overturned.

Lula’s defense team asked the Supreme Court to judge whether Moro had acted with the necessary impartiality. On Tuesday, the five justices assigned to the case tabled the decision. They tied in a 2-2 vote after the fifth judge, who joined the court in November, said he was unable to cast an opinion because he lacked sufficient knowledge of the case.

Pathway to the presidency

While connected to the accusations against Moro, this week’s annulments stemmed from a different argument.

Justice Edson Fachin – who voted against the prejudice charge against Moro back in December – ruled that the four cases against Lula fell outside of the jurisdiction of the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, contending that the crimes did not happen in the city, located in the southern state of ParanĂ¡. The cases will be forwarded to the capital of Brasilia for reconsideration.

Fachin’s decision does not exonerate Lula, as the judge did not determine whether the former president was innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him. Regardless, Lula is now free to run for office until he is re-tried in the capital, which could take years. To become ineligible again, Lula would have to be convicted before submitting his candidacy in mid-2022, which is unlikely to happen.

Brazil’s attorney general’s office has appealed against Fachin’s decision, asking the Supreme Court to reverse it. However, Fachin’s arguments are in line with previous decisions taken by the country’s highest court, which legal experts claim are unlikely to be overturned.

Seeing that Fachin sided with Moro in the prejudice accusations against him, the internal assessment in the Supreme Court is that he opted to overturn the convictions against Lula to prevent others from using the same argument against the former judge, starting a domino effect that could jeopardize the entire Car Wash inquiry.

Economic decline and the Amazon

Though Lula is now free to run for office, the political landscape has changed since he left the president’s office in January 2011 with a record 83% approval rate, which made him Brazil’s most popular president in modern history.

Following his speech on Wednesday, the dollar dropped by 2.5% and the Brazilian stock exchange rose by 1.3%. This week’s polls place Lula just six percentage points behind Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election, a gap that is likely to narrow after the court’s ruling.

Lula’s re-emergence comes at a time where Brazil is still struggling with the pandemic, with a death toll of more than 270,000 – the world’s second highest. Bolsonaro has consistently been criticised for downplaying the pandemic and his denial of science, aggravating the problem in a country where implementing social distancing measures is already challenging given that 41.4% of the population depend on informal jobs and at least 13.6 million live in overcrowded, marginalized neighborhoods known as favelas.

Despite Bolsonaro being elected partly thanks to his ultraliberal economic promises, Brazil’s GDP, which had grown by a disappointing 1% in the first year of his presidency, has shrunk by 4.1% amid the pandemic – the worst setback since 1996.

Bolsonaro, with his growing far-Right agenda, has lost support among the financial elite and investment in the country has fallen by half. His disregard for the environment – particularly the Amazon, which has had record deforestation rates under his administration – has also hurt Brazil’s relationship with some of the world’s most powerful economies: US President Joe Biden has threatened Brazil with sanctions, while European companies have threatened boycotts of Brazilian products.

Although Brazil’s current predicaments may encourage Lula, especially after the events of the past week, there is still room for caution. The annulment of his conviction is not a definitive victory for him or his supporters. In a country with a 400-page constitution and a complex judicial system, decisions can be made and unmade in a matter of days. But Lula and his supporters will certainly be celebrating while they can. After all, Bolsonaro seems shaken.

Paraguay’s health care system collapses as government tries to quell protests

Andrea Lobo


Protests continue across Paraguay demanding the ouster of the fascistic administration of President Mario Abdo BenĂ­tez over its refusal to take measures to contain a massive surge of COVID-19 infections.

In recent days, however, the crowds have significantly diminished, largely due to the collapse of the health care system.

The government continues to oppose the demands by demonstrators and doctors associations, including the Pneumology Society, for a return to lockdown measures, including the shutting down of all nonessential activities and schools.

Paraguayan nurses protest for health supplies (Photo: Twitter)

The surge in cases since early February has been exponential, with the seven-day average rising from 700 daily infections to 1,730. According to Our World in Data, Paraguay has the highest rate of new infections in the world, with 44.6 percent of COVID-19 tests coming out positive.

On Sunday, the specialist in infectious diseases TomĂ¡s Mateo Balmelli raised the prospect that, given the current trend, the health care system will remain “collapsed” for the rest of the year. He pointed to the dangers of a rise in flu and Dengue cases, as well as the new and more transmissible coronavirus variants.

Several health care experts have suggested that the recent surge is being dramatically worsened by the new strains from Brazil, after thousands of Paraguayans traveled there for vacations. The rapid surges in Brazil, Paraguay and much of Europe, fueled by the new variants, are a major warning for the rest of the world.

The surge has saturated ICU beds in Paraguay’s public hospitals and led to shortages of medicines, which have in turn increased the death rate to 25 a day. At the same time, infections have translated into guaranteed bankruptcies for working class families.

On Sunday, in unprecedented scenes, the broadcaster GEN interviewed long lines of family members of patients outside the public hospitals, as they waited for doctors to send them on frantic searches for the medicines needed to save their loved ones.

While appreciative of the care by the medical staff, a woman whose uncle is being treated for COVID-19 at the ClĂ­nicas Hospital said the family has spent about 10 million guarani ($1,520) out of pocket in one week of intensive care. This is the equivalent of more than two years of the average salary in the private sector in Paraguay, the second poorest country in South America.

At the IPS Ingavi public hospital, a woman said she spent two million guarani for her father, who has been intubated for five days. She explained, “We are spending the nights here because they will call you constantly for anything, for some report or medicine. We have to stay. We just don’t know what to expect.” Midazolam, for pain and anxiety, has been particularly requested.

It was precisely the protests by nurses and doctors in AsunciĂ³n over the lack of supplies and vaccines, along with partial strikes by teachers against the return to in-person learning, that detonated the wave of mass demonstrations earlier this month. Reports of extreme exhaustion among medical personnel were widespread.

In this context, vaccinations have barely begun. Besides the 4,000 doses previously received from Russia, out of an order of one million doses, the government claims that 20,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have arrived from Chile and 3,000 from the UAE.

Less than 4,500 of these doses have been administered in total, according to Johns Hopkins University. When the UN-led Covax program promised 4.3 million doses to Paraguay, this news was used to defend the continued reopening of businesses and schools. Yet, to date, none of these vaccines have arrived.

Four ministers, including the health care and education chiefs, were dismissed during the first week of protests. Nevertheless, the crowds only grew larger, reaching a peak on March 5, when thousands marched in the capital AsunciĂ³n, and thousands more joined roadblocks and other actions across the country.

This showed that social anger is only mounting, despite the smaller size of the protests last week.

Last Friday and Saturday, a few hundred demonstrators took to the streets of AsunciĂ³n, mostly students and youth, accompanied by existing protest groups focused on anti-corruption demands and oriented to the main political parties. Several demonstrators minimized the danger of COVID in their signs and statements made during an “open-mic.”

Appeals were also made to the police to join them, as well as to the trade union bureaucracy, which is entirely integrated into the state and reliant on its handouts. Only about six percent of workers are affiliated to a union, almost exclusively among education, medical, energy and transportation workers in the public sector.

A more amenable tone in the coverage by the corporate media outlets also registered this change in the composition and political orientation of the demonstrations in recent days. For instance, the right-wing ABC Color reported that “the citizenry demonstrated conviction and perseverance,” while Diario Hoy, added: “The demonstration without incidents stood out.”

At the same time, the continued resistance among teachers and the public condemnations by health care experts compelled the government to suspend in-person learning starting on Thursday in 23 districts on “red alert.”

The Abdo administration has also declared a curfew from 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., enforced by the military and the police. Its only conceivable intention is to intimidate the population and prepare a crackdown against potential unrest late into the night. This was made clear by an exception until midnight for indoor restaurants and bars for employees and those with receipts or reservations.

Interior Minister Arnaldo Giuzzio stated on Monday that the demand by the health care sector for “phase 0”—a full lockdown—is “not possible” and indicated that the new measures will be reevaluated in two weeks.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Party and the pseudo-left Frente GuasĂº have sought to channel the growing social anger behind an impeachment motion against Abdo and Vice President Hugo VelĂ¡zquez. This has allowed the supposed “opposition” parties to feign support for the demonstrations while focusing their appeals on the ruling Colorado Party itself, which they absurdly blame for “not listening” to the protesters’ demands.

While composed of two large factions, one led by Abdo and the other by the former President Horacio Cartes, the Colorados have so far remained together in opposing the impeachment drive, which has only secured 29 of the 53 votes needed to proceed in the lower chamber of Congress. The Colorado legislators have been refusing to attend sessions to prevent a quorum and forestall any debate of the pandemic crisis.

On March 10, the Frente GuasĂº released an equally futile appeal for Abdo and VelĂ¡zquez to resign and call presidential elections. This was accompanied by a seven-point program demanding medicine, supplies, vaccines, a halt to evictions and an end to corruption. What their document shows, above all, is a hostility no different than that of the Colorados to implementing any of the urgent measures needed to contain the virus that impinge upon the interests of the financial and corporate elite.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte set to carry Dutch general elections by default

Harm Zonderland


Tomorrow, general elections will take place in the Netherlands for the general public. The elections are spread out over three days to reduce social contacts, and voting is currently proceeding for voters diagnosed as vulnerable to COVID-19. The elderly above 70 years old have been encouraged to vote by mail, and voting began yesterday for voters diagnosed as vulnerable to COVID-19.

Voting form of the Dutch elections in 2017 (Sebastiaan ter Burg/ Creative Commons)

Internal Affairs Minister Kajsa Ollongren, of the Liberal D66 party, told the news media that should the curfew be extended, it would not be enforced on election days. Ballot offices are open until 9:00 p.m.

The elections are marked by one central contradiction. On the one hand, it is unfolding as the COVID-19 pandemic spins out of control, triggering the deepest social and economic crisis the Netherlands and Europe have seen in decades. Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government is moving aggressively to lift the limited social distancing measures that are in place, even as new, more contagious variants of the virus spread rapidly.

The superrich have profited immensely from mass deaths as Rutte implemented the European Union’s (EU) ruthless “herd immunity” policy. Over 1.1 million have fallen ill, and 16,087 have died, yet primary schools reopened on February 8, and now middle schools are opening their doors one day a week. Rutte said, “We should be prepared to take a little bit more risk.” And so corporate profits have kept pouring in. According to business magazine Quote, the net worth of the 500 richest Dutch was €186 billion in 2020, up €6 billion from 2019.

On the other hand, Rutte’s right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) nevertheless enjoys a massive lead and is set to emerge strengthened from the election.

I&O Research and Ipsos-EenVandaag polls forecast the VVD winning 38 seats (gaining five) and the runner-up, the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) of Geert Wilders 19 (losing one). Rutte’s coalition partners would all lose ground: the Christian-Democratic Appeal would win 17 seats (down two), D66 15 seats (down four) and the Christian Union six votes, up one. The projected fall in the far-right PVV’s vote is more than counterbalanced by the far-right Forum for Democracy’s (FvD) projected two-seat gain, to four.

Rutte has ruled out a coalition government with Wilders’ PVV, and it is expected that he will need to organize a coalition with multiple parties, as in the previous government, in order to obtain a parliamentary majority to form a government.

Examining the Dutch elections, Britain’s Guardian newspaper wrote that the COVID-19 pandemic had “taken the wind out of Dutch politics” and asked admiringly about Rutte: “What is his secret?”

Rutte’s “secret,” if it is correct to call it so, is that what the ruling elite has falsely passed off as the “left” is discredited and utterly rotten. Mounting social anger in the Netherlands reflected in mass strikes by health care and education workers in recent years has found no expression in rising support for the Labour Party (PvdA) or the petty-bourgeois ex-Maoist Socialist Party (SP). The SP is set to lose four seats, taking only 10; the PvdA, once a major party of government for the Dutch bourgeoisie, is set to take just 12 seats, up three. GreenLeft is projected to take 12 seats, down two.

In recent decades, they have moved so far to the right that their policies are difficult for working class voters to distinguish between the VVD or even Wilders’ PVV. The entire political establishment would have the public believe that immigrants and war refugees are to blame for all social ills.

The SP calls in their election programme for a halt on immigration, an expansion of the police forces and, overall, an utterly nationalist agenda. Wilders, who is somewhat more overt about his intentions, rabidly calls for expelling Muslims and sending the military to quell social unrest.

The SP’s reaction is in line with the reactionary response of the entire petty-bourgeois pseudo-left milieu in the Netherlands to the COVID-19 pandemic. No trade union has called for the closure of nonessential businesses and schools, nor have the unions organised any strike actions against Rutte’s murderous herd immunity policy.

Instead, they have ceded the terrain of political opposition to Rutte to the far-right parties, who organised riots demanding an end to social distancing policies. Under these conditions, Rutte has been able to maintain himself, despite deep working class opposition to his reactionary record.

Over the past 10 years, he has led three coalitions, imposing draconian austerity measures on the working class. Housing prices soared, taxes on food and medicine rose and health care was stripped to the bone—as were education, public transport and other social services.

Social security and unemployment benefits were cut, and pensions were not corrected for inflation, even as the retirement age was incrementally increased to 67. Corporate taxes were slashed, while jobs became increasingly insecure due to the proliferation of “flexible” jobs through temp agencies, such as Randstad or Adecco.

Meanwhile, the Rutte government turned the Netherlands into a police surveillance state. Amnesty International published a report last year, describing his government’s “predictive policing” projects based on camera surveillance and ethnic profiling. Legislation regulating operations of the AIVD and MIVD intelligence agencies was updated in 2017, making it possible for AIVD to collect telecom and internet data on a broad scale—including from innocent people—to find “terrorists.”

This legislation was pushed through in the face of broad popular opposition. An online petition to demand a referendum on the legislation was signed more than 300,000 times, and the referendum produced a large majority against the law. Nevertheless, the new law was adopted. The referendum law was repealed shortly afterwards.

Rutte’s coalition officially resigned in January following the exposure of the state’s witchhunt of childcare benefits recipients. Parliamentary hearings exposed a ruthless, vindictive state apparatus, that keeps its operations obscure while sharing as little information as possible. This became known as the “Rutte doctrine.”

The social democratic labour party PvdA was also discredited in the child care benefits scandal, as former party leader Lodewijk Asscher was deeply implicated in it. He was minister for social affairs and deputy prime minister between 2012 and 2017, when around 20,000 parents incorrectly had child benefit payments stopped or were ordered to repay benefits after being targeted for bogus fraud investigations.

This “symbolic” resignation has no practical consequences for the Rutte government’s ability to ram through right-wing policies. While he now leads a “caretaker” government until a new coalition is formed, parliament gave the coalition a green light to devise and implement a new policy to “combat the crisis.” The Ministry of Justice also felt free to raise the maximum penalty for manslaughter from 15 years imprisonment to 25.

The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the decay and rot of the bourgeois political establishment in every country. The United States, the centre of world capitalism, has seen nearly 30 million confirmed cases and suffered over half a million casualties. Across Europe, over 36 million people have been infected during the pandemic—more than double the Dutch population. Over 850,000 lives were lost, more than the population of the city of Amsterdam.

The callous indifference to human suffering of the ruling elites is expressed by their prioritising of private profit over saving lives, and their denunciations of scientific evidence and medical advice.

French President Emmanuel Macron declared at a National Security Council meeting, “I’ve had enough of scientists who answer my questions about the variants with just one scenario: a new lockdown.” German President Wolfgang Schäuble declared that Germany’s Constitution “does not exclude us from having to die.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered workers to “accept that there will be more infections, more hospitalisations and therefore, sadly, more deaths.”

The media, trade union apparatus and pseudo-left outfits like Socialistisch Alternatief keep the working class tied to the political establishment by peddling illusions that workers can obtain something by working through this corrupt establishment. Socialistisch Alternatief recently published “voting advice” on its website, where they urge readers to vote SP “because there is still a part of this party that believes in socialism and is willing to take action for it.”

The policies adopted by the SP throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in fact prove the contrary.

Shorter holidays and longer work day under UK government’s school catch-up plan

Tom Pearce & Margot Miller


Ahead of the reopening of schools begun March 8 in England, with Scotland and Wales returned earlier, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced the government is considering a five-term year, a longer school day and shorter holidays in the summer. The six-week summer break could lose two weeks.

Boris Johnson during his televised speech from Downing Street on Tuesday evening (Credit: Downing Street--gov.uk)

The proposals will increase the risk of pupils and educators catching and spreading the coronavirus. Dressed up as an “education recovery package for children and young people” to catch-up on lost learning during the pandemic, it will intensify the exploitation of education workers—already exhausted by the government’s schools policies since the pandemic began.

Williamson told Sky News the government's education recovery commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, will "leave no stone unturned" in planning a catch-up programme. "We've got to look at what is going to have the biggest positive impact on children's lives,” he said.

The mind boggles at the pretence that children’s welfare is a government priority. Over the last decade, education has been starved of funding with billions of pounds cut. And everything it has done during the pandemic, driven by its homicidal herd immunity agenda, has severely impacted on children.

Children have lost parents, grandparents, become ill themselves and in a small number of cases died. The disruption to education is due to the government’s failure to stem the pandemic and fully resource safe remote learning.

The Tory’s refusal to implement the necessary public health measures to suppress the virus—with the direct collaboration of the Labour opposition and trade unions—and to financially support families and small businesses has led to a health and social catastrophe. The Covid death toll has surpassed 140,000, when including the virus being mentioned on a death certificate. Prime Minister Boris Johnson absurdly claimed, “The reopening of schools marks a truly national effort to beat this virus,” while telling the public to expect “ more infections, more hospitalisations… more deaths ”.

Speaking to the BBC, Williamson said, “[W]e are taking a cautious approach because we intend for it to be an irreversible approach and that schools will continue to remain open." This is in line with government policy that there will be no more lockdowns. He made a commitment that schools would reopen after the Easter break in April.

While Johnson said he was "very hopeful" the reopening of schools would proceed as planned, one school sent an entire year group home after only a week. The Metro reported last Friday that 230 students at Budmouth Academy in Weymouth, Dorset went home to isolate for 10 days after several year 10 pupils tested positive for Covid.

Last week, hundreds of children were sent home from at least 14 Greater Manchester schools only days after they reopened. On Monday, it was reported that a school in Gloucestershire school partially closed after confirmed Covid cases saw multiple year groups forced into isolation. The school was the fourth to be partially closed in the county in one week.

The education unions have been an indispensable prop in the reopening of unsafe schools, in the teeth of mass opposition from their members. The response of joint national secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), Mary Bousted, to the government’s “recovery support package” was only to complain that “The £200 million funding for the National Tutoring Programme won't be anywhere near big enough to meet the learning and social needs the Government have identified, which have been created by Covid disruption.” She added, “The NEU and the Sutton Trust [educational charity] have recommended to Government that £750 million is needed as the first immediate boost to Pupil Premium. Instead, £302 million has been announced.”

Bousted even praised the way the government are allowing reopened schools to use the few crumbs offered them. “Giving flexibility to schools to use the Recovery Premium in ways that they judge will best support their disadvantaged learners is vital. It is a rare recognition by Government that schools know best.”

Labour have described as a “national mission” shared with the Tories to have all schools fully reopened in the middle of a pandemic. Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green criticized the recovery package’s “lack of ambition”, calling for catch-up breakfast clubs.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Green announced the launch of a “Bright Future” taskforce to develop a national strategy for children’s recovery. Any progressive or child centred development will be absent, as the “taskforce” is under the leadership of former education secretary Estelle Morris—who worked under Tony Blair’s Labour government which started the Academy schools programme. Academies, publicly funded but privately run, were developed as a critical component of the marketisation of education.

Teachers have already raised concerns, epitomised by a TES article penned by London primary school head teacher Colin Dowland, with the headline, “Longer days? Shorter holidays? Watch the resignations.”

The government is utilising the pandemic to usher in long-planned education restructuring, to the detriment of educators and pupils. Williamson told Sky News the recovery package, to be developed over the next 18 months, will introduce fundamental changes in the education system.

The credentials of Williamson’s Education Recovery Commissioner Sir Kevan Collins are telling. He was chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation from 2011 to 2019. Prior to this, he was chief executive of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, overseeing a budget of £1 billion and 8,000 staff. In this post he implemented £50 million cuts over three years.

Bousted welcomed Collins’ appointment, saying, “We look forward to working with Sir Kevan Collins on a long-term strategy to respond to the inequality which blights children's lives.”

Successive Conservative and Labour governments have introduced reforms taking forward the marketisation of education claiming this would be the basis for “raising standards in education” and “closing the attainment gap.” Poverty, inequality and the attainment gap have increased under all governments.

Hand in hand with the redistribution of wealth from the poorer sections of society to the super-rich has been a raft of “reforms” in education, including the imposition of the market model and increasing privatization. These have been massively detrimental to teachers’ pay, pensions and conditions, and have contributed to a reversal of child-centred approaches to teaching and learning.

The following “reforms” were introduced without the unions lifting a finger.

* Local Management of Schools (1988) whereby schools control their own budget under conditions in which education funding has been slashed.

* The National Curriculum (1988), leading to target-driven teaching alongside rigorous testing and punitive Ofsted inspections.

* Turning schools into academies (begun in 2000 under Labour), which are privately run but publicly financed.

* The outsourcing of school support services to private companies.

Over this period, the workload of teachers has vastly increased, along with the stress levels of teachers and pupils.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee calls for emergency meetings in every school and campus to demand the closure of schools and other education settings, in order to implement policies to protect the population, provide adequate remote learning and defend livelihoods.

Pakistan government admits “dangerous” third wave of COVID-19 infections

Sampath Perera


Pakistan’s Islamist populist Tehrik-e-Insaaf government was forced to admit last Thursday that the country is in a “dangerous” situation, due to a fast spreading “third wave” of COVID-19 infections linked to the more contagious B.1.1.7 or “UK” variant.

However, Prime Minister Imran Khan, who in the past has vociferously opposed any measures to fight the pandemic that would impact on Pakistan’s economy, is refusing to order urgently needed social and public health measures to stop the spread of the virus and support the country’s largely impoverished population.

People enter the Empress Market, a colonial era market that is one of the busiest and most popular for shopping in Karachi. (IMF/ Creative Commons)

Local authorities are haphazardly attempting to lessen the spike in new cases with limited “lockdowns.” In the face of the federal government’s inaction, seven cities in Punjab, the province that is home to more than half of all Pakistanis, imposed limited lockdowns as of Sunday, similar to the localized measures taken in March 2020. Three sub-sectors of Islamabad, the country’s capital, also began enforcing a lockdown Sunday night.

Daily new cases have surpassed 2,000 for the first time since January with a positivity rate of 6.5 per cent, indicating an already significant presence of the virus.

Official figures show only 607,453 confirmed COVID-19 cases after a year of the pandemic. Just 13,537 people are officially recorded as having died due to the virus. These modest totals conceal a far worse reality in a country where the virus was allowed to spread virtually unchecked and where the health care system was on life support long before the coronavirus arrived.

A major contributor to the vast underestimation of infections by the official statistics is the lack of testing. Only around 173 tests per million people are being performed every day. Cities like Karachi and Lahore are densely populated, with millions forced to live in cramped slums.

Speaking to a March 11 press conference, Planning, Reforms and Special Initiatives Minister Asad Umar said there was “no doubt” that the third wave of the pandemic is underway. Umar heads the government’s response to the pandemic through the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) it established for that purpose. “The phenomenon” that is driving this wave, Umar said, “is the spread of the UK [variant],” which he admitted has now become the “dominant” form of the virus in Pakistan.

The UK or B.1.1.7 variant was first confirmed to be present in Pakistan in late December. At that time, Dr. Faisal Sultan, a special assistant to Prime Minister Khan, downplayed the danger it represented, claiming “even the British authorities don’t have any strong evidence if the virus has become more infectious.” In fact, British health experts were alarmed from the outset, identifying B.1.1.7 as a variant of “concern” in December. Subsequently, the new variant was shown to be both much more contagious and lethal.

Umar has now been forced to contradict Sultan’s earlier complacent and irresponsible claims. He has admitted that the variant is “more transmissible” and will infect more people, leading to more deaths, and that Pakistan now faces a “very dangerous situation.”

The Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) minister and former Engro CEO revealed that Pakistan’s fatality rate is already rising. “Our own statistics from the last few weeks show a sustained increase in our case fatality rate,” Umar said.

Yet Imran Khan and his PTI-led government are refusing to shut down non-essential businesses and provide social support to Pakistan workers and toilers so they can shelter at home, so as not to impede corporate profit-making and impinge on the wealth of the country’s venal capitalist elite.

An emergency meeting of the NCOC held on Saturday merely called for “strict implementation” of various social-distancing guidelines it issued in March 2020. Many of these guidelines are impossible for much of the population to follow, due to cramped living quarters and lack of access to sanitation and clean water. The NCOC said that “further steps for disease control, including expanded lockdowns” are “under consideration.”

The government’s indifference to the development of a third wave of COVID-19 infections is entirely predictable. After all, the brunt of this new stage in the pandemic will be borne by Pakistani workers and their families and the poor.

Pakistan’s government also has no plan to vaccinate the country’s 216 million people.

Ruling out buying vaccines from the pharmaceutical giants, the government has said Pakistan’s vaccination effort will be almost entirely dependent on COVAX, a vastly underfunded World Health Organization (WHO) initiative tasked with providing free vaccines to poor countries. China, Pakistan’s closest ally, has pledged to donate a million doses of its Sinopharm vaccine.

National Health Service (NHS) secretary Amir Ashraf Khawaja’s revealed that the government has budgeted no money to procure vaccines in a March 4 briefing to the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly, the lower house of Pakistan’s parliament.

Reporting on Khawaja’s comments, Dawn, Pakistan’s most widely read English daily, observed that the government aims to tackle the pandemic “through herd immunity and donated vaccines as it has no plan to buy vaccines at least during the current year.”

Since the initial reports of COVID-19 and the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic, the PTI government has shown a callous disregard of its impact on the population. It refused to adopt any lockdown measures, claiming Pakistan is too poor to do so because “people would die of hunger,” as Khan infamously put it. However, when a limited lockdown was forced on his government due to pressure from provincial governments and the military, Khan quickly set about spearheading a campaign to re-open the economy in April so as to protect corporate profits and investor wealth. Acting on the orders of the government and the military, the NCOC drafted guidelines known as “special operating procedures” or SOPs to provide a “public health” façade for the reopening of factories and other economic activities regardless of the spread of the virus.

Khan also refused to take even minimal measures to protect the population from the economic impact of the pandemic. Economic assistance was limited to a face-saving measure of four monthly payments of 12,000 rupees (about US$74.50) to 12 million low-income earners. Conservative estimates place the job losses at 20 million during the first months of the pandemic.

Hit by the economic fallout caused by the pandemic and Khan’s relentless implementation of International Monetary Fund-championed pro-market “reforms,” the country’s poverty rate has massively increased during the past year. According to the government’s own estimates, poverty has increased by 10 million, meaning that 60 million people live below the poverty line.

Despite relying entirely on donations to vaccinate its people, the Khan government is grandly propagandizing about its “vaccination drive,” with the number of times PTI spokespersons invoke the word “vaccine” appearing to be in inverse proportion to the number of Pakistanis actually getting vaccinated.

The government “launched” the vaccination of frontline health workers and the elderly on February 3, following the arrival of 500,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine from China, which has agreed to provide a further 500,000 free doses at an unknown date.

A month after the campaign had begun, Pakistan health authorities had administered just 197,000 doses.

Two-and-a-half million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were supposed to be delivered to Pakistan on March 2 as part of the WHO COVAX initiative were delayed “due to unexplained reasons,” according to a March 9 report. The authorities now expect them arrive later this month. Pakistan is aiming to source up to 45 million free doses from the COVAX initiative—most, if not all of which, will have been manufactured in India, its arch-rival.

At the same time, the government has allowed the commercial importing and selling of Drug Regulatory Authority-approved COVID vaccines and exempted them from price caps that otherwise would apply to imported drugs within the country. The cost of importing a single dose of China’s CanSino is said to be $13 or a little over 2,000 Pakistani rupees, putting it beyond the reach of the vast majority of Pakistanis.

Amid the raging pandemic and an unprecedented economic shock, nuclear-armed Pakistan increased military spending by 12 percent in its 2020/21 budget. Almost a fifth of the entire budget (18 percent) was allocated to the military. The only item to account for a larger portion of the budget was debt servicing. Yesterday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Pakistan the 10th largest arms importer in the world during the last 5-year period. Locked in a reactionary strategic conflict with India that has led to four all-out wars and countless war crises, including in 2016 and 2019, Islamabad is expanding its nuclear arsenal and high-tech missile stockpile so as to give it the capability to shower unimaginable destruction on India’s cities.

Biden launches barbaric attack on immigrants

Eric London


The scenes playing out across the US-Mexico border disqualify the US government from ever lecturing the world on “human rights,” its favorite pretext for invading countries and laying waste to entire societies.

The number of immigrant children detained by the US government has risen from 3,200 to 4,200 this week. Children report to attorneys that they are not allowed to shower and that they have not seen the sky in days. Yesterday, the Biden administration announced that instead of releasing children to family members, the government will transport 3,000 teenage boys to a Dallas convention hall, which they have chillingly dubbed an “immigrant decompression center.”

The events make clear that far from representing a break with Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is continuing and deepening his anti-immigrant policies. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the situation at the border a “humanitarian crisis,” as though the Biden administration and her own party were not primarily responsible for it.

The scant media attention to the attacks on immigrants has focused on the mass detention of unaccompanied children, presenting the matter as a “crisis.” Republican members of Congress traveled to the border on Monday, masquerading as the Child Protection League, declaring that the “barbaric” conditions of migrant children traveling to the US border “broke their hearts.” In other words, they want them kept out.

Perhaps even worse than the conditions imposed by the Biden administration on the children and youth that it has allowed to enter the country is its decision to summarily expel all arriving adult immigrants and those children crossing with relatives on the grounds that they pose a health risk due to the coronavirus.

In a late January letter to the Biden administration, dozens of medical experts explained that such “Title 42” expulsions serve no medical purpose: “Imposing restrictions on asylum seekers and other migrants based on immigration status is discriminatory and has no scientific basis as a public health measure.” Title 42 abolishes due process, ends the right to apply for asylum or other relief, and denies immigrants the right to appear for a hearing before expulsion. Seventy percent of the over 100,000 people who attempted to cross the border in February, including thousands of children, were expelled in this manner.

Those immigrants deported under Title 42 are sent back across the border after US authorities strip them of their possessions, including their shoelaces, leaving them to shuffle across bridges into Mexico. Many are flown hundreds of miles away from where they crossed, to be expelled at a different point along the border. Thousands presently find themselves homeless or detained along the US-Mexico border where the pandemic is spreading unabated.

In Mexico, immigrants are held in government facilities that a Doctors Without Borders official described as “worse than a makeshift camp, you don’t even have access to proper water.” The government of President AndrĂ©s Manuel LĂ³pez Obrador announced yesterday it has detained 1,000 children in such facilities, complying with demands by the Biden administration for a harsher crackdown. Mexican officials have also conducted a series of high-profile mass raids in recent weeks on behalf of the US.

The crackdown has resulted in death on a mass scale. On Saturday, the Guatemalan town of Comitancillo held a funeral for 11 town residents, who were murdered by gang members and their bodies burned in a car fire while trying to enter the US in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in January—a crime which Mexican authorities covered up. Earlier this month, a car packed with immigrants crashed while attempting to enter the US, killing 13 immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Adult immigrants and accompanied children who are “fortunate” enough to make it into the United States without summary expulsion are held in crowded detention centers where COVID-19 is also spreading like wildfire. There are presently 420 active cases in detention centers, up from 370 at the end of last week. A total of 10,000 detainees have been infected with the virus since the start of the pandemic.

As for those who are able to win release from detention centers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been dropping off sick COVID-positive immigrants in towns on the Texas side of the border to fend for themselves without medical attention and without informing medical officials or local non-profits.

This reality exposes the lie that the Democratic Party represents a “lesser evil” compared to the Trump administration’s fascistic attack on immigrants. Even under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, immigrants were ostensibly allowed to apply for asylum, unlike today.

The Biden administration will soon introduce its main immigration bill, the US Citizenship Act. In announcing the bill, Biden and Democrats will spew meaningless platitudes about how America is “a nation of immigrants” (one might add, despite their best efforts). But the bill does nothing to undo the criminalization of immigrants and will pave the way for millions of deportations, especially of those who are now trying to enter the United States, as well as those with criminal records.

Under the bill, immigrants will still have no right to an attorney, the network of immigration jails will remain open, the immigration court system will remain under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), child detention will remain “legal,” the border will be further militarized, hundreds of millions of dollars will go to arming Central American police and death squads and a “public information campaign” will be conducted to scare Central Americans away from trying to reach the US border.

Workers in the United States and Europe must come to the defense of their class allies in Mexico, Central and South America, rejecting the xenophobic propaganda coming from the capitalist parties and the corporate media.

Those risking their lives to enter the US and EU are workers, small farmers and ruined small shopkeepers from countries whose natural resources have been plundered and whose population has been exploited and suppressed by powerful corporations and imperialist-backed dictators for over a century.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 800,000 across Latin America. The World Economic Forum estimated that 500 million people will fall into poverty, while the International Labor Organization predicted that 1.6 billion informal jobs worldwide—including a large section of the working class in Latin America—will be lost or see huge wage cuts. The total amount of income loss suffered by the international working class in 2020 was $3.4 trillion, roughly equal to the amount gained by the world’s richest people. The World Bank reported that 800 million immigrant family members have lost $110 billion in remittance transfers from the US and Europe for food and other necessities.

Workers in the advanced and underdeveloped countries alike confront hardship as a direct result of the policies of the ruling classes. The global working class must mobilize its tremendous social power in the struggle against these conditions by uniting across national boundaries. For this reason, defending the democratic rights of immigrant workers is a strategic imperative in the fight for socialist revolution.

Minneapolis agrees to $27 million settlement for family of George Floyd

Trévon Austin


The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, will pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit filed by George Floyd’s family. The city council unanimously approved the settlement on Friday amid the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who is charged with murder and manslaughter for killing Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes on May 25, 2020.

Derek Chauvin

The Floyd family filed a civil rights lawsuit against Minneapolis, Chauvin and the three other former officers charged in Floyd’s death. The suit declared that the Minneapolis Police Department violated Floyd’s constitutional rights when they restrained him, and that the city created a culture of excessive force and impunity in its police department.

Ben Crump, the attorney for George Floyd’s family, called the deal the largest known pretrial civil rights settlement in US history. The Floyd family’s settlement surpassed the $20 million Minneapolis paid to the family of Justine Damond, the 40-year-old Australian-American woman who was killed by a police officer in 2017 after she called 911 to report a possible crime.

The latest settlement includes $500,000 to be spent on the south Minneapolis neighborhood that includes the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue where Floyd was killed, which has become known as George Floyd Square. Since his death, a massive metal sculpture and murals have been constructed in Floyd’s honor.

During a news conference Friday, Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, said he would return the money if he could see his brother again.

“I thank the state of Minnesota for getting this settlement taken care of,” he said. “But even though my brother is not here, he’s here with me in my heart. Because if I could get him back, I would give all of this back.”

He also expressed gratitude for the demonstrations against police brutality following his brother’s death.

“I want to be able to thank all the supporters, all the protesters for standing, especially during a pandemic,” Philonise Floyd said. “You put your lives on the line.”

George Floyd’s sister, Bridgett Floyd, said in a statement, “Our family suffered an irreplaceable loss May 25 when George’s life was senselessly taken by a Minneapolis police officer. While we will never get our beloved George back, we will continue to work tirelessly to make this world a better, and safer, place for all.”

Bridgette Floyd founded the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, which will honor her brother’s legacy as a “community-minded volunteer who would truly give the shirt off his back to someone who needed it.”

The news of the settlement comes amid jury selection in Chauvin’s trial. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, and a third-degree murder charge reinstated on Thursday. Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Defense attorney Eric Nelson said he was worried that the announcement of the settlement would make it impossible for Chauvin to get a fair trial.

“I am gravely concerned with the news that broke on Friday,” Nelson said, adding that the settlement announcement “has incredible potential to taint the jury pool.”

Nelson asked Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill to postpone the trial and asked if the trial could be moved to another city. Nelson also asked that the defense and prosecution be given extra “strikes” to remove jurors that might be biased after hearing of the settlement. Cahill stated he did not think it was appropriate to grant additional strikes but agreed to recall the seven jurors already selected for further questioning.

The seven jurors selected so far include five men and two women, ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s. Four of the jurors are white, one is multiracial, one is African American and one is Hispanic.

Meanwhile, Nelson dismissed a potential juror Friday after she acknowledged she had a negative view of Chauvin. In response to the questionnaire issued to jurors, the woman said she had a “somewhat negative” view of Chauvin and thought he held his knee on Floyd’s neck for too long.

“I could only watch part of the video, and from what I saw as a human, I, that did not give me a good impression,” she said. She said she did not watch the bystander video in its entirety because “I just couldn’t watch it anymore.”

The woman stated that she could set her opinions aside and judge the case objectively but was nonetheless dismissed.

The first potential juror questioned Monday told Judge Cahill she had inadvertently heard about the settlement and knew that it was a record sum. She said she guessed it meant the city did not think it would win the civil lawsuit.

“When I heard that I almost gasped at the amount,” she said, adding that she could not promise she could disregard it. Cahill excused the woman from the case.

Minneapolis remains prepared for potential demonstrations during the trial and in its aftermath. The city’s government center has been blockaded with concrete barriers, fencing, and barbed wire and is being guarded by National Guard troops. The earliest date for opening statements in Chauvin’s trial is March 29.