Biden’s and America’s Mental Illness is on Full Display

Dave Lindorff

It was just three weeks ago that our new “transformative” President Joe Biden joined that long almost unbroken list of war criminal presidents stretching back to #!, George Washington.

Biden joined this disgraceful list by ordering a bloody aerial bombardment by US warplanes in eastern Syria.

The US bombs, which were reportedly dropped on a a location in the city of Erbil, according to the British daily The Independent, killed as many as 22 people in the targeted buildings (assuming all the bombs actually landed on their intended targets). Most if not all of the victims were Iraqis described by the US as being part of two “Iranian-backed militias,” which were accused of being behind a rocket attack 10 days earlier that killed a US mercenary and wounded a Louisiana National Guardsman . The Pentagon called the attack, which employed seven 500-1b bombs, a “proportional response” to that earlier attack, which raises questions about the meaning of “proportional” (or about what the hell dictionary they use in the White House).

The Oxford Dictionary defines “proportional” as meaning “corresponding in size or amount to something else,” but it seems unlikely that a rocket attack by a militia group or two could come close in explosive power to seven bombs totaling nearly two tons of explosive, and besides, 22 deaths is unarguably way out of proportion in relation to a casualty toll of one dead and one wounded.

Aside from the ludicrous misuse of that term by the Pentagon and the reporters who dutifully scribbled it own in their notes and quoted it in their reports of the briefing without comment, there is another point that was left out: That those who were killed, even if Iraqi, were there in Syria at the behest of the Syrian government. The US mercenary killed and the US soldier wounded in Syria were in that country as invaders, in violation of both Syrian national sovereignty and international law.

That is why Biden made himself yet another US war criminal president.

But Biden didn’t stop there. After killing those 22 people, who could well have included innocent civilians, maybe even kids, who might have been in some of those buildings, a few weeks later he went on to label Russia’s Vladimir Putin a “killer” in a classic pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment.

Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst and Russia expert who co-founded the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, points out that ABC News talking head George Stephanopoulos provided Biden the opportunity for that name calling during an interview when he asked the stupid and pointless question: “Do you think Russian President Putin is a killer?”

Biden of course stupidly and hypocritically replied, “Yes.”

In McGovern’s view, that whole incident was likely a set up deliberately by someone in the State Department or the Pentagon who wanted to further bung up US-Russia relations, and I think Ray’s got a point. It’s not hard to imagine that being the case, given the way ABC, like the other major TV network news programs, employs retired Pentagon and State Department officials as paid news “commentators.” You can just imagine one of them saying, “Hey Steph, why don’t you ask Biden whether he think’s Putin’s a killer?”

Now Putin’s pissed off, Biden can’t back down, and we’re off to the races at the start of a new term with a childish deadlock that will make any kind of serious negotiating to ease tensions between the world’s two nuclear super-powers difficult if not hopeless. Nice job George, you thumb sucking imposter of a real journalist! You just gave an example of the workings of what Ray calls “MiciMatt “(that’s for Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank).

If the gambit of insulting Putin works, it’s worth at least another $100 billion for the Pentagon’s already record large coffers for the next fiscal year.

It’s just another sign of the madness of all involved — Biden, Stephanopoulos and, what the hell, Putin too.

The US at least is well and truly mad. Earlier this past week we had the madness of an angry white guy in Atlanta deciding, at least as he explained it to police, that seven Asian women in several licensed mall spas, including some old enough to be receiving Social Security benefits, had to be blown away by him because he felt they were taunting him with their beauty and making him have “bad thoughts.” He had no alternative, he said, but to kill them to stop them from tormenting him like that.

I really can’t decide who’s loopier, President Joe Biden or Robert Aaron Long. Biden is crazy to be trash-talking a foreign leader with whom he surely knows he must engage in serious negotiations, at least if there is to be any hope of lowering the risks of war and the certainty of spending this nation into bankruptcy, not to mention worsening a human rights disaster in civil war-torn Syria. And Long is crazy, like a lot of Americans, for thinking a bunch of Asian women trying just to make a living by easing people’s joint and muscle pains deserve to die (along with an unfortunate young bride who was, along with her husband, getting a his-and-hers, side-by-side massage wedding gift, and happened to be in his way.

The truth is that the whole US needs mental health counselling. Half the country is celebrating at having just installed in the White House a man who apparently is still living in the 1960s Cold War era with a foreign policy and appointees in national security posts that together seem hell-bent on creating two massive enemy nations, Russia and China, both armed to the teeth, instead of trying to achieve peaceful relations with both those countries. Meanwhile, the other half of the country are mostly white racists who want to prevent people of color from voting, and view anyone who is non-white regardless of birth or US citizenship as interlopers with no right to be here, and as deserving to be being beaten up, harassed or even killed. They are also, for the most part, people caught up in a delusional fantasy that the last election was “stolen” away from their hero, Donald Trump, a huckster so preposterous that it’s difficult to see how anyone — at least anyone sane — could take him seriously.

With the globe careening towards a disaster that could lead to the extinction of humanity, or at least the collapse of what we call civilization, and perhaps to the extinction of much of the earth’s entire biome, this is a crisis situation.

The US may represent only some 4.25% of the earth’s population but it is by far the world’s primary purveyor and inciter of violence. It’s also one of the the world’s greatest and most unapologetic producers of pollution (particularly if you include the share of pollution produced in China, Indonesia, India and other third world countries in the making and shipping of goods purchased by US residents). For this country to be focused on such misguided issues as a wholly unnecessary arms race, military confrontations and imaginary threats, and internal affairs that are not its own business, with such an existential crisis actually facing the US and all of humanity is not just depressing. it’s infuriating.

The UK’s Military Show Time

Kenneth Surin

Readers of any reliable news outlet will probably be aware that the UK’s Brexit rollout has been little short of a disaster.

Adding to the catalogue of Brexit failures, the UK is now being sued by the EU for extending unilaterally a grace period on food imports to the island of Ireland, where the EU and the UK share a land border, and where a special trade system was set up as part of the Brexit deal. The wheels of the international justice system grind slowly, so it may be a while before this case is resolved.

These readers may also be aware that, a successful Covid vaccination programme notwithstanding, the UK’s death toll from the pandemic is among the highest in the western world.

They may also be aware that the combination of Brexit and the pandemic has plunged the UK’s economy into depths not encountered for 300 years.

What better time, therefore, to conduct a review of existing defence arrangements, and to promise an upgrade of current weapons systems, as a hoped-for boost to the morale of Brits uneasy or depressed about the situation described above.

A war, started by the Americans on some pretext with the UK joining as the ever-loyal ally, might have served this morale-boosting purpose better, but a populace distracted by the pandemic and its ramifications may be less easily cajoled by previously effective recourses to bellicosity such as the invasion of Iraq.

So, time for Prime Minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson and Ukania to head to the weaponry gym where armaments, and other military paraphernalia, can be bulked-up for show without any imminent prospect of battle-field combat.

The UK Defence Review 2021called for an increase in expenditure of £40bn plus /$56bn plus on WMDs. China was very much its focus.

“China’s growing international stature is by far the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today…. The fact that China is an authoritarian state, with different values to ours, presents challenges for the UK and our allies. China will contribute more to global growth than any other country in the next decade with benefits to the global economy”.

BoJo, the ersatz Churchill, announced that the UK intends to deploy the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and supporting carrier strike group in Indo-Pacific waters later this year, perhaps in the hope that it will make China (2 aircraft carriers) tremble at the knees.

CounterPuncher Dave Lindorff has given a recent overview of Russia’s and China’s nuclear warfare capabilities.

Lindorff points out that China has 380 nuclear warheads, and is estimated to have 100 nuclear-capable missiles with a variety of ranges. It has 6 nuclear-missile carrying submarines, and 2 aircraft carriers, which are deployed close to home.

The UK has 4 Trident nuclear-missile carrying submarines.

The UK Defence Review calls for an increase in the UK’s stockpile of the Trident nuclear warheads from 180 to 260, the biggest increase since the end of the cold war.

However, to call Trident a “British” missile is something of a misnomer.

Trident missiles are designed and manufactured in the United States by Lockheed Martin. Maintenance and in-service support of the missiles is undertaken at King’s Bay, Georgia, USA. While Trident’s nuclear warheads are manufactured in the UK, they are patterned after their US equivalent, the American W76 warhead. The missiles are in effect leased from the US.

While the UK has operational control over its Trident missiles, it is impossible to believe that the UK’s missiles will be launched without prior American approval. A country receiving a submarine-launched Trident missile strike will probably have no way of distinguishing between US and UK missiles, since both use Trident, and thus could just as feasibly retaliate against the US as the UK.

Nuclear missiles are of course professed to be a deterrent, in response to an enemy’s first strike, but this renders their deployment moot, for the UK at any rate.

The (relatively tiny) UK fits into Oregon state, so an enemy strike, involving multiple nuclear warheads much more powerful than the single bomb dropped on Nagasaki (22 kilotons on Nagasaki vs a single Trident warhead-equivalent of 100 kilotons), directed solely at London would nonetheless wipe-out any semblance of everyday life in most of the UK, with the possible exception of a few islands to the far north of Scotland.

What then would be the point of a Ukanian retaliatory strike?

The UK Defence Review 2021also makes much of the threat posed by cyber-warfare, but there seems to be little connection between this trepidation and the decision to increase unilaterally the UK’s nuclear warhead stockpile by 40% and to lower significantly the bar for first use of WMDs.

This altered position, the review argues, is a response to the challenge posed by “emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact” to a strike by nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

It is not clear what the Tory government means by “emerging technologies”, just as it is unclear how adding to a stockpile of WMDs will counter the threat posed by a cyber-attack.

Unless the muddle-headed BoJo thinks that one way to respond to a cyber-attack would be to launch a Trident missile strike against the presumed cyber-belligerents. But this would be an act of sheer lunacy, involving the almost certain annihilation of his country in the ensuing counter-strike.

The underlying motivation for this baffling flummery lies elsewhere.

Ukania’s political elite, with even the Labour leader Keir Starmer joining in, is in the midst of a frenzy of flag-waving.

BoJo’s new “media room” in 10 Downing Street has no less than 4 union jacks in the back— Americans may think a room with a phalanx of flags is normal, but it isn’t for many Brits.

BoJo’s transport secretary, Robert “three homes” Jenrick, explained BoJo’s enthusiasm for the union jack thus: BoJo was using “a symbol of liberty and freedom that binds the whole country together”.

This is arrant nonsense. The northern Irish (especially its Catholic community) have little enthusiasm for Ukania, especially after the chaos brought to that part of Ireland by Brexit; Wales is devolved, has its own parliament, and polls show increased support for independence; and Scotland, the current leadership crisis in the Scottish National Party notwithstanding, seems to be bailing on the sinking HMS Ukania.

BoJo even tried to get packages of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine labelled with an image of the union jack, despite the fact that AZ is actually an Anglo-Swedish company with a French chief executive.

The Ukanian project is in its death throes, and no number of union jacks and Trident missiles is going to come to its rescue.

Despite rising COVID infection rates, German state education ministers refuse to implement lockdown

Gregor Link

The decisions of the recent summit of the heads of the German federal and state governments make clear once again that the ruling class is willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to secure the profits of the banks and corporations.

Although the number of cases—triggered by the decisions of the last federal-state conferences to reopen the economy and schools—is increasing exponentially and the pandemic in Germany continues to cost hundreds of lives every day, the latest meeting did not order the closure of any offices or factories. A passage on school closures, to be triggered “from an incidence [rate] of 200,” which was still included in a draft that became known yesterday, was also deleted without replacement. There were also no binding requirements made regarding testing and hygiene.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) together with Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) and Berlin Mayor Michael Müller (SPD) at the press conference after the Corona Summit on 22 March (Michael Kappeler/Pool Photo via AP)

Given the explosive opposition in the population, the “talks” were marked by considerable nervousness. With the words “we cannot carry on in public like this,” Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to have interrupted the joint discussions for individual talks that lasted five hours. The result of the 12-hour haggling behind closed doors was unanimously described by the media as the “toughest lockdown since the beginning of the pandemic.”

In the end, the existing shutdown over the Easter period was only to be extended by one day and combined with holding online religious services and restrictions on private contacts. At the same time, even some of the hardest hit regions will be allowed to reopen retail businesses under “temporary model projects.”

This murderous policy is justified by the “increasing availability of rapid and self-tests,” the use of which, however, is left to the discretion of the regional authorities and individual companies. “At the beginning of April, the trade associations are to report how many companies are participating,” t-online.de reported this morning.

Meanwhile, the available data leaves no doubt that tens and hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake in Germany and Europe in the coming weeks. In the last 10 days alone, the weekly incidence rate across Germany rose from 72 to 107 per 100,000—more than twice as much as in the previous 20 days. In Thuringia, led by the Left Party, the incidence rate of 210 is still twice as high as the national average.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the number of cases of the B.1.1.7 strain of the virus doubles every 12 days. The institute predicts a nationwide incidence rate of 300 at the beginning of the week after next and 350 after Easter.

At a case fatality rate of three percent—as reported by Worldometers for the past two months—these infections would result in 7,500 to 8,700 weekly COVID deaths nationwide.

However, this death toll could multiply as intensive care units (ICU) become overcrowded. Already, many urban and rural districts have run out of ICU beds. In more than 90 urban or rural districts, less than 10 percent of beds are unoccupied, especially in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse and Thuringia.

Despite the threat of mass deaths, no consequences are being drawn in the federal states and municipalities from the exponential growth in the number of cases. The “emergency brake” option set up by the last ministerial summit, consisting of ineffective measures, is not even applied in many places, although the incidence rate exceeds 100 in almost every second district. At the beginning of the year, a rate of 35 was still considered the limit beyond which the tracking of B.1.1.7 infections becomes impossible.

The question of whether a renewed closure of retail outlets should be considered because of the development of the pandemic was already answered in the negative by Reiner Haseloff (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), president of the Bundesrat (upper chamber of the federal parliament) at a press conference on Thursday. The changes in numbers were not due to shops being open, he explained, but to “day-care centres and schools.” The prime minister of Saxony-Anhalt thus contradicted the ceaselessly propagated lie of the education ministers, according to which children in schools were “safe” from coronavirus.

Then Haseloff made it clear that the federal and state governments had consciously accepted allowing the current contagion to spread among children. “We clearly stated that we would open up an increase potential for contacts—in our case 250,000 people.” This had been “known to everyone nationwide, including the chancellor.” To justify this, Haseloff explained that one had to “include day-care centres and schools.” Otherwise, one could have “written off the school year completely.”

According to the RKI report, the consequence of this policy is that the seven-day incidence rate among children between 0 and 14 years of age had recently doubled within four weeks. The number of active infections among underage school and kindergarten children rose by 42 percent to 3,190 cases within one week.

The most devastating expression of this development at present is in the town of Schrozberg in Baden-Württemberg, where the incidence rate rose to over 1,200 last week following a mass outbreak in a kindergarten. The approximately 70 cases included all eight kindergarten teachers at the facility.

In neighbouring Belgium, 50 percent of all hospitalised COVID patients are under 48 years old. On Saturday, Belgium’s education minister reported the results of a follow-up study that identifies “school and workplace” as the main source of infections, against the backdrop of likewise rising case numbers.

At the same time, intensive care specialists in Germany are also warning of the increasing threat of a Kawasaki-like syndrome that affects children and adolescents infected with the virus and can be life-threatening. Paediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS) produces a “distinct clinical picture” and has already been diagnosed in 238 children in Germany and Austria, according to Business Insider .

Triggered by a misdirected immune reaction, inflammatory processes occur in various organs or blood vessels. This is accompanied by a high fever and an unstable circulation. According to the Dresden PIMS Register of the German Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases (DGPI), the syndrome currently occurs in one in every 1,000 infected children. Children between the ages of seven and 10 are particularly at risk. In 59 percent of the documented cases, the child had to be admitted to an intensive care unit, and almost one in 10 patients suffered consequential damage.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, intensive care physician Dr. Christian Dohna-Schwake expressed concern about the “rising third wave” and that he expected more PIMS patients “soon.” The US has already recorded 33 deaths, and 15 children in Germany have so far suffered permanent heart damage from the disease, also known as MIS-C (Multi-Inflammatory Syndrome, Children).

Against the background of these clear facts and the general development of the pandemic, the resolution of the last Conference of Education Ministers (KMK) on Thursday can only be described as a political crime. The document written by the representatives of the federal states ignores the several hundred cluster infections at day-care centres and schools that have been independently registered by parents and teachers in recent weeks, as well as all the recommendations of leading medical experts and scientists.

While the education ministers view the effects of school closures on children and young people “with great concern,” the document does not have a single word to say about the dangers of infection and illness, including the consequential damage and potential infection of family members.

This is due to prioritising the profit interests of the ruling class. KMK President Britta Ernst (Social Democratic Party, SPD), for example, told the press on Thursday that face-to-face teaching was “of crucial importance” for children’s “further educational biography” and “school career”—i.e., their smooth transition to the labour market. This applied “especially to the little ones.”

Instead of allocating the billions needed for safe education, children and young people are to be increasingly herded into classrooms regardless of the incidence rate. “When making decisions about operating schools,” this should be “examined in perspective, whether the criterion of incidence [rates] should be supplemented by other criteria.” In general, day-care centres and schools should “remain open the longest in comparison to all other areas of life.”

To ensure this, the state governments have relied on cover-ups, long disproven lies and a concerted disinformation campaign, as they have since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, the ministerial resolution explicitly demands not to “stigmatise … children and adolescents” as a “danger” in the face of increasing mass outbreaks.

Such statements serve to deny the central role of schools and day-care centres in the general infection process. Schools, the document says, “operate under a very high level of infection control,” a lie that flies in the face of the government’s own statistics and all the field reports from teachers and parents.

Finally, in the style of far-right coronavirus deniers and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the education ministers claim “the expanded testing of children and adolescents” could lead to “a higher number of detected infections” and drive up the “incidence [rates] in the federal states.” There is no question of systematically recording mass testing at the vast majority of schools in Germany.

Opposition to this policy, which was already evident in North Rhine-Westphalia last week, is growing strongly, especially on social media. “People, parents—please leave your children at home from Monday,” wrote paediatric nurse Brigitte W., for example, in a viral post on Twitter. “I can’t imagine teachers reporting you to the ministry. Teachers have common sense too. Report the children sick, take a stand and take action. It’s about the health of your families!”

Sandro, a young father from North Rhine-Westphalia, sums up federal and state policies in an accusatory video on YouTube. “For a year, serious science has been largely ignored.” While the pandemic was developing as predicted by science, the government continued to “play down, ignore and disinform.” The population was being “demoralised and divided” and “children and families exposed to incalculable risks.” “Reasonable parents” were “incapacitated, criminalised and terrorised” by the authorities—their endangerment was “consciously accepted,” he said.

France: Protests continue against police violence and the “global security” law

Alex Lantier

On Saturday, dozens of demonstrations took place across France in opposition to police violence and the “global security” law that passed its first reading in the Senate on Thursday.

The United Nations condemned the “global security” law when the Macron government proposed it last year, saying its ban on filming police officers undermined “democratic control of public institutions.” Nevertheless, both houses of the French parliament are set to approve the law. Devised by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, a former member of the far-right Action Française, it aims to free the police state from any restraint in its operations against strikes and demonstrations.

A woman holds a poster, center, that reads, "towards an authoritarian state? that is not going to happen" during a demonstration Tuesday, March 16, 2021 in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Demonstrations were held in Lille, Rouen, Rennes, Nantes, Brest, Limoges, Toulouse, Marseille, Nîmes, Lyon, Strasbourg and dozens of other cities, called by the collective #StopLoiSecuriteGlobale. The group includes journalists unions, the Human Rights League and groups of “yellow vest” protesters previously injured or mutilated by the police.

The police allowed the protests to go ahead, even though the Macron government had announced on Thursday that it was imposing a new pseudo-lockdown. This only served to re-emphasise that the government, which is keeping nonessential industries and schools open, is opposed to a genuine policy of social distancing. While France has passed the milestone of 4.3 million cases and 90,000 deaths from COVID-19, it is allowing new variants of the virus to spread.

The demonstrations revealed a basic contradiction. While the government is discredited by its disastrous health care policy and is setting up an authoritarian regime, only a few thousand people participated. It is clear that this is related to the silence of the protest organisers on the central questions facing the working class: social austerity and especially the COVID-19 pandemic. These groups have nothing to say about Macron’s policy against workers or are even complicit in it.

The demonstrators’ demands against police violence are legitimate and enjoy wide support. After last year’s police beating of a peaceful music producer, Georges Zecler, was captured on video at his studio in Paris, an Ifop poll showed that only 37 percent of the population trusted the police. But the statements by the protest organizers, such as the #StopLoiSecuriteGlobale collective, were silent on the pandemic.

There were 500 protesters in Lyon, where a police helicopter was deployed overhead; 400 in Rennes and 300 in Lille, where protesters chanted “cops, rapists, murderers” and “police everywhere, justice nowhere.” In Bordeaux, a “Truth and Justice” procession of several hundred people representing mutilated “yellow vests” marched through the city. In Paris, where demonstrators carried signs reading “Liberté, égalité, éborgné” [liberty, equality, maimed to lose an eye] or “Floutage de gueule, démocratie floutée”, between 5,000 and 10,000 people demonstrated.

Several families of victims of police violence spoke in Paris. Assa Traoré, the leader of the Adama Traoré Collective and sister of Adama Traoré, who was choked to death by the police in 2016, addressed the crowd. She listed the protesters’ demands, including “an end to permanent identity checks,” the suspension of accused police officers, and “a ban on choking techniques.” She chanted, “No justice, no peace” with the protesters.

“In a democratic country, you don’t have the right to kill. Don’t kill us, we didn’t deserve this,” said Christian Chouviat, the father of Cedric Chouviat, a 43-year-old delivery worker who was choked to death by police during a traffic stop in central Paris.

The media imposed a near-universal blackout on the protests, despite the widespread opposition to the Macron government. On Twitter, however, there were numerous tweets to the protest linking it to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a racial political movement whose leaders are closely connected to the Democratic Party in the US.

While Macron is pursuing the same policy of herd immunity that has led to almost 900,000 COVID-19 deaths across Europe and is building up a police state, the protest organisers were calling on Macron and Darmanin to negotiate with them.

Their statement calling the protest demanded “the opening of discussions with the Ministry of the Interior and the parliamentary group La République en Marche,” Macron’s party. It called for a “social dialogue” between the unions and the government. “This bill aims to undermine the freedom of the press, the freedom to inform and be informed, freedom of expression, in short, the fundamental public freedoms of our Republic. Social dialogue, democracy, that is all that we, journalists, producers, citizens, aspire to.”

Yet there is nothing to negotiate with Macron. He has chosen a murderous coronavirus policy for the same reasons that he is pursuing austerity and the militarisation of France’s external and internal security. He represents the financial aristocracy and French imperialism in the midst of a historic economic and social crisis of world capitalism. Macron will do everything to ensure that workers stay at work so that profits continue to accumulate in the pockets of the banks and corporations.

The national union federations whose journalists unions were demonstrating yesterday—including the General Federation of Labour (CGT) and Solidaires—are steeped in this political criminality. They organised the return to work and reopening of schools in the late summer of 2020, when the spring lockdown had limited the circulation of the virus. But while it was still circulating, there was no proper tracking system put in place. There have been 62,000 deaths from COVID-19 in France and 700,000 in Europe since then.

In the summer, the CGT signed a protocol to approve the European Union bank and corporate bailouts, which handed more than two trillion euros to the banks and big companies.

The government, political establishment and trade union apparatuses of the ruling class are doing everything possible to impose a deadly health care policy. This is clearly impacting on social layers who are disoriented and demoralised by the social isolation resulting from the pandemic.

In Marseille and Annecy, several thousand young people gathered for a “carnival,” without masks and without social distancing measures. “Young people are fed up with being confined,” said Romain in Marseille, where there were 6,500 young people participating in the carnival.

“I know lots of friends who are going to Madrid, where everything is open. So it’s good to see that,” Quentin, a 26-year-old medical intern, told Le Monde .

With more than 30,000 new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed every day in France, it is statistically certain that this irresponsible carnival will spread the coronavirus. However, the denunciations of the event coming from Interior Ministry spokesman Camille Chaize, who pointed to the “partyers who, in total irresponsibility, participated in this carnival.” But this irresponsibility is promoted incessantly from the top of the police state itself.

Right-wing Rutte government wins re-election in Netherlands

Parwini Zora

Incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte is projected to have won the March 17 Dutch elections and is set to lead a fourth coalition government after a decade in power in the Netherlands. It was a widely expected victory by default, under conditions where none of the established parties opposed Rutte’s policies of austerity and “herd immunity” on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Official election results are to be finalised and announced on March 26. However, exit polls show Rutte’s right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) won 22 percent of the vote and 36 seats, three more than in 2017, in the 150-seat Tweede Kamer. This slight increase was mainly due to first-time voters and a shift in votes away from the VVD’s own former coalition partner, the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), and the 50Plus retirees party.

Rutte with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on 18 July 2019 (Photo: The White House)

The liberal D66 party, another VVD coalition partner, emerged as the main beneficiary of the 2021 elections, with its highest vote ever since its foundation in 1966. It won 15 percent of the vote and 24 seats, five more than in the previous election, becoming the second-largest party in parliament. While as many as a quarter of D66 voters came from the VVD, many also came from former voters for the ex-Maoist Socialist Party (SP), the Green Left, and the Labour Party (PvdA).

The elections have only confirmed that the Dutch political establishment is utterly impervious to the social aspirations and demands of the working class. In the last decade, Rutte has led three coalition governments, imposing draconian austerity and police-state measures, and slashing social spending by €47.4 billion just in the 2011-2016 period. Rutte’s “herd immunity” policies have helped lead to a situation where a country three times smaller than the US state of New York, with a population of 17.4 million, has seen 1.2 million cases and 16,260 dead of COVID-19.

The Dutch far right continued to gain ground, winning a total of 29 seats. Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) performed worse than predicted, however, coming only third with 17 seats, three fewer than in 2017. The Forum for Democracy (FvD) of Thierry Baudet, who received widespread media coverage during the election campaign, is expected to quadruple the number of seats it had, to eight, having obtained 5 percent of the vote.

The far right capitalized on riots they organized against the curfews the Rutte government imposed as a token social-distancing measure against the pandemic. It could only do so, however, because no political party spoke for opposition to Rutte in the working class, on his left, calling for a lockdown policy determined by scientists and medical professionals to halt the spread of the virus.

This reflects the political bankruptcy of the PvdA, Green Left, and the SP, all of whom essentially accepted Rutte’s political agenda. This allowed D66, and thus the Rutte government, to politically profit by posing as the only alternative to the far right. The Brussels-based German think tank, International Politics and Society, wrote that D66 were “the loudest opponents of Dutch right-wing populism. And D66 totally overran the left parties.”

While the PvdA, which has stagnated for years, remained unchanged at nine seats, the SP and the Green Left each lost almost half their seats to finish with respectively nine and seven seats. “It’s painful,” GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver told Politico-Europe, adding: “GreenLeft has gained in many elections in a row, so it takes some getting used to losing now.”

SP leader Lilian Marijnissen said, “we’d hoped for more, and perhaps expected more too,” and Politico reported that Marijnissen’s “gut feeling was that the coronavirus crisis had dented the party’s results.”

The SP’s alignment on Rutte’s herd immunity policy not only explains its electoral failure, but also exposes it as a petty-bourgeois party hostile to the workers. The SP ran a campaign based on accepting the European bourgeoisie’s herd immunity policy, and instead, dividing the working class by relentlessly targeting Muslims and immigrants with calls to step up draconian police-state measures. Marijnissen made clear in public interviews she could join a Rutte government.

Campaigning on this right-wing basis, the SP ceded many of its votes either to D66 or to the FvD, 8 percent of whose voters were former SP voters.

They played a crucial role in the political calculations of the Rutte government and the entire Dutch bourgeoisie, who organized these elections in an attempt to bury a devastating scandal threatening to bring down the government.

Rutte’s coalition officially resigned in January following the exposure of the state’s witch hunt, over a decade, of at least 20,000 beneficiaries of child benefit. Public parliamentary hearings exposed a ruthless and vindictive state apparatus, which falsely alleged benefit fraud and ruined families, primarily of immigrant backgrounds, demanding that they repay years of child benefit. The ruling establishment as a whole was implicated in this fascistic persecution of immigrants and Muslims.

The election was designed to present voters with a false choice between the political status quo and neo-fascist reaction. On this basis, despite the Rutte government’s murderous and reactionary record, it seems that Rutte was able to hang on to power.

The population has clearly been politicized by the pandemic and the deepest social and economic crisis the Netherlands and Europe have seen in decades. An I&O Research and Ipsos-EenVandaag poll found that voter turnout in the Dutch election reached a 30-year record. With 82.6 percent of eligible voters casting their ballots, over 60 percent said “health care” was the central issue for them in the elections.

With the SP and its political satellites working to block a movement to the left among workers, however, there was no alternative for workers to express their opposition to herd immunity policy and to European Union austerity measures. Under these conditions, the vote went either to the dead end of the D66 or of the far right.

As one distorted expression of mass discontent towards official parties, three new, smaller parties entered parliament. The Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) secured one seat. Two middle class parties, the free-market Volt Europe party and the BIJ1 party led by former TV and radio presenter Sylvana Simon, attracted a mostly Amsterdam-based constituency centred on postmodernist identity politics of race and gender.

Alluding to entrepreneurs funding Volt Europe, the New York Times ran a piece on the Dutch elections throwing the limelight on Volt, stating, “for years, right-wing populists have been a driving force in the Netherlands. But this week a pan-European party called Volt shook things up.” The Times speculated that Volt, whose leader in the Netherlands, Laurens Dassen, investigates money laundering for ABN Amro Bank, could join the Rutte government. It also highlighted the BIJ1 party, which it called “anti-capitalist.”

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a particularly devastating exposure of the bankruptcy of such organisations, however, which ignore critical needs of the working class and adapt themselves to the policies of militarism and social austerity dictated by the European financial aristocracy.

Half the Dutch population does not have access to affordable housing, with homelessness doubling between 2009 and 2019 to 40,000, a million people live below the official poverty line, and more than 30 percent of the entire workforce subsists on flex-contract jobs. None of these critical issues were seriously addressed in the campaign. The Netherlands—the last country to start a vaccination programme in Europe, which slashed half its intensive care units under the last three Rutte governments—brought him back to power by default.

Police in Germany clear streets to protect illegal demo by far-right coronavirus deniers

Christoph Vandreier

Up to 20,000 right-wing extremists and COVID-19 deniers marched through the Hessian city of Kassel on Saturday, attacking journalists and terrorising those opposing the demonstration. Police reacted by not only allowing the fascist mob to proceed, they cleared the streets for the illegal march and brutally attacked counter-demonstrators. They clearly sought to intimidate anyone who supports social distancing rules under conditions where infection figures in Germany are rising exponentially.

Arguing on the basis of health considerations, a court decided that a single rally of 6,000 participants could take place outside the city centre. Thousands of demonstrators defied this legal requirement and marched in a number of different columns toward the city centre. They refused to respect the requirement to wear masks or the minimum distance recommendations.

Police officers clear a bicycle blockade (Image: Twitter screenshot)

Demonstrators carried placards with slogans such as “End the lockdown” or “Take off the masks.” Many participants carried German flags, imperial flags or—as is usual at xenophobic Pegida demonstrations—the flags of the federal states from which they had travelled. Also on display were the identification badges of right-wing extremist organisations such as the Third Way party or the Q-Anon conspiracy group. The victims of National Socialism were mocked by persons wearing yellow stars and carrying portraits of the prominent victim of the Nazi holocaust, Anne Frank.

In the run-up to the demonstration, the far-right milieu had mobilised for the Kassel demo throughout Germany and Europe. Appeals were made in far-right forums to “explore the city centre” and not comply with health protection measures.

The demonstrators moved through the city centre from noon onwards and assembled at the city’s central Friedrichplatz, where they remained for the afternoon. The last of the demonstrators were only dispersed by police at around 7 p.m. For the rest of the day the demonstrators were able to move through the city centre largely unmolested. Police only resorted to the use of batons and tear gas when they were directly attacked with stones and bottles.

In the city centre, demonstrators not only endangered the health of residents and passers-by, they also repeatedly attacked journalists and counter-demonstrators. One video shows the photojournalist Felix Dressler being knocked down by a demonstrator. A camera team from Hessian Radio was also attacked and many other reporters were threatened.

Numerous videos on social media also document how right-wing demonstrators beat people who peacefully stood in the way of the illegal marches with their bicycles. The Left Party reported that one of its members, Ali Timtik, was a victim of racial insults and was injured so badly by punches and pepper spray that he had to be taken to hospital for emergency care.

The right-wing thugs were often supported by the police to the applause of the pandemic deniers. A video shows a police officer brutally pulling a young woman from the road and then hitting her head with force against the handlebars of her bike. The woman fell to the ground. Other videos show police officers being cheered by the right-wing extremists as they drag counter-demonstrators away and beat them, thereby freeing the path for the far-right mob.

A picture widely shared on social media shows a uniformed policewoman making a heart gesture in solidarity with the Corona deniers. In addition to Hessian police officers, police units from North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia, which is governed by the Left Party, were involved in the operation.

Following the operation on Saturday evening, a spokesperson for the police stated that they had deliberately not intervened following consultation with all of the relevant authorities. Even though the “vast majority” of the demonstrators “neither complied with police dispersal orders nor observed hygiene or distance rules,” the police had not intervened in order to avoid a “not inconsiderable number of injuries on all sides.”

Despite the contradiction between this claim and the brutal scenes of violence throughout the day, the police spokesperson went on to explain: “The participants apparently came predominantly from the political (bourgeois) centre and on the whole tended not to show any recognisable tendency towards violent actions.”

This glorification of the right-wing demonstration was supported by leading politicians. The parliamentary secretary of the CDU faction in the Hessian state parliament, Holger Bellino, defended the actions of the police, saying: “We thank our police for their commitment and the consistent crackdown.” The mayor of Kassel, Christian Geselle (SPD), said on Sunday: “From my point of view, one cannot criticise the police on the spot.”

Some politicians have since called for clarification of what took place and have feebly criticised the police operation in order to dampen down the angry response on social media to the police tactics, based on the available videos and pictures.

In fact, all of the parties involved in the meeting on Monday between the federal and state governments agreed they would resist taking genuinely effective lockdown measures to contain new, highly dangerous COVID-19 variants. Although businesses and schools are among the main drivers of the pandemic, industrial production is to be maintained without any restrictions and schools will remain open so that parents can go to work. Corporate profits are placed before the lives and health of workers.

To enforce these policies, Germany’s main political parties and the media have long relied on the mobilisation of far-right forces, such as those who rallied in Kassel. Since the beginning of the pandemic, such protests have received excessive media attention and, like the prior xenophobic Pegida marches, have been glorified as protests by “concerned citizens.”

The right-wing extremists’ links to the state apparatus, so evident on Saturday, are well documented. Especially in the state of Hesse, numerous neo-Nazi networks in the police have been uncovered in recent years. One such network sent threatening letters to leftist lawyers, journalists and politicians calling itself the “NSU 2.0.” Its activities were then covered up at the highest level.

Kassel is also the city where district president Walter Lübcke was murdered by a member of the militant neo-Nazi milieu which has been active there since the 1990s and has been heavily penetrated by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Large demonstrations by pandemic deniers have been repeatedly organised whenever the government’s policy of opening up the economy and society has been met with growing resentment. Meanwhile, almost 75,000 people have died in Germany because of the “profits before lives” policy. Now, with the refusal to close businesses and schools, tens of thousands more lives are threatened. At the same time, there has been a complete failure on the part of the government to organise vaccinations and a proper testing regime. It is against this background that those who oppose the government’s course are being intimidated.

Hurricanes, unchecked pandemic produce humanitarian disaster in Nicaragua

Andrea Lobo

A humanitarian disaster has developed in Nicaragua as the government of President Daniel Ortega crawls before corporate interests, particularly US imperialism, in its response to compounding political, economic and environmental crises.

Three years after cracking down on mass protests triggered by pension cuts demanded by the IMF, leaving over 300 dead and hundreds more injured, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) administration has employed increasingly authoritarian means to suppress popular opposition to its herd immunity policy toward the COVID-19 pandemic.

Town of Haulover after Hurricanes Eta and Iota (Twitter @MisticaRevoluc1)

Most pressingly, four months after two major hurricanes devastated much of the impoverished northern Caribbean region of Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands remain deprived of basic necessities.

About half a million people in the northern Caribbean coastal region remain without running water, according to UNICEF, and “are relying on rainwater for consumption and sanitation” as the dry season begins. The agency adds that 1.8 million people are still in need of humanitarian aid, including 720,000 children.

The predominantly Miskito indigenous communities in the Caribbean region have been struggling for months with limited food, power and no water, while they struggle to reconstruct their homes from fallen trees.

An Onda Local report published last week found that the government aid has been limited to insufficient zinc sheets, nails and kitchenware, while residents demand wood, water, food and clothes. Moreover, relocations of entire towns and solid infrastructure for homes, roads, bridges, public buildings, water treatment and power are urgently needed as experts warn of a further intensification of storms due to global warming.

At Haulover, which had more than 1,000 inhabitants, the economy was based on receiving tourists attracted to its beaches, now turned into a mosquito-ridden wasteland.

At Wauhta Bar, which depends on agriculture, a woman explained: “We do several kinds of jobs here, our own businesses. Before the hurricane, we raised animals, sold fish. … But we are now entirely paralyzed.” Families have no money to invest in grains, animals or boats, the report adds.

Children sit outside destroyed home in Bilwi, Nicaragua, November 5, 2020 (© UNICEF, Tadeo Gómez)

The United Nations World Food Program estimated that the population going hungry multiplied by four in the last two years in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, with 1.7 million suffering an “emergency” level of food insecurity. Food scarcity is particularly critical along the Pacific region, which has been dubbed “The Central American Dry Corridor” after years of severe droughts.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus continues to spread unhindered. The Health Ministry has reported a total of 6,582 coronavirus cases and 176 deaths—the lowest official death toll per million in the Americas, except for Haiti. However, the Ortega administration never implemented a shutdown of schools or nonessential activities, and these figures are a gross undercount. Reports of overwhelmed hospitals and nightly burials as early as May 2020 were followed by a wave of firings of outspoken health care workers.

The COVID-19 Citizens Observatory, composed of public health care workers and officials who compile figures on suspected COVID-19 cases and deaths based on symptoms, has reported a total of 13,728 suspected cases and 3,009 deaths as of March 17, including 117 fatalities among health care workers. The report cites seven new deaths in the previous week and warns specifically of growing outbreaks among students and teachers.

A multidisciplinary scientific committee, also created by health care specialists during the pandemic, found that just between March and August, according to government data, the country saw 7,772 excess deaths.

The vaccination program began on March 2 on patients with chronic comorbidities, against the World Health Organization recommendation to begin with health care personnel. The country has received 135,000 doses from the UN-led COVAX Program and 6,000 doses donated by Russia.

Baseball game in Bilwi, March 21, 2021. Photo by the Regional Autonomous Government of the Northern Caribbean, promoting mass gatherings under the caption 'families enjoy games in peace and love.'.

The Sandinista officials have boasted that the country saw a 9.5 percent increase in exports during 2020, presumably the only country in the world with such a jump. The chair of the Economics Commission in Parliament, Wálmaro Gutiérrez, exclaimed on television: “The reality, the facts, the results have demonstrated that the decision to not close the economy was the most correct.”

But while major textile and agricultural transnationals continue pumping profits from Nicaragua’s poorly paid workers, commerce and other sectors were gravely hit given that most Nicaraguans have sought to limit their own exposure to the virus. About 21,000 formal jobs affiliated to the social security system were lost in 2020 and many more were lost in the informal sector, which comprises 75 percent of the workforce.

The business consulting firm Copades, which has previously hailed Ortega’s policies, estimated that about 30 percent of the economically active population did not generate any income in 2020, and denounced the government for not providing any aid whatsoever to workers or small businesses.

The UN Economic Commission for Latin America forecasts that the percentage of individuals under the poverty threshold will increase from 46 percent to 50.7 percent due to the 2020 crises.

Since the mass protests and repression of 2018, 88,000 Nicaraguans have requested political asylum in Costa Rica, where over 300,000 Nicaraguans live. The super-exploited Nicaraguan migrants represented at one point one-third of all infections in Costa Rica, even as the percentage with jobs fell from 93 percent to 59 percent in 2020, according to the UN.

While tax revenues remained relatively stable, the FSLN administration requested $1.67 billion in loans in 2019-2020. This includes at least $185 million from the IMF, approved last November. This is politically significant given the absolute rejection of Venezuela’s request for an emergency loan. The IMF has expressed great confidence in Nicaragua’s ability to pay back its loans, even after three consecutive years of recession.

“A widening of the budget deficit this year to preserve public health and contain the economic impact of the pandemic is appropriate,” the IMF announcement reads. It adds: “The authorities are committed to safeguard medium-term debt sustainability and rebuild buffers once the pandemic abates,” including “structural reforms.” These are the usual euphemisms for deep social cuts.

Behind this assurance lies the willingness of the Ortega regime to brutally suppress opposition in the working class against austerity and to sacrifice countless lives for corporate profits during the pandemic. A constitutional reform approved in January will punish open-ended “hate crimes” with life sentences, while 13 of the participants during the 2018 protests remain behind bars.

Nicaragua is the only Central American country that didn’t record a public deficit for 2019, after its social spending fell 3.3 percent. Social spending per capita fell from $207 to $190, making it next to Honduras the lowest in the Americas, compared to over $2,500 in Chile and Uruguay.

Beyond its pro-investor policies, the most important step in winning the favor of US imperialism has been the abandonment of the project to build a transoceanic canal with a Chinese firm, which disappeared from public discussion after the 2018 protests. Under Ortega, Nicaragua has also participated in the yearly Panamax military exercises sponsored by the United States on the pretext of protecting the Panama Canal.

This rapprochement with Washington has been reciprocated through IMF loans, a symbolic amount of USAID assistance after the hurricanes, and a regime of sanctions on officials and public institutions that has remained far less onerous than those destroying the economies of Iran and Venezuela.

The thuggish threats by Washington have continued, however, to keep the Ortega regime aligned with US imperialism as Washington escalates its “great power” confrontation with China and Russia.

Biden’s State Department accused Ortega of pushing Nicaragua toward “dictatorship,” while the US Southern Command chief, Adm. Craig Faller, named Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as “malign regional state actors.” Faller claimed Russia is employing security and humanitarian assistance “in a strategy to subjugate the Nicaraguan government and counter U.S. regional goals,” while significantly not mentioning China.

Moreover, in 2020, the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) disbursed $1.57 million for its programs in Nicaragua, which are used to finance anti-Ortega media, political parties and protest groups. This brings the total spent by the NED in Nicaragua to $6 million in the past five years.

Nonetheless, these US-sponsored organizations, including politicians and student leaders who physically reported to the US State Department, played a key role in channeling mass demonstrations behind futile talks with the Ortega administration throughout 2018.

On Monday, Biden named Ricardo Zúñiga, former director for Western Hemisphere Affairs in Obama’s National Security Council, as his special envoy to the Northern Triangle of Central America. During a recent discussion hosted by the Inter-American Dialogue, he joined several think-tank pundits and former Central American presidents in appealing to Biden to include Nicaragua in its $4 billion plan for the Northern Triangle, with Zúñiga stating “Nicaragua should be part of everything.”

At the Inter-American Dialogue forum, Cristiana Chamorro, likely presidential candidate and daughter of the former US-backed president Violeta Barrios, called the Ortega regime “a threat for the security of the American continent,” only to appeal immediately to the Biden administration to “negotiate with Ortega and understand what Ortega needs in this moment,” and to eventually “begin deep negotiations to restore democracy.”

The US-backed opposition parties, which remain overwhelmingly unpopular according to polls, have denounced police harassment and efforts to disrupt their campaigns ahead of the November 2021 presidential elections. However, while they remain deeply divided, they have insisted on participating in the elections and pursuing a common ticket.

The right-wing policies and widespread poverty overseen by the FSLN, which first came to power during the 1979 Revolution as one of the most radical petty-bourgeois nationalist movements in the hemisphere, stand as proof of the dead end represented by all pro-capitalist nationalist tendencies, long promoted as alternatives to the fight for a genuinely Marxist leadership in the working class.