Divisions over Russia policy erupt inside EU at Brussels summit

Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

On Thursday, European Union (EU) heads of state met for a two-day summit in Brussels that endorsed EU policy on the pandemic, while clashing bitterly on foreign policy, especially Russian.

On Thursday evening, the EU issued an initial summit communiqué whitewashing its pandemic policies in Orwellian terms. It hailed “good progress on vaccination and the overall improvement in the epidemiological situation” and stressed “the EU’s commitment to international solidarity in response to the pandemic.”

Angela Merkel [Wikipedia Commons]

In reality, over 1.1 million people have died in Europe due to EU opposition to scientific social-distancing policies. It kept hundreds of millions of workers and youth on the job and at school, even in many of the deadliest weeks of the pandemic. Now, EU states are pressing to end all social distancing, even as the Delta variant spreads, threatening a new contagion. Moreover, EU countries are starving the Covax global vaccination program of doses, pledging to deliver only 100 million by the end of 2021 though they have already administered 325.1 million doses in Europe.

The heart of the summit, however, was planning an aggressive imperialist foreign policy, targeting refugees and Russia. Even before the summit opened, conflicts were mounting over EU relations with Moscow, after the bilateral summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month.

It came after a dangerous incident on Wednesday between Russia and Britain in the Black Sea, in which Russian aircraft dropped a bomb in the path of a British destroyer allegedly violating Russian territorial waters in the Black Sea. In response, Berlin and Paris proposed to renew EU-Russia talks, which have been suspended since the 2014 NATO-backed regime change operation in Ukraine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel floated the proposal before the German parliament on Thursday morning. “It is not enough for the US president to speak to the Russian president. I am very happy about that, but the European Union must also create different formats for discussion,” she said. Citing wars in Libya and Syria, Merkel added: “We must define an agenda of common strategic interests, for instance on climate protection, but also in the areas of peace and security.”

French President Emmanuel Macron supported her remarks as he arrived in Brussels on Thursday. “Dialog is necessary to stabilize the European continent but it must be firm, as we will not give up any of our values or of our interests,” Macron said. He added, “We cannot remain on a purely defensive attitude to Russia, on a case-by-case basis, while, very legitimately, we saw a structured discussion unfold between President Biden and President Putin.”

The proposal went too far for most EU states and was rejected out of hand, especially by Eastern European governments. The Polish government demanded that Putin first meet EU demands, first and foremost the implementation of the Minsk agreement on Ukraine. Approaching Russia before that would be “a bad signal,” said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, right at the start of the EU meeting. “It would be like trying to talk to the bear to save some of the honey.”

Instead, the EU called for a tougher course against Russia. Its communiqué “stresses the need for a firm and coordinated response by the EU and its Member States to any further malign, illegal and disruptive activity by Russia, making full use of all instruments at the EU’s disposal, and ensuring coordination with partners.” To this end, the EU Commission and the High Representative are tasked to “present options for additional restrictive measures, including economic sanctions.”

In reality, the proposal of Merkel and Macron had nothing to do with a more peaceful policy. It aimed to develop a foreign and military policy towards Russia more independent from Washington, in order to strengthen the EU’s hand against its foreign rivals and to impose its policies of austerity and “herd immunity” on the coronavirus at home.

From their point of view, however, it was not enough to “let ourselves be debriefed about talks with the president of the United States,” Merkel explained. She said the EU must be “man enough and woman enough to put forward its point of view in direct talks.”

Berlin and Paris are stepping up military pressure on Russia. France will participate in the massive Sea Breeze naval maneuver, scheduled for June 28–July 10 in the Black Sea. Hosted by US and Ukrainian forces, it includes 5,000 troops, 32 ships and 40 aircraft from dozens of countries.

This week, the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) is participating for the first time in a NATO airspace surveillance mission over the Black Sea. Two Eurofighters from Tactical Air Wing 71 “Richthofen” landed at Romania’s Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base in Constanta on Thursday. Until July 9, they will patrol Black Sea airspace together with British forces.

As the EU escalates its military threats, divisions between the member states are growing. Writing on Paris’ and Berlin’s failure to secure support for their proposal, the German weekly Der Spiegel warned: “Merkel’s and Macron’s defeat extends beyond the day. … The Union is also divided over its dealings with Hungary: the rift between East and West threatens to become an abyss.”

A the summit, besides Hungary and Portugal—which holds the rotating EU Council presidency—eight Eastern European states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic) refused to sign a joint letter attacking Hungary’s new anti-LGBT law, banning schools from using material seen as promoting homosexuality. A Reuters report called it “the most intense personal clash among the bloc’s leaders in years.”

The EU is responding to its explosive internal divisions and to growing social and political opposition among workers and youth with a constant police state and military build-up.

In the Mediterranean and Africa, the EU called for closer cooperation with regional allies to halt migrants, deny their right to asylum and imprison them in camps. It stated that “mutually beneficial partnerships and cooperation with countries of origin and transit will be intensified.” This has led to the construction of detention camps including in Turkey, Libya, Bosnia, Greece and Spain where hundreds of thousands of refugees are kept in appalling conditions.

The EU identified Turkey as a key partner against refugees. It hailed “preparatory work for high level dialogues with Turkey on issues of mutual interest, such as migration, public health, climate, counter-terrorism and regional issues.”

“The European Council calls on the Commission to put forward without delay formal proposals for the continuation of financing for Syrian refugees and host communities in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and other parts of the region,” it added. It also hailed “de-escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean,” where Turkey has clashed with Greece and France, and new customs deals with Turkey.

The EU communiqué also endorsed France’s war in Mali and its collaboration with the military junta installed in an August 2020 coup in Bamako. It reaffirmed its “call on the Malian transition authorities to fully implement the Transition Charter” and return to nominally civilian rule.

This came as a car bomb attack wounded 12 German troops supporting French forces in Mali, near Ichagara in the northern Gao region, as well as a soldier from another unidentified country, four days after a car bomb injured six French soldiers near Kaigourou. German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said three German soldiers were seriously wounded.

Nonetheless, the EU hailed its missions in Africa in support of France, including “the continuation of EU CSDP missions and engagement in the Takuba Task Force,” which involves troops from 12 European countries beyond France.

The summit concluded with a closed-door discussion of the Next Generation EU bailout, one of the multiple bailouts that collectively will funnel over €2 trillion to the banks and corporations during the pandemic. Such bailouts are to be paid for with austerity attacks targeting the working class, such as renewed labor reforms in Spain and pension cuts in France that are already being prepared.

Civil War in Afghanistan Will Threaten Afghanistan, China and Pakistan

Vijay Prashad

The United States, which has prosecuted a war against Afghanistan since October 2001, has promised to withdraw its combat troops by September 11, 2021. This war has failed to attain any of the gains that were promised after 20 years of fighting: neither has it resulted in the actual fragmentation of terrorist groups nor has it led to the destruction of the Taliban. The great suffering and great waste of social wealth caused due to the war will finally end with the Taliban’s return to power, and with terrorist groups, which are entrenched in parts of Central Asia, seizing this prospect to make a full return to Afghanistan.

Civil War

There are two forms of war that exist in Afghanistan.

First, there is the war prosecuted by the United States—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—against their adversaries in Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO have allied with a range of political projects, which certainly includes the government of the President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani. This is the war that the U.S. and NATO have indicated will now be ending.

Second, there is the ongoing civil war between the Ashraf Ghani government, backed by the West, and the forces around the Taliban. This is a war among Afghans, which has roots that go back several decades. As the first form of the war ends, the civil war will continue. The two principal forces in Afghanistan—the government of Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban—are unwilling to form a government of national unity or to create a mechanism to end the civil war.

Failure of peace talks between the various stakeholders in Afghanistan—including the United States—in Doha, Qatar, suggests the continuation of the civil war. The United States, since 2001, has not drawn up any serious political road map for a withdrawal. The U.S. will leave as it came, with the U.S. troops taking off as abruptly as they arrived.

Already, the Afghan National Army is weakened, much of the Afghan territory outside its full control. In recent months, the Taliban has been keeping its powder dry, waiting for the U.S. to withdraw before it steps up its attack against the government in Kabul. A report by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, which was submitted to the United Nations Security Council on June 1, suggests that Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network prepare to strike as soon as the opportunity arises. Al Qaeda is “such an ‘organic’ or essential part of the insurgency that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate it from its Taliban allies,” the report noted.

A Pakistani intelligence official, who is well-informed about the situation in Afghanistan, told me that the countryside will gradually slip further out of Kabul’s control, with the Taliban and its allies—including Al Qaeda and other regional terrorist groups—confident of victory by the end of the summer in 2022.

There is no appetite either in the United States or in Central Asia for the continuation of the U.S. military presence. Nothing good has come of it, and it does not promise any advantage in the future.

Regional Possibility

On June 3, 2021, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi, and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi held their fourth trilateral dialogue. This was the first high-level meeting held since September 2019. There was no direct reference to the withdrawal of the U.S. forces, but it set the context for the two most important outcomes of the meeting.

First, China pledged to play a “constructive role” to improve the long-fraught relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have become more heated up because of the regional conflict between India and Pakistan. China has close ties with the governments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) requiring peace in Central Asia for the success of the massive infrastructure and trade project, which runs from China’s Pacific coast to the Indian Ocean and to the Mediterranean Sea. China’s leverage over these countries is considerable. Even if China can create a modus vivendi between President Ghani and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, it does not settle the deeper problems, such as the military weakness of Ghani’s government.

Second, based on these governments’ cooperation in the counterterrorism process, the foreign ministers agreed to jointly tackle terrorist outfits that operate in Afghanistan and in its neighboring countries: such as the Turkistan Islamic Party or East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), ISIS, and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Pakistan’s government is troubled by the operations of the TTP, which operates along the borderlines of the two countries but is based in Afghanistan’s Paktika province. China, meanwhile, is very concerned about the ETIM, which operates in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and has been trying to destabilize the Chinese province of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The ETIM has close ties with the Taliban, which—while it has held discussions with the Chinese—understands that its use of the ETIM gives it leverage against China. Whether or not these three governments will actually be able to weaken these terrorist groups, incubated by the Taliban, is unclear.

Tangled Web

It now seems impossible for the United States to formally remain in Afghanistan. There is simply no political will for the troops to remain in the country, even as the U.S. will keep paramilitary and mercenary forces in Afghanistan.

Given the heightened U.S. pressure on China, however, there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. is not unhappy with the possibility of instability that will come to the heart of Asia after the summer of 2021. In 2003, the U.S. designated the ETIM as a terrorist group, but it removed it from that list in 2020. This is clear evidence of the U.S. motives to destabilize China’s Xinjiang province.

The Pakistani intelligence official suggests that if the Taliban takes Kabul, groups such as the TTP and the ETIM will be emboldened to conduct attacks in Pakistan and China respectively. These groups, he tells me, will fight alongside the Taliban to weaken Kabul’s hold and to use the countryside to launch these attacks; there is no necessity for the Taliban to actually take control of Kabul.

The question that remains is whether or not the Taliban can be divided. The Taliban is a tangle of Afghan nationalism and patriotism as well as various forms of political Islam. There are elements in the Taliban that are far more nationalistic and patriotic than they are committed to the Islamist currents. Attempts to peel the “moderates” away from the more hardcore sections have largely failed, which has been evident since at least former U.S. President Barack Obama’s failed plea to the “moderate Taliban” in 2009.

There is simply not sufficient strength in Afghanistan’s society to resist the spread of the Taliban. Nor is there an organized capacity of Afghan citizens present yet to build a new bloc against both the failed U.S.-backed governments (from Hamid Karzai to Ghani) and the Taliban. But if Afghanistan’s neighbors cut off their support to the Taliban, and if they are able to deepen an economic project (such as the BRI), then there is the possibility for this new bloc to eventually emerge. That is why the dialogue between Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan is central. It might, in fact, be more important in the long run than the conversations with the Taliban.

Industrial waste, unplanned urbanization blight Turkey’s Sea of Marmara

Ozan Özgür

The marine mucilage, or sea snot, that first started to appear in the Sea of Marmara in January, mostly on Istanbul’s shores, has continued to spread over the past months. It recently covered the coasts of almost all the provinces that have a coast to the Sea of Marmara and brought a major environmental disaster to the surface.

When marine mucilage was first seen on the beaches, it was thought to be just a layer over the sea. However, scientists have explained that its greatest impact takes place underwater.

An aerial photo of Pendik port in Asian side of Istanbul, Friday, June 4, 2021, with a huge mass of marine mucilage, a thick, slimy substance made up of compounds released by marine organisms, in Turkey’s Marmara Sea.

The mucilage layer on the bottom particularly affects sea creatures. The layers seen on the surface prevent sea creatures from getting the necessary oxygen, causing them to die. Thus, the entire marine ecosystem is rapidly disappearing.

Alice Alldredge, an expert on marine mucilage and a professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara, told The Scientist: “Sea snot is a colloquial term for the mucus that is exuded by a lot of different phytoplankton species.” She added: “[t]he main problem is that the material eventually sinks and completely smothers the organisms that are on the bottom. It kills corals, it kills fish, it kills all the crustaceans down there, the bivalves—it kills pretty much everything because there’s not enough oxygen.”

Studies have shown that the pollution is not limited to the Marmara Sea, which is an inland sea. The pollution has been seen both in the neighboring Aegean and Black Seas. Like all environmental problems, it ignores artificial national boundaries and has an international character.

Alldredge said: “There have been scum events like this in the Adriatic [Sea] going back to the 1800s. … It seems these events are increasing in the Mediterranean. It used to be just the Adriatic, in the area around Sicily. Now, there’s been some events up around Corsica and the Italian-French border. So, it’s not just Turkey that’s suffering from this.”

Scientists agree that this mucilage originates from industrial and urban wastes that have been dumped into the Marmara Sea for decades, as well as from climate change. If comprehensive measures are not taken soon, Marmara will turn into a completely dead sea.

M. Levent Artüz, a hydrobiology expert from the Marmara Environmental Monitoring Project, claims that the Sea of Marmara already died in 1989. Speaking to the 1+1 Forum website, he said: “This is not an isolated event; it is a chain, a result. Marmara died in 1989. What we see is the decay of a corpse. The diversity of species in the sea was dealt a grave blow, it was hollowed out, competition between species disappeared.”

The Marmara Region links Europe and Asia and consists of cities clustered around the Sea of Marmara. While it makes up 8.5 percent (approximately 67,000 square kilometers) of Turkey’s surface area, over 25 percent of country’s population—over 20 million people—live there. Its largest cities, including Istanbul, Kocaeli, Bursa and Tekirdağ, host many of the country’ largest industrial facilities. Waste from industrial plants and these major cities is dumped on the bottom of the sea without passing through modern wastewater treatment facilities.

Professor Barış Salihoğlu, head of Turkey’s Middle East Technical University (METU) Institute of Maritime Sciences, stated: “Indeed, mucilage is very common. We have seen a gel-like structure spreading across the sea and never encountered such a large mass before.” He also warned: “Oxygen levels have dropped drastically, so we need to take action quickly. It is not the first time mucilage has been seen, but it is the first time it has been so widely spread.”

Pointing to deoxygenation caused by the waste from provinces surrounding the Marmara Sea, Mustafa Yücel, deputy director of the METU Institute of Marine Sciences, said: “There is also an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus that creates other ecosystem problems, such as deoxygenation, which is the main cause of mucilage. … The problem is big.”

He also stated: “The main cause of this deoxygenation is essentially the same thing that causes sea snot: nitrogen and phosphorus loads. According to our models and calculations, this deoxygenation only comes from Turkish territories. These loads have entered the sea for the last 20-30 years.”

Capitalist politicians have reacted by covering up the roots of the problem, which is in the capitalist system’s failure to build the proper waste management infrastucture. They either blame each other or make empty promises to solve the problem quickly. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has blamed the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, controlled by the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which was elected two years ago, for this issue.

Erdoğan himself was silent on the issue for months and then cited untreated wastewater discharged into the sea as the cause of the problem. He blamed municipalities that passed from the AKP to the bourgeois opposition parties in local elections held in 2019. However, most of the municipalities, especially Istanbul, have been ruled by AKP mayors since 1994.

Nurettin Sözen (CHP), a former mayor of the Istanbul metropolitan area, claimed that three full biological treatment projects planned to be built in Istanbul were shelved after Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Sözen said that under Erdoğan, a low-cost method of discharging the wastewater, which pollutes the Sea of Marmara to the bottom of the sea was implemented.

The CHP’s criticisms are utterly hypocritical, however, as smaller cities on the Sea of Marmara that have been governed by CHP mayors for years have not pursued a waste treatment policy fundamentally different from AKP municipalities.

On June 8, Environment and Urbanization Minister Murat Kurum announced that Turkey is launching its “largest and most comprehensive sea cleaning mobilization” ever to save the Sea of Marmara. The only action proposed by Kurum, who met the mayors and governors of the Marmara Region’s seven provinces fully six months after the mucilage emerged, was to begin collecting mucilage by boat. However, the source of these problems is the control of industry and urban planning by capitalist interests and bourgeois governments who serve them.

While industrial enterprises do not implement necessary purification and filtration measures, the national and local governments who serve them transfer public resources to the wealthy instead of acting to protect the environment.

The Turkish state refuses to make long-term, comprehensive infrastructure investments needed to save the Marmara Sea from turning into a dead sea or to ensure the safety of millions in an expected Istanbul earthquake. Instead, it is preparing to build an Istanbul Canal in line with the NATO military alliance’s geopolitical calculations and plans for massive profiteering by Turkish and international investors.

However, scientists warn such a canal would damage the ecosystem of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, destroy Istanbul’s wetlands, increase traffic and even damage inflicted by a possible earthquake. Valuable resources and time are thus wasted., 

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government pardons Catalan-nationalist political prisoners

Alejandro López

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has pardoned nine Catalan nationalists serving decade-long jail sentences over their role in the October 1, 2017, Catalan independence referendum. The decrees eliminate the remainder of the prison sentences, which were based on fraudulent convictions on charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. They maintain the prisoners’ disqualification from holding public office for a decade, however.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Yesterday, they were released from jail.

The PSOE-Podemos pardons are not a recognition that the Catalan nationalists were jailed due to a far-right campaign using trumped-up charges and a show trial. In fact, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made clear that he defends the Supreme Court’s reactionary sentences and refuses to halt the prosecution of 3,000 Catalan-nationalist activists. Rather, it is a pragmatic decision dictated by the need to rapidly shower Spanish corporations and banks with billions of European Union (EU) bailout funds, while trying to defuse mounting working class anger over the pandemic and EU austerity measures.

The pardons have received the full blessings of powerful sections of the Spanish and European bourgeoisie. They come after Sánchez’s speech last Friday titled “Re-encounter: A project for the future, for all of Spain” at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Speaking in front of Catalan businessmen, Sánchez announced the pardons, calling them “a resounding message of the desire to live together in coexistence.”

Antonio Garamendi, president of the Spanish Confederation of Employers’ Organizations (CEOE), which represents Spanish big business, told RTVE that “if this ends in things normalizing, it is welcome.” Two days later, he said in another interview, “I would like companies to return to Catalonia, and normality is needed.” An estimated 7,500 companies have left Catalonia since the 2017 independence referendum.

Javier Faus, president of the Cercle d’Economy, Catalonia’s big-business association, founded during the 1950s by pro-Francoite Catalan businessmen, said: “We consider that political stability has an economic value in itself. Politics and economics are not unrelated. ... We need tranquility, calm and get to work on things.”

Even the Catholic Church, a bastion of the 1936-1978 fascist Francoite regime and still one of Spain’s largest landowners, posted a statement defending the pardons. It said, “dialogue must always be proposed as an effective way that responds to the hope of resolving divisions.”

Spain’s largest trade unions, the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO) and the social-democratic General Union of Labor (UGT), which are negotiating wage cuts and sackings, and advising the government on austerity, posted a joint statement hailing the pardons as “a necessary—although certainly not a sufficient—condition to overcome past episodes.”

Outside of Spain, major factions of the European bourgeoisie supported the pardons. The Council of Europe, a human rights body headquartered in Strasbourg, the seat of the EU parliament, passed a resolution defending the pardons. It also demanded the withdrawal of Spanish extradition requests for exiled Catalan nationalists facing charges in Spain.

London’s Financial Times posted an editorial, “Catalan pardons offer a chance of reconciliation,” calling the pardons a “commendable attempt to try to open a route to reconciliation and coexistence within Catalonia.”

Workers and youth must be warned. The WSWS has always opposed the incarceration of the Catalan nationalists and called for their release, but Spanish big business, the Catholic Church and the European bourgeoisie are not trying to defend democracy. Indeed, barely three months ago, the PSOE was busily seeking extraditions of Catalan nationalist lawmakers charged with sedition sitting in the European parliament. The question raised by the pardons is: what has changed?

The pardons are part of back-door negotiations between factions of the ruling class in Madrid, spearheaded by the PSOE-Podemos government, and in Barcelona, led by the Catalan nationalists, over the disbursement of billions of euros in EU bailout funds.

In coming years, Spain is set to take in €140 billion from the EU’s €750-billion recovery fund. The bailout mechanisms were approved by all 27 EU countries last month. In Spain, they were approved earlier this year, in January, thanks to parliamentary support from the fascistic Vox party. Sánchez has hailed the EU bailouts as the “most ambitious and transcendental of Spain’s recent history.”

Leading sections of the European and Spanish bourgeoisie aim to scale back the nationalist, anti-Catalan campaign that Madrid launched after the 2017 independence referendum, in order to secure agreement on the disbursement and spending of these funds. Spain’s regions will play a prominent role. They are to manage around 54 percent of Madrid’s allocated bailout for 2021, around €18.7 billion. Catalonia is to receive the second-highest payoff on the list.

The bailouts were a major part of the phone call between Sánchez and Catalan regional premier Pere Aragonès earlier this month. They are set to meet next Tuesday; the bailout will again be on the agenda.

The Catalan bourgeoisie expects to be one of the main beneficiaries. The Catalan government has already selected 27 projects for the fund valued at €41 billion. Major transnationals, such as ICL, Celsa, Aigües de Barcelona, Telefónica or Cellnez are set to benefit. The largest budget is allocated for a “carbon recovery” project, involving large companies such as Suez, La Farga, Nedgia Naturgy, Holaluz, Factor Energia and Serradora Boix.

The bailout is sealed in blood, however, amid the catastrophic loss of life to the pandemic. Claiming there was no money to implement a scientific policy to combat the virus, including to end non-essential work and subsidize small businesses, the EU instead funneled €750 billion to the super-rich. There was also a €1.25 trillion European Central Bank “quantitative easing” plan and a seven-year €1 trillion EU budget.

So far, it has cost the lives of over 1.1 million people across Europe. Now, as mass COVID-19 deaths are expected from the Delta variant’s spread, the ruling classes demand that nothing impede their orgy of self-enrichment.

The agreement also involves the Catalan nationalists supporting the PSOE-Podemos minority government to implement draconian social cuts dictated by the EU. These include a new labor reform and measures to “flexibilise” the workforce, raise the retirement age, cut pensions and increase taxes.

Pledges of unity, concord and coexistence made by Spanish and Catalan politicians and businessmen, will prove utterly empty, and sooner rather than later. The coming together of Spain’s ruling factions will not produce the economic stability they predict. Instead, it will be accompanied by mounting attacks on the working class amid an international upsurge of the class struggle.

Recent months have seen a series of significant strikes by workers across the United States, including the Volvo strike. Major struggles have also been waged by educators, health care workers and Amazon workers across the US and Europe. In Spain, not a week has passed by without one major strike since the beginning of 2021. This includes bus, metro and tram workers; health workers opposed to redundancies and cuts; Airbus workers struggling against plant closures; bank workers opposed to 18,000 redundancies in the banking sector.

The pardons agreement vindicates the analysis made by the WSWS of the reactionary character of both Catalan nationalism, which promoted itself as an alternative to the “authoritarian, anti-democratic Madrid,” and the pseudo-left forces like Podemos. While the Catalan nationalists are endorsed by the CEOE and the Catholic Church, Podemos oversees reactionary policies in government.

Washington rebuffs Maduro’s bid for US-Venezuela rapprochement

Bill Van Auken

The Biden administration this week delivered a swift rejection of an appeal from Nicolas Maduro for the lifting of unilateral US sanctions and the pursuit of what Venezuela’s president termed a “win-win” policy to benefit US transnational banks and oil corporations.

A State Department spokesman told the Bloomberg news agency that there would be no change in US policy as long as the Maduro government continued its “repression and corrupt practices” and until it negotiated a deal with the US puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó to “restore democracy” and organize “free and fair elections.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

It is worth noting that Washington has issued no such declarations demanding an end to “repression and corrupt practices” by the narco state headed by President Ivan Duque in neighboring Colombia as it murders, disappears and tortures protesters. Instead, it sent its top military commander in the region, US SOUTHCOM chief Adm. Craig Faller, to the country this week in a gesture of solidarity with Bogota’s murderous military apparatus.

The Biden administration has kept in place both a “state of national emergency” initiated by the Obama administration in 2015, branding Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and the escalating regime of “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by the Trump administration beginning in 2017. These include a de facto blockade of Venezuela’s oil exports and a ban on the country’s access to US financial markets.

The US economic and financial blockade has dramatically deepened the worst depression in Venezuelan history, condemning millions of working people to poverty and hunger, while triggering a mass emigration of more than 5 million Venezuelans abroad.

The country’s economy is estimated to have shrunk by 80 percent since 2012, while real wages of Venezuelan workers have been decimated by an inflation rate that is now averaging 25 percent a month. Oil production, the main source of the country’s income, stands at 500,000 barrels a day, up slightly from the low of 310,000 last year, but a fraction of the 2.5 million barrels produced before the collapse of oil prices and the imposition of US sanctions.

The Biden administration, like its predecessor, is intent on using hunger and disease as weapons in its campaign for regime change and the imposition of a reliable US puppet in Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet.

While Washington routinely claims that its illegal sanctions exempt humanitarian supplies, the reality is that the threat of secondary sanctions against financial institutions doing business with the Venezuelan government has made it virtually impossible to finance purchases of vitally needed food and medical supplies. A study done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank in 2019 estimated 40,000 excess deaths as a result of the US sanctions regime, a toll that has no doubt escalated sharply since then.

The deadly impact of Washington’s sanctions is now posed even more sharply by the increasing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to government figures, Venezuela has suffered 265,000 COVID-19 cases and over 3,000 deaths, with the number of infections doubling since February, and the number of deaths doubling over the past three months.

Hospital records, however, indicate that the real numbers of infections and deaths are four times higher than the official figures, and the growing number of COVID-19 cases has brought the impoverished country’s health care system to the brink of collapse.

“We are in the peak of the second wave right now and it has been 25 percent bigger and 40 percent longer than the first wave,” Julio Castro, a Venezuelan doctor and expert in infectious diseases told The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

Only 0.5 percent of Venezuelans have been fully vaccinated, and just 1.5 percent have received a single dose so far.

The Venezuelan government protested earlier this month that its attempt to receive vaccines from the WHO-affiliated COVAX international vaccine program had been stymied after a last installment of a $120 million payment to the agency had been blocked as a result of US sanctions.

“The financial system that also hides behind the US lobby, has the power to block resources that can be used to immunize the population of Venezuela,” Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said.

The Maduro government had attempted to induce “interim president” Guaidó to use some of Venezuela’s hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen overseas assets over which he has ostensible control to buy vaccines. However, the puppet, like his master, is apparently content to exploit COVID-19 deaths as one more weapon in the war for regime change. Having no significant base of support in Venezuela, and with his attempts at fomenting a military coup and organizing a mercenary invasion having ended in fiasco, his options are limited.

The response of the Venezuelan government to the country’s increasingly desperate crisis has been to plead for a rapprochement with US imperialism and to accommodate its policies to the interests of both foreign capital and the national bourgeoisie.

This reactionary strategy found its most naked expression in an interview Maduro granted earlier this month to Bloomberg at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. He insisted that his aim was to “regularize” US-Venezuelan relations in order to pave the way for an influx of foreign direct investment.

“Venezuela is going become the land of opportunity,” he said. “I invite US investors, don’t get left behind.” He went on to state that foreign capital was aware of the potential for profit. “The financial sector, the bondholders, with whom we had an impeccable relationship know it is possible to invest in Venezuela and have a ‘win-win.’ The petroleum sector, which has invested in Venezuela and still maintains investments, knows it.”

While Maduro has made various gestures of accommodation toward US imperialism—releasing six CITGO executives, including five Americans, from prison to house arrest and giving the right-wing opposition five seats on the national Election Board—he acknowledged that from Biden, “There has not been any signal. Nothing.”

He went on to complain that the sanctions were “irrational.” He told Bloomberg: “If Venezuela cannot produce petroleum and sell it, cannot produce and sell its gold, cannot produce its bauxite and sell it, cannot produce iron, etcetera, and cannot earn revenue in the international market, where is it going to be able to get what it needs to pay holders of Venezuelan debt?”

That paying off bondholders and foreign bankers is the driving motivation for lifting sanctions is telling in a country plagued by blackouts, water shortages, breakdowns of every essential service and with two-thirds of the population living in poverty.

Within Venezuela, the Maduro government has introduced what amounts to an IMF-style “structural adjustment program” that includes slashing of state subsidies, scrapping price controls, eliminating import restrictions and effectively dollarizing the economy.

According to government documents cited by Bloomberg, private companies accounted for 92 percent of imports of food and raw materials in 2020, compared to just 25 percent a year earlier, a graphic indication of the government ceding control to big business interests.

Meanwhile, the Maduro government has pushed through a series of legislative packages designed to attract foreign direct investment and pave the way for the privatization of public enterprises, up to and including the state-owned oil corporation PDVSA. An “Anti-blockade Law” enacted last year offering tax and labor incentives to “stimulate and favor” the private sector, has been followed by a Law on Foreign Investments and now a Law on Special Economic Zones, which is being rubber-stamped by the National Assembly

The aim of these laws is to auction off Venezuela’s resources to foreign transnationals that are being invited in to exploit the country and its workforce with a host of incentives including a 10-year moratorium on taxes, suspension of import-export duties, guaranteed repatriation of invested capital and a pledge that foreign companies will be fully compensated for any losses incurred as a result of government actions.

The measures are supported by Maduro’s two key constituencies, the military command and the so-called boliburguesia, the layer of capitalists which has enriched itself off of speculation and corrupt ties to the state, even as the rest of the population has faced immiseration. These layers are anxious to solidify their control and expand their wealth through reforging ties to US imperialism.

Social inequality has risen to unprecedented levels, with the Venezuelan Central Bank reporting that in 2017, just 18 percent of the gross domestic product went to the country’s 13 million workers, while fully half was directly pocketed by its capitalists. This yawning divide has only widened since. The result has been a growth of popular protests and class struggle, which the government has met with repression and arrests.

The right-wing evolution of the Maduro government has put paid to the illusions promoted by the pseudo-left in the “21st Century Socialism,” touted first by Hugo Chávez, along with similar nationalist and “anti-imperialist” pretensions of other representatives of the so-called Pink Tide in Latin America.

Corporate Canada used government’s pandemic emergency wage subsidy as slush fund

Omar Ali

Recent weeks have seen further revelations as to how corporate Canada, with the blessing of the federal Liberal government, has used the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) program to enrich itself to the tune of billions of dollars.

Since last fall, a spate of media reports has detailed how some of Canada’s largest companies have used the CEWS to pad their bottom lines, even as they bounce back from any pandemic-related revenue losses and reap sizeable profits.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has lied brazenly about the wage-subsidy program, in an attempt to cover-up the Liberal government’s complicity in the corporate profiteering. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The CEWS was created in the spring of 2020 as part of the emergency bailout programs that Ottawa put together after working class protests in the auto sector over the lack of protections from COVID-19 forced the ruling elites in Canada and the US to implement temporary lockdown measures. The CEWS allows companies that show a decline in revenue to have the government cover up to 75 percent of their employees’ wages. While other pandemic relief programs, including the more than $650 billion the federal government and Bank of Canada poured into the markets or handed over to the banks and major corporations with no strings attached, openly shoveled public funds into the hands of the rich and super-rich, the wage subsidy was ostensibly designed to keep workers on the job. However, it has proven to be a blank cheque for the corporate elite to boost profits and shareholder payouts while most Canadians have suffered the ravages of the economic downturn. One academic has rightly described the CEWS as a business expense subsidy masquerading as a wage subsidy.

The latest round of exposures of companies profiteering from the CEWS program was kicked off by reports in the Globe and Mail in April. The Globe noted that the wage subsidy has now swelled into Ottawa’s biggest-ever spending program, with costs expected to reach $110 billion over two years, outstripping the now-defunct Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which was derided by much of Canada’s ruling elite as an “overly-generous” handout to those unable to work due to the pandemic.

In preparing its report, the Globe used information on publicly-traded firms and a partial list of companies receiving government CEWS funds to examine how 389 companies, including some of Canada’s biggest, benefited from the program. It found that many companies continued to pay out and even boosted dividends while tapping into the CEWS. Some raised executive compensation, and many laid off workers en masse, as participation in the program did not require any commitment to preserve jobs or impose any limitations on how recipients managed their businesses.

The Globe cited the case of TFI International, a Montreal-based transport company. TFI International saw its profits rise as it cut labour costs and moved to acquire other companies, all the while receiving $75 million in wage subsidies. It subsequently enriched its shareholders by handing out dividends in the last three quarters of 2020 that were greater than in 2019.

The Globe observed that even executives have had their salaries partially covered by CEWS. (The average CEO makes in 4 days what the average Canadian does in a year).

While many companies remained profitable throughout the pandemic, and in some cases didn’t even experience a drop in revenues, they were nonetheless able to claim CEWS funds through subsidiaries that did suffer temporary losses. Overall, despite the unprecedented drop in GDP in the second quarter of 2020 and mass joblessness, only a small majority of the 389 businesses analyzed by the Globe saw their profits suffer any decrease from the previous year.

The Globe also pointed to the government’s brazen lying in response to public criticism over corporate profiteering. This includes Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s claims that CEWS funds can’t be used for purposes other than wages, and that companies that increased their executives’ compensation could have the CEWS payments clawed back. In fact, companies were and are free to use the subsidies to pad their bottom lines. As for the claw-back, it was only announced in the April 2021 budget, won’t take effect until July, and is not retroactive.

The Globe stressed that it could only provide a partial picture of how businesses have exploited the CEWS, since the government has refused to provide a full list of recipients. In fact, the partial online list the government previously provided has now been taken down.

The Globe articles were just the latest in a long list of reports depicting how the government has plied the corporate elite with easy money during the pandemic via the wage subsidy. The CBC highlighted the case of Yellow Pages, which received $7.3 million from CEWS, while paying out more than $8.8 million in dividends and spending $3.3 million on share buybacks. Earlier this year, the Toronto Star reported that the country’s three largest telecommunications firms, Rogers, Bell, and Telus, received upwards of $240 million in CEWS money. They managed to do this while paying out a combined $5.5 billion in dividends last year, with Bell and Telus actually increasing the amount paid out compared to 2019.

In another highly revealing example of the wage subsidy’s class purpose, it was revealed that Saskatchewan-based Federated Cooperatives Ltd. received millions in CEWS payments to cover the wages of the scabs it employed while locking out over 700 Regina oil refinery workers so as to impose massive contract concessions.

The media revelations and recriminations over the wage-subsidy program reflect tensions within the ruling class over how best to defend the interests of Canadian capitalism in the midst of the socio-economic and political crisis triggered by its ruinous response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Globe has used the CEWS revelations to attack the Trudeau Liberal government, complaining that the Liberals have thrown the “door to the federal treasury wide open.” For its part, the opposition Conservative Party has denounced “reckless” Liberal spending. After it emerged that all three major federal parties had received wage subsidies, the Tories made a show of pledging to pay back what they received. While there are undoubtedly tactical divisions between the Tories and Liberals on how best to safeguard the profits of big business, one of the main concerns motivating Trudeau’s critics is that the shameless enrichment of the wealthy—summed up by the fact that Canada’s 48 billionaires have gained more than $78 billion in wealth since the beginning of the pandemic—could become a lightning rod for popular anger.

Other sections of the ruling elite, no doubt motivated by the vast swelling of their stock portfolios during the pandemic, have been equally vociferous in defending the CEWS. The hard-right Financial Post published an editorial denouncing the mild criticisms of the Globe and the Star, writing in defence of the nation’s corporate elite that “bus drivers, software engineers, accountants, and shoe salesmen are greedy, too. Also, gardeners, plumbers, librarians, and zookeepers.” Citing the needs of business competition, it added, “It makes no sense to say that all these companies should have cut everything else before touching employee compensation. When faced with a choice between paying dividends or keeping all employees on payroll, it may well make sense for many companies to pay the dividend.” The Post ’s own parent company Postmedia has been a beneficiary of the wage subsidy, receiving tens of millions of dollars in state support.

If such shameless endorsements of capitalist exploitation can be published, it is in no small part because the ruling class knows it has the support of the trade unions and ostensible “left” in diverting working class anger into a blind alley. The New Democrats have made much of their opposition to “abuses” of the CEWS program. However, they have steadfastly kept the minority Liberals in power and supported all the bailout measures, including the hundreds of billions poured into the markets to prop up investor wealth. They have complained instead, to cite the words of the party’s finance critic, that companies are “breaking the spirit of why CEWS was put into place.” The reality is that the CEWS is being used exactly as its drafters among the political elite and corporate lobbyists intended it to be.

The trade union bureaucracy, with the Canadian Labour Congress in the lead, has supported the ruling elite’s unprecedented bailout packages for the super-rich, banks, and big business from the outset. Early on in the pandemic, then-CLC president Hassan Yussuff appealed for a “collaborative front” with the major employers’ organizations, and was intimately involved in government consultations to draw up the CERB and CEWS.

Last month, Yussuff defended the CLC’s partnership with big business, and specifically the CEWS, as “pro-worker” in a column co-authored with Perrin Beatty, the CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Yussuff and Beatty dismissed the reports of many of Canada’s biggest companies using the program as a slush fund, with the argument that speedy action to “save” the economy necessitated giving employers free rein until a “recovery” set in—that is, until workers could be forced back on the job amid the pandemic. “While we still haven’t recovered the growth lost in the pandemic,” wrote Yussuff and Beatty, “the rebound effect after each lockdown was stronger than expected. This is a good thing, fueled in large part by the fact that Canadians could quickly go back to work in a business that had survived. In other words, CEWS did its job.”

UK imaging study reveals loss of brain’s grey matter in patients infected with COVID-19

Benjamin Mateus

One of the most recognizable features of the COVID-19 infection is the loss of smell and/or taste, disturbances that often precede respiratory symptoms affecting upwards of 80 to 90 percent of those infected. Early in the course of the pandemic, clinicians began to associate the sudden onset of these symptoms without an underlying cause as indications of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

CT image of a normal brain (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Additional neurological symptoms include headaches, fatigue, nausea and vomiting in many infected individuals. In severe cases, strokes or impairment in consciousness can occur. Viral neurotropism, a term that describes the ability of viruses to infect nerve tissue, has been hypothesized as possibly the cause for some of these symptoms. Still, evidence for direct invasion by the virus into the central nervous system (CNS) has been limited.

In the course of the pandemic, there has been an intense investigation into the neurotropic ability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Given the neurological manifestation of Long COVID symptoms and its impact on cognition, it is critical to understand if the CNS is directly affected by the live virus or if these symptoms are a secondary byproduct of our immune system’s response to the infection.

Often, the current literature on this topic is based on only a small series of cases, which can be confounded by a lack of comparisons to uninfected individuals, leading to conflicting results and conclusions. Even many of the neuro-imaging reports published have been performed in people with acute symptoms revealing a broad range of findings but without consistent patterns to elucidate the impact of the infection on the brain in general.

For instance, in an intriguing report published in Nature in November 2020, the authors from Charité University of Medicine, Berlin, summarized their findings after conducting a careful postmortem evaluation of the “olfactory mucosa, its nervous projections, and several defined CNS (central nervous system) regions” in 33 individuals, who died from COVID-19. According to the study, one-third had severe neurological symptoms before succumbing to their infections. The olfactory system is the structure that makes up the nose, nasal cavities and the nerves that carry the sense of smell to the regions of the brain where it is perceived.

The authors wrote: “Taken our findings together, we provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 neuro-invasion can occur at the neural-mucosal interface by trans-mucosal (nasal passages) entry via regional nervous structures. This may be followed by transport along the olfactory tract of the CNS, thus explaining some of the well-documented neurological symptoms in COVID-19, including alterations of smell and taste perceptions.”

The olfactory mucosa is situated under a thin strip of perforated bone called the cribriform plate.

Head anatomy with olfactory nerve, including labels for the nasal cavity, olfactory nerves, cribriform plate, olfactory bulb, and olfactory tract. Source, Wikipedia.

The sensory neurons that detect smells are threaded from these holes leading to the brain just above it. Additional study findings included microscopic blood clots in six cases with recently localized infarction of the brain.

Dr. Kiran T. Thakur, a neurologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, speaking with the Washington Post, explained that the ability of the virus to penetrate deeper into the brain tissue has critical consequences. “A person who has a virus in their brain can have symptoms related to brain involvement. Viruses that invade the brain are tough to eradicate because a barrier protects the brain from the rest of the body. Once viruses enter the brain, the organ can become a refuge for stowaways.”

However, countering the findings in the Charité study, he and his colleagues recently published a study that found levels of the actual virus in the brain, compared to the nasal cavities, were very low. This was corroborated by neuropathologist Frank Heppner of Charité, who has studied the brains of over 100 COVID-19 victims. In their not yet published findings, he told the Post, “[Our] investigations show low amounts of virus in the brain.”

Precisely because there is an urgency for large, well-designed trials to address these questions, the findings of a new UK brain imaging study are fairly important.

Before the onset of the pandemic, UK Biobank, a long-term 30-year study established in 2006 to follow 500,000 volunteers ages 40 to 69 to investigate the contributions from genetics and environmental exposure to disease development, had already conducted 40,000 brain scans. In the context of COVID-19 and its association with the brain, serendipitously, the scientists from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London invited hundreds of these volunteers to participate in a second imaging visit in 2021 to investigate the correlation.

As the authors noted, this was the first large-scale longitudinal imaging study in COVID-19 patients whose brain scans were compared to before the pandemic and with well-matched controls (for age, sex, ethnic background, and the interval between the two scans) and comparing people who were positive and negative for COVID-19 infection. There were 394 COVID patients and 388 controls. The concluded study was posted on the preprint server medRxiv.

The authors wrote their findings “revealed a significant, deleterious impact of COVID-19 on the olfactory cortex (region of the brain responsible for smell perception) and gustatory cortex (taste and flavor), with a more pronounced reduction in grey matter thickness and volume in the left para-hippocampal gyrus, the left superior insula and the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex in COVID patients.” It should be emphasized that this study provided objective evidence of the destructive impact of COVID on the brain.

Grey matter is distributed at the brain’s surface, containing most of the brain’s neuronal cell bodies and essentially controls all our brain’s functions. Besides involving people’s sense of smell and taste, the mentioned areas play a role in memory and emotional reactions. The study findings were troubling because the brains of those with mild cases of COVID-19 infection were similar to a small number of hospitalized patients with severe disease, hinting that the impact on the brain is not predicated on the severity of the condition.

The other aspect of the study that makes it compelling is the longitudinal nature with matched controls that assured the researchers that these findings were free of substantial interpretational bias from case studies. However, what remains to be better elucidated is if these findings are a byproduct of a direct infection by the virus or immune/inflammatory changes caused by the disease.

They summarized that “the limbic nature of the regions of the olfactory system, and their physical proximity to the hippocampus, in particular, raise the possibility that longer-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection (for which some suggest that the coronavirus itself enters the brain via the olfactory route) might in time contribute to Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.”

MRI imaging of the Olfactory nervous system. a: frontal view - white arrow pointing to cribriform plate and white tip showing the olfactory bulb. b: side view - image of the olfactory bulb placed on the cribriform plate. c: front view - olfactory tract between the right gyrus and the medio-orbital gyrus. d: Side view - olfactory tract under the frontal lobe (tip of white arrow). Source - diagnostic and interventional imaging.

The compelling evidence between COVID-19 and the long-term effects on the brain and nervous system led to the initiation in January 2021 of a large international study investigating the correlation between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the issues behind the cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia that afflict the elderly.

For decades, evidence has been accumulating that respiratory viruses, including coronaviruses, may potentially increase a person’s risk for these neurological diseases. Circumstantial evidence for this exists after the Spanish flu. Researchers from almost 40 countries will enroll and follow 40,000 participants aged over 50 who have survived COVID-19 infections to answer these critical questions.

One of the lead authors of the international study, Dr. Gabriel A. de Erausquin from Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Health San Antonio, explained: “When the trail of the virus, when it invades the brain, leads almost straight to the hippocampus. That is believed to be one of the sources of the cognitive impairment observed in COVID-19 patients. We suspect it may also be part of the reason why there will be an accelerated cognitive decline over time in susceptible individuals.”

Given that estimates of the global burden of COVID-19 infections are in the hundreds of millions if not billions, the social and economic implications of the pandemic’s impact will be considerable, especially in the decades that will proceed the eventual end of the pandemic.

Dr. Erausquin added: “It really worries me, because if you think that we are already, in developed countries at least, an aging population, and the rate of dementia and diseases of the brain is already likely to increase, the impact of an additional hit on the brain that can accelerate or precipitate the disease without any additional risk factors, that’s scary to think about.”

The more transmissible Delta variant is well underway to becoming the dominant strain in the US and throughout Europe before the summer’s end. In the context of the complete abandonment of all public health measures and school reopenings, school-age children and young adults, who have for the most part still to be vaccinated, face considerable consequences to their long-term neurological health. Most of the planet’s population remains naïve (unexposed) to the virus. Should they survive the infection, as most will, how has the criminal response to the pandemic, which continues to place profits over lives and livelihoods, impacted their lives that are still unlived?