Japan’s COVID-19 crisis in the wake of the Olympics

Emily Ochiai

In the aftermath of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, a predictable COVID-19 disaster continues to unfold in Japan, demonstrating the Japanese government’s complete indifference to containing the virus. As of August 30, 2,075 COVID-19 patients nationwide are in critical condition. The number of patients on respirators nationwide exceeded 900, far exceeding the numbers in the third and fourth wave of infection. More than 118,000 people are self-isolating at home.

In Tokyo alone, 4,351 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 267 of them critically ill. Some 17,603 people self-isolate at home, 2,126 in hotels, and 6,254 people are wait-listed to be admitted into a hospital. Even with these horrific numbers, experts warn that the official number of confirmed cases is significantly underestimated due to the slow and inefficient testing system, citing a high positivity rate of over 20 percent. They warned at the Tokyo COVID-19 Monitoring Committee Meeting on August 20 that “infection will rampage through the nation to a disastrous level. This is an emergency.”

This disaster in Japan is a direct result of a series of decisions made by the government of Yoshihide Suga and his predecessor Shinzo Abe, whose sole objective has been to maximize profit for the ruling class, not to save lives. They proceeded to hold the Tokyo Olympics Games, ignoring the countless warnings from scientists, criticism from the medical workers, and mass opposition from people all over the world. Thousands of workers and youth protested to stop the tidal wave of infections and death pummeling the hospitals. During the Games, Tokyo recorded its highest number of daily cases, at over 5,000.

People walk by posters to promote the Olympic Games planned to start in the summer of 2021, in Tokyo, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Despite the state of emergency that persisted throughout the Olympic Games, the Suga administration has criminally proceeded to hold the Paralympics Games as well and has invited more than 130,000 elementary school students as spectators into the stadiums in what can only be described as an effort mirroring the Swedish herd immunity model to purposefully infect masses of children.

With the surge in cases and the sharp increase in serious cases from the spread of the Delta variant, the healthcare system in Japan has been in a deep crisis for months. There is a serious shortage of all resources, beds, staff and respirators. The bed occupancy rates for critically ill patients and ICU beds are 97 percent in Tokyo, 91 percent in Kanagawa, 82 percent in Chiba, 69 percent in Saitama, and 89 percent in Okinawa. On August 27, one of the major hospitals accepting COVID-19 patients in Osaka declared bankruptcy.

The crisis in the hospitals is catastrophic. Between August 16 and August 22, 250 patients spent more than three hours in the ambulance before reaching a hospital that would accept them in Tokyo. This is more than 30 percent of all patients taken by the ambulance. There were 121 instances in which patients were required to wait longer than five hours.

Additionally, 1,160 instances occurred in which the ambulance did not transport the patient to a hospital at all, meaning ambulances and first responders are being asked to make life-and-death decisions. These cases include cases where the health center decided the patient should self-quarantine, as well as those in which patients gave up looking for a hospital and requested to be taken home. A tragic case was reported where a woman in her twenties was rushed to the hospital in Tokyo after her blood oxygen level fell below the critical condition threshold. She waited hours in an ambulance while the staff looked for a hospital willing to accept her. Devastated by the situation, she told the staff, “I have no choice; I am going to give up,” and returned home despite her worsening condition.

With the critical shortage of hospital beds, an increasing number of people are being forced to remain at home and are denied medical care. Currently, over 118,000 people nationwide are self-isolating at home. Health centers are stretched to their limit and are often unable to monitor the self-isolating patients.

Self-isolating COVID-19 patients dying alone at home have become a frequent story in the media. On August 30, a self-isolating patient in her sixties in Chiba Prefecture was found dead approximately three days after her death. The health center classified her as low priority because she was diagnosed as having a mild condition and lived with her husband. However, her husband was hospitalized with a critical injury and was not present with her. His speech was impaired, and he could not be identified by the hospital. The health center was unable to contact the woman about her husband and thus visited her home, where they found her dead.

According to NHK, a man in his twenties was also discovered dead in his home in the Chiba prefecture while self-isolating. He tested positive and had a fever of 104 degrees. However, the doctor advised him to self-isolate at home. The health center explained that, due to the short time period between his diagnosis and death, they did not have time to initiate contact with him. This is the second death in the Chiba prefecture of COVID patients in their twenties. The young man’s daughter found her father dead.

Another man in his sixties who was self-isolating at home was discovered dead. Even though the man had a preexisting medical condition (diabetes), he was denied hospitalization and told to self-isolate at home after the Saitama Prefecture determined his symptoms were “mild.” His case was transferred to a ‘self-isolating patient care center.’ For 10 consecutive days, the center was unable to contact him. His wife, who was also COVID-19 positive, was self-isolating with him. However, her health was worsening, and she was unable to call for help for her husband.

On August 19, a self-isolating pregnant woman lost her baby after being forced to deliver prematurely at home alone without any medical assistance. She was classified as low priority by the Chiba prefecture and therefore was denied in-patient care.

Healthcare workers are continuing to fight against the criminal policy of the Suga administration and are voicing their criticism on social media. A nurse declared on social media, “Many people are dying. They could have been saved if we had proper and sufficient resources. It is wrong to reduce the number of beds and health care workers,” criticizing the Japanese government’s decades-long plan to reduce health care costs. Another explained the situation at the front line stating, “We did not have enough resources to begin with. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is impossible. We do not have enough beds. We do not have enough nurses.”

A number of health care workers on Twitter spearheaded a social media strike using the hashtag # 国会ひらき医療崩壊を防げ meaning “open an Extraordinary Diet [Parliament] session and avoid health care crisis.” One declared, “There are more than 135,000 COVID patients left at home. Every day we have self-isolating patients die alone at home. It is clearly an emergency, and we shouldn’t be demanding an Extraordinary Diet session,” questioning the government’s complete indifference to human lives. Another stated, “They reduced workers at health centers to half and don’t pay even 1 yen. This is what the LPD did to us,” expressing her anger towards not only the Suga administration but all the previous administrations. Another expressed her criticism of the government: “People cannot get tested. They can’t connect to the Health Center. Can’t be admitted to a hospital. No contact tracing is done. This is all because the government reduced the funding for health centers. The government must take responsibility for reducing the number of health centers to one per designated city.”

With increasing reports of self-isolating COVID-19 patients’ deaths, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan asked the government to release information on the total number of deaths among those self-isolating. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare official answered, “There are many cases that we do not have a grasp of. So, we do not have a grasp of the comprehensive situation.”

The Japanese government and mass media have been relentless in their efforts to blame young people, who they claim do not take the pandemic seriously, for the spread. This has been bound up with a cynical media campaign urging young people to get vaccinated. In reality, for young people to receive the limited number of vaccines, workers and youth must enter into a lottery. On August 28, Tokyo set up a walk-in vaccination lottery site. More than 2,200 people, primarily young people, lined up hoping to get vaccinated. Of the 2,200, only 354 “won” the vaccination ticket.

These numerous tragedies were entirely preventable. Public health experts have been warning about the risk of holding the Olympics Games, an event that catalyzed a massive surge of infection. The Games were highly unpopular, with more than 80 percent of the population opposing the event. More than 460,000 people all over the world signed a petition on Change.org calling to cancel the Tokyo Olympics to protect lives. Countless protests erupted all over Japan demanding to cancel the Olympics.

Health care systems are on the verge of collapse all over the world. The situation is particularly dire in the United States, the epicenter of global capitalism. As a direct result of the criminal campaign to reopen schools, pediatric intensive care units and hospitals across the country are filling up and reaching their capacity. Nurses are quitting and retiring as a result of exhaustion and demoralization caused by the crisis. Profit-driven policies allowed the virus to spread and mutate into more contagious, vaccine-resistant strains. All workers across the globe must join the struggle to reject the ruling class’s promotion of endemicity that we must “learn to live with the virus,” and demand a scientific approach to eradicate COVID-19.

Sri Lankan president proclaims state of emergency

Saman Gunadasa & K. Ratnayake

On August 30, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse suddenly announced a repressive national “state of emergency.” The new measures, he declared, were necessary “to ensure the public security and well-being, and maintenance of supplies and services essential to the life of the community” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The official reason given for the proclamation was in order to deal with food shortages and massive increases in the cost of food, such as rice and sugar, which have doubled in price to 250 and 220 rupees per kilo respectively. Pro-government media outlets immediately hailed government seizures of hoarded food stocks and other measures that Rajapakse insisted would control the price of food and guarantees orderly supplies.

The new “state of emergency” measures, however, simply by-pass already existing laws to deal with hoarding and price increases. Rajapakse’s proclamation has nothing to do with providing services “essential to the life of the community” but is a far-reaching move for even-more draconian presidential powers.

The capitalist classes and their regimes internationally are rapidly embracing dictatorial methods in order to take on the working class and the oppressed masses resisting government attempts to impose the burden of the economic crisis produced by the coronavirus pandemic.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Although the new measure is called the “Emergency (Provision of Essential Food) Regulation,” under existing state of emergency powers the president has the power of seizing property and for “amending any law, for suspending the operation of any law and for applying any law with or without modification.” It also allows censorship of the media.

Last week, Rajapakse renewed the “Essential Public Services Act,” originally imposed on May 27, which covers about one million public sector employees and bans strikes and other industrial action.

Anyone found guilty of “violating” the essential services laws, following a summary trial before a magistrate, faces rigorous jail terms, fines, seizure of their property and banned from employment in any profession. The same punishments can be inflicted on anyone prosecuted for “inducing” or “inciting” public sector workers to “violate” these regulations.

While Rajapakse’s newly-declared emergency regulations are being debated in parliament today, as required under the constitution, the ruling party has the majority to push through the law, notwithstanding submissive criticism from the pliant opposition.

Last week, the media launched an extensive propaganda exercise, suddenly “exposing” unnamed hoarders of sugar, rice and paddy stocks. This was followed by police raids on warehouses with officials from the government’s Consumer Affair Authority (CAA) sealing off the premises.

The seized stock, the CAA declared, would be purchased at a “reasonable” rate from the “illegal hoarders” by government authorities and distributed among consumers. Instead of seizing these food essentials without compensation, the “illegal hoarders” have been rewarded, in a clear signal to big business that the government’s actions are not directed against them.

In fact, the highly publicised raids and seizures were a public relations exercise to deflect rising anti-government sentiment over soaring prices, shortages and social devastation exacerbated by the pandemic. According to the latest figures, over 10,000 people, including children, have died from COVID-19, with 8,000 of these deaths in the last two months from the Delta variant which has overwhelmed the public health service.

In yet another elevation of a senior military figure into the government, President Rajapakse appointed Major General, D.S.P. Niwunhella as the Commissioner General of Essential Services to coordinate the essential food supplies.

Food shortages, however, are not caused by hoarding but are the result of government-imposed cuts to imports and rising inflation. Colombo, in fact, is preparing to ration the supply of essentials to the population.

The import curbs, including on milk powder, are in response to $4 billion in foreign debt repayments this year. Sharp declines in export, tourism and remittance earnings saw the state’s foreign reserves drop last month to just $2.8 billion. Sri Lanka’s energy minister is involved in discussions with United Arab Emirates officials to secure oil on credit.

The rupee has fallen dramatically against the US dollar with the Sri Lankan Central Bank reporting that the currency had dropped by about 13.5 percent between January 1 to August 30 while commercial bank exchange rates fell by almost 25 percent. The bond market has also dropped with the cash-strapped treasury only able to sell 4 billion rupees in bonds on August 30.

The Central Bank has printed billions of rupees to overcome government expenditure gaps, further increasing inflation and driving down the value of the rupee. The official inflation rate increased to 6 percent in August on a year-on-year basis.

Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse, who is preparing for another austerity budget in November, told cabinet ministers last week that “state revenue has decreased drastically… and that it was not sufficient even for recurrent expenditure.” His ministry has directed all other ministries to slash expenditure and halt all projects. Government ministers are already campaigning for cuts to state employees’ salaries and pensions as a “remedy.”

Even as it prepares to deepen its attacks on workers and the poor, the Rajapakse government has provided massive assistance to big business, kept all its debt commitments to international financial institutions and ordered employees to remain at work in export plants and other workplaces in unsafe conditions. Banks and other business have reaped massive profits during the pandemic.

The opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), United National Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the Tamil National Alliance have timidly criticised the emergency laws. The SJB asked the government to “take steps to promulgate legislation to deal with the pandemic,” instead of imposing emergency measures. The TNA said the government should have “separate public health emergency laws instead of imposing an emergency.”

The JVP remains silent on the emergency regulations. Sunil Haduneththi, a JVP leader, called on the government on August 29 to implement effective price controls. When the emergency laws were imposed, JVP MP, Vijith Herath said they only benefited the traders. The pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party has not said a word about the state of emergency.

The Rajapakse government, opposition parties, unions and the fake left groups, in fact, all fear the developing social opposition among the working class. As Rajapakse declared last month during his national speech reluctantly announcing a new lockdown: “This is not the time for strike actions.”

Ongoing strike action by almost 250,000 teachers and the eruption of strikes and protests by railway, postal, plantation and health workers in the past months has created a deep political crisis for the government and the unions.

Biden endorses anti-Russian “Crimean Platform” amid Ukrainian government fears of US foreign policy shift

Clara Weiss

On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden granted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a meeting for which the Kiev government had had to beg Washington for well over a year. Following the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became central to the US-led NATO encirclement of and war preparations against Russia. The US played the principal role in funding a far-right coup in Kiev in February 2014, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky [Credit: en.kremlin.ru]

After the two-hour meeting between Zelensky and Biden, the White House published a joint statement, confirming Washington’s support for Ukraine’s aggressive and provocative “Crimean Platform” and its military build-up against Russia in the Black Sea. The statement reiterated the lies of “continued Russian aggression” and pledged that Washington would retain its “commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The “Crimean Platform” was announced by Kiev in March and involves a provocative strategy for Ukraine to “retake” Crimea, presumably by military means. The Crimea is a strategic peninsula in the Black Sea that was annexed by Russia in March 2014 following a US-backed coup in Kiev and a referendum on the peninsula. Crimea’s main city, Sevastopol is also the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s highly provocative announcement of the strategy to “retake” Crimea earlier this year triggered a significant military crisis in the Black Sea region. The “Crimean Platform” initiative held its first summit with representatives from all NATO countries on August 23.

Biden also pledged an additional $60 million this year to deliver Javelin missiles to Ukraine, on top of $400 million that were already granted this year. By contrast, the US has so far provided only $55 million for just 2.2 million vaccine doses to assist Ukraine in vaccinating its population of 40 million people, and will provide an additional $12.5 million, a fraction of its support for the Ukrainian military.

The statement also insisted on ongoing “reforms” of Ukraine’s economy, which involve large-scale privatizations, as well as far-reaching cooperation between Ukrainian and US intelligence.

While the joint statement declared that the US continued “to oppose” the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, there was no indication that Washington would undertake any measures to revise its recent deal with Berlin, which effectively allows the pipeline to be completed and go into operation. The pipeline is expected to cost the Ukrainian economy billions of dollars annually because of lost revenue from transit fees. Both the joint statement and Biden also made but very vague statements of support for “Ukraine’s European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” that is, its repeated and insistent requests to be granted accelerated access to NATO.

Zelensky later said he had invited Biden to Ukraine, but that the US president said that he would “come when he can, he is a very busy man.” The Ukrainian president travelled on to California to meet with representatives of Apple and speak at Stanford University.

Prior to the meeting with Biden, Zelensky and his delegation had met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Austin and the Ukrainian defense minister Andrei Taran signed a new strategic defense framework agreement. While details have not been revealed, the agreement reportedly focuses on deepening military cooperation in the Black Sea, reforms of Ukraine’s defense industrial sector, as well as cybersecurity and intelligence.

The Russian press has warned that the new agreements would be directed against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. Most of Russia’s nuclear arsenal dates back to the Soviet period, when the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was the main manufacturer of weapons, including nuclear weapons. The closer cooperation between American and Ukrainian intelligence, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote, could entail Ukraine providing intelligence about Russia’s nuclear weapons to the Pentagon.

Zelensky’s visit to the US was overshadowed by the staggering debacle US imperialism has just suffered in Afghanistan. Ukraine, which has supported the criminal NATO war, was unable to evacuate dozens of its citizens in time before the withdrawal was completed.

The rapid shift in focus of US imperialism away from Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s unceremonious dropping of support for its Afghan stooges has sent shock waves through the Ukrainian oligarchy. Torn by conflicts and widely hated in the desperately impoverished working population, it is heavily dependent on funding and political support from Washington.

In the lead-up to the February 2014 coup, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich, the US pumped some $5 billion into supporting the “opposition,” including various fascist formations like the Azov Battalion. Since then, billions more were given to the government in Kiev, including $2.5 billion for the Ukrainian military, which has been fighting against pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine. The civil war has claimed over 15,000 lives and displaced millions, with no end to the conflict in sight.

An advisor to Zelensky, Andrew Mac, told the New York Times in advance of the Zelensky-Biden meeting, “The situation in Afghanistan seems to indicate a realignment of U.S. global commitments, and President Zelensky wants to hear from President Biden where Ukraine fits in.” In an indication of just how worried Kiev is, Tymofiy Mylovanov, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, told the newspaper, “We are very different from Afghanistan, and we would like to emphasize this. We are an independent country, not a failed state, and our military has managed to resist the Russians, not the Taliban.”

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, mockingly commented, “Did the fact that Afghanistan has the status of a main U.S. ally outside of NATO save the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul? A similar situation awaits those who are banking on America in Ukraine.” He predicted that Ukraine “is going to disintegrate and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember its supporters in Kyiv.”

Fears in Kiev of Washington dropping or reducing its support were fueled earlier this year by the summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The summit was part of the Biden administration’s effort to somewhat ease tensions with Russia, while orienting US foreign policy more directly toward preparations for war against China.

A few weeks later, Berlin and Washington announced a deal over the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The deal was struck without consultation with the Ukrainian government, and the invitation to Zelensky to Washington was issued once the deal was announced. The Biden administration has also refused to make any commitment to accelerating Ukraine’s accession to NATO, a central and stated goal of the 2014 coup.

The shifts in US foreign policy have fueled bitter conflicts within the Ukrainian ruling class and stirred up far-right forces against president Zelensky. Ever since coming into office, Zelensky has faced multiple violent demonstrations from the far right, which has opposed any efforts to negotiate a settlement with Russia over East Ukraine, as well as Zelensky’s attempts to work more closely with Berlin. In one of the most recent attacks, in mid-August, right-wing thugs held a demonstration before his office, demanding that he work more closely with the US and that he not “capitulate” to Russia in negotiations over the conflict in East Ukraine. In a highly unusual move this summer, Zelensky, who is the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, was temporarily banned from visiting the front of the civil war.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government plans to deport almost 800 child migrants

Alice Summers

Almost 800 child migrants are being expelled from Spain by the coalition government of the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party. These mass deportations are the latest atrocity in the so-called “progressive” government’s crusade against migrants and refugees.

The children were among the thousands of migrants who arrived in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, which borders Morocco, in May. Most swam around the six-metre fence that juts out into the sea, walked across at low tide, or used rubber dinghies to cross into Spain. Roughly 10,000 migrants are estimated to have crossed the border with Morocco in barely more than a day, of whom around 2,000 were minors.

In response, the PSOE-Podemos government sent in hundreds of soldiers in armoured vehicles, and mobilised over 200 riot police to reinforce the 1,000-strong police force stationed in Ceuta. Soldiers and police used batons to clear migrants from the beach and threw smoke bombs to stop others from crossing. At least one migrant drowned at sea.

The deportation of hundreds of children is a continuation of the violent assault on these migrants begun in May. Those who made it into the Spanish enclave, despite attacks by soldiers and militarised police are now being summarily expelled without the chance to have their case heard, in flagrant violation of international law.

Podemos has half-heartedly postured as an opponent of the deportation order. The party’s Minister of Social Rights and Agenda 2030, Ione Belarra, pathetically declared, “any process of family regroupment must use a protocol that includes individualised interviews with the children as well as a detailed knowledge on the part of the Prosecutor's Office.”

In reality, Podemos is complicit in the xenophobic, anti-migrant policies of the government of which it is a part. In office it has implemented policies indistinguishable from those of the far-right, separating migrant children from their parents, building concentration camps on the Canary Islands and facilitating fascistic attacks on migrants stranded there. These policies led to the deaths of more than 2,000 migrants who attempted to cross to Spain in the first half of 2021, according to charity Caminando Fronteras.

Deportations of the minors began on 13 August, with 15 children transported back to Morocco each day on buses. According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, the expulsions were being carried out in accordance with a 2007 agreement signed with Morocco to facilitate the rapid repatriation of unaccompanied children. Three days later, however, after 45 migrants had already been expelled, the Government of Ceuta was forced to suspend the repatriations for 72 hours.

This was in response to numerous legal challenges, including by the non-governmental organisations (NGO) the Spanish Network for Immigration and Refugee Assistance, Coordinadora de Barrios and Fundación Raíces. The children were being deported without having had access to a lawyer or the opportunity to have their cases heard individually, Patricia Fernandez Vicens, lawyer for Coordinadora de Barrios, stated.

Mass expulsions violate both domestic and international laws: children have the right to be heard during all legal and administrative processes that affect them, and the public prosecutor in Spain must issue an individual report before a minor can be deported.

Numerous NGOs denounced the PSOE-Podemos government’s decision as a breach of fundamental rights. UK-based charity Save the Children declared that “any collective repatriation of children and adolescents is illegal.” The Spanish government must carry out an “individual evaluation of every child,” the NGO said, “prepare a process of hearings and pleas for each young person and collect information about the family of origin in Morocco.”

“Many of these children will be deported into a situation of risk to their safety,” declared Andrés Conde, managing director of Save the Children in Spain. The charity has interviewed around 350 of the child migrants who crossed into Ceuta in May, and many reported that they had suffered sexual violence, work exploitation, forced marriage and human trafficking in their country of origin.

Amnesty International, meanwhile, demanded that Spain’s Interior Ministry “halt these expulsions until every document has been inspected by the Juvenile Prosecution Office and guarantee that they have acted in the child’s best interest.”

It is the “obligation of the Autonomous City of Ceuta to protect the rights of minors that they find in their territory,” Amnesty International continued. “The Spanish authorities must in practice, and not just rhetorically, guarantee that the rights of the hundreds of unaccompanied minors in Ceuta are coming first. We have no evidence that this is the case.”

On 24 August, the judicial suspension of deportations was upheld as a “precautionary measure” by a further ruling. “Lifting this measure would be permitting repatriation...,” the judge presiding over the case stated. “It would be absolutely ineffective to have delivered a verdict violating a fundamental right without having attained the intended protection for a minor in Morocco.”

A day later, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summoned Juan Jesús Vivas, president of the autonomous city of Ceuta, to Madrid to discuss plans to continue with expulsions despite these rulings.

Far from halting deportation orders, Sánchez and Vivas, a member of the right-wing Popular Party, doubled down on their plans. They reportedly agreed to prevent the transfer of any of the migrants currently held in Ceuta to mainland Spain and to continue processing deportations via the Aliens Law, rather than through the 2007 repatriation agreement with Morocco. The Aliens Law states that deportation cases must be individualised and carried out with the participation of the minor.

While the Aliens Law may slow the tempo of deportations, Sánchez has insisted that there will be no let-up in the government’s anti-migrant plans and that the children will be deported “in the shortest time possible.” In a government statement, Sánchez pledged to provide “triple support for a safe and ordered return of the minors… with three axes: capacity, administration and diplomacy.”

Sánchez “promised to activate all resources in the hands of the state to return the minors to Morocco,” Vivas stated in a press conference. “The only solution is the return to Morocco …”

Falsely and cynically attempting to present the deportation orders as being for the well-being of the migrant children, the statement declared that Sánchez and Vivas “agreed on the necessity of prioritising a safe and orderly return of the minors to their country of origin, especially with the start of the school term, because their remaining in Ceuta could enormous harm their educational development and increase their uprooting from their families.”

The appalling and illegal treatment of the almost 800 migrant children in Ceuta reveals the deceitful nature of current attempts by the PSOE-Podemos government to posture as humanitarians in their response to the US debacle in Afghanistan.

At the end of August, Irene Montero, Podemos Minister for Equality and partner of former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, declared that the priority of the Spanish government “must be women and LGBTI people in Afghanistan now and in the next months.” The PSOE-Podemos government is “doing everything possible to assure that all those who need to can leave the country,” Montero added.

Germany: Train drivers launch third consecutive strike for better wages and working conditions

Marianne Arens

At 2 in the morning on Thursday, train drivers and other railway workers began a third consecutive strike to obtain better wages and working conditions. In freight transport, a strike had already begun on Wednesday afternoon. It is becoming increasingly clear that the industrial action raises political issues which cannot be resolved or left in the hands of the trade union that called for the strikes, the German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL).

Striking railway workers in Frankfurt

The offer made to strikers on Tuesday by the management of the Deutsche Bahn (DB) railway company is a sham. Deutsche Bahn remains insistent on cutting the company pensions of railway workers and freezing wages for 2021.

GDL leader Claus Weselsky accused the DB board of seeking to destroy his union. He said that although the GDL had recently gained about 4,000 new members, the DB management was not prepared to comply with a contract already agreed with the GDL.

Earlier this year, a new law on Collective Bargaining Unity (Tarifeinheitsgesetz, TEG) has been applied to the railways which stipulates that companies can only conclude contracts with the union which has the largest number of members in that workplace. In most railway companies, the larger union is the Rail and Transport Workers’ Union (EVG), which has already agreed to a pay freeze and has ordered its members to work during the strike, effectively forcing them to scab on workers in the GDL.

On Thursday, the DB board also took legal action against the train drivers’ strike. Martin Seiler, the board member responsible for human resources, applied to the labour court in Frankfurt am Main for a temporary injunction to ban the industrial action. According to Seiler, the strike did “not fall into the framework of applicable law.”

The Labour Court threw out the application the same evening, stating it was not possible to determine sufficiently in summary proceedings whether inadmissible strike objectives were being pursued. Deutsche Bahn has announced that it will appeal against the court’s decision, and the Regional Labour Court in Frankfurt scheduled the appeal for Friday.

Drivers and conductors, who have worked day and night during the coronavirus pandemic, are very bitter about the action taken by the DB executive. “We have practically no weekends off, have different working hours every day, have been on the job throughout the pandemic. Who is of systemic importance here?” said one striking train driver at Frankfurt’s main station. “The DB executive awards itself bonuses worth millions, but nobody cares about us.”

In fact, the offer made by DB to the workers is a new provocation. Deutsche Bahn did agree to pay a one-time coronavirus bonus of “600 or 400 euros” and “shorten” the duration of the contract from the originally planned 40 months to 36 months. In these three years, however, wages would increase by a total of just 3.2 percent, under conditions of soaring inflation which is already nearly 4 percent in Germany. The DB board still refuses to pay even one cent more in 2021.

At the same time, the board of directors is raking in millions. The annual financial statement of Deutsche Bahn for 2019 listed total remuneration of the six board members at more than 7.4 million euros; in addition, more than 1.3 billion euros is listed in provisions for the pensions of retired board members.

The head of Deutsche Bahn, Richard Lutz, pocketed more than 1.7 million euros in 2019. Ronald Pofalla, DB’s Board Member for Infrastructure and former chief of staff of the German Chancellery, raked in just under 1.25 million. Martin Seiler, the head of Human Resources who is leading contract bargaining, took home more than 800,000 euros.

“The inequality is unimaginably blatant,” a striking train attendant in Frankfurt commented. “I have huge difficulty finding any affordable housing here in Frankfurt. You can’t find anything in the city for less than 800 euros, and yet I am often expected to turn up here at the station in the middle of the night to work.”

Like other strikers, including very young ones, this train conductor was particularly outraged by the board’s attacks on the company pension. “We want at least the hope that we can live reasonably securely when we retire. Poverty in old age is definitely an issue. For example, my grandma is now in a situation where she has to live on a monthly pension of just 650 euros.”

Train drivers and conductors are fighting over social issues that affect all workers. They are in conflict not only with the DB board and the German government, which owns Deutsche Bahn, they also face the hostility of the rest of the trade unions and all of Germany’s main political parties.

The head of the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB) Reiner Hoffmann and EVG chairman Klaus-Dieter Hommel have publicly denounced the strikes and stabbed train workers in the back. The leading election candidate of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, has described the strike as “theatre” and “completely unreasonable” and called upon Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) to intervene.

For its part, the GDL is also neither willing nor able to lead a principled struggle for a real improvement of wages and working conditions. It has only called for limited strike action: two strikes of two days, and now a five-day stoppage, but vehemently rejects an indefinite strike.

At the same time, the demands set by the GDL also mean a real wage reduction, even if they were fully implemented. The GDL is demanding 1.4 percent more pay this year and 1.8 percent next year to cover a 28-month period, plus a coronavirus bonus of 600 euros. In 2014, the GDL called off a strike on short notice, although it had been confirmed as legal by a labour court.

The career of Martin Seiler, the personnel director of Deutsche Bahn, illustrates the close relations between the trade union bureaucracy and management. For 15 years Seiler was a works council member and trade union section leader, first of the German Postal Workers’ Union, then of the service trade union Verdi. In 2003, he moved to the management of Deutsche Post AG, and twelve years later became Labour Director at Deutsche Telekom, responsible for 70,000 employees. At the beginning of 2018, he took over as personnel director at Deutsche Bahn in charge of 320,000 railway employees.

The German media is acting as a mouthpiece for management in the rail strike. This is another issue that deeply angers strikers. The media describe the strike as a pure “power play” by the GDL. All of the news reports about the strike on Wednesday contained the sentence: “Despite a new offer from Deutsche Bahn, train drivers began their announced strike this morning.” None of the media outlets said a word about what the “offer” really entailed.

A team from the German public broadcaster ZDF filmed and interviewed several train drivers in front of Frankfurt’s main station on Wednesday morning, but the subsequent broadcast featured just one sentence from the strikers alongside a number of spiteful comments critical of the strike.

WHO reports fifth “variant of interest” as COVID pandemic worsens

Benjamin Mateus

This week the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the presence of a fifth variant of interest called “Mu,” designated by the alpha-numeric code B.1.621, with several characteristic mutations that make it more resistant to vaccines.

It was first identified in Colombia in January 2021. Though the global prevalence of the Mu variant globally remains low, it accounts for 39 percent of all strains sequenced from Colombia and 13 percent from Ecuador, and its frequency has consistently been rising.

The designation “variant of interest” means that the new version of the virus has genetic markers suggesting a potentially increased capability to infect or increased resistance to vaccines, but it has not yet risen to the level of “variant of concern,” which actually demonstrates increased transmissibility, lethality or resistance in the field.

Additionally, scientists in South Africa announced that they have detected a new variant designated as C.1.2, first discovered during the country’s third wave in May. Though the strain has not been designated a variant of interest by the WHO, it has spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific into nine countries, including China and New Zealand.

The C.1.2 appears to harbor a significant number of mutations with an unusually high mutation rate, which makes it important to track. Newsweek wrote, “It was found to contain many mutations that were found in all variants of concern (VOCs) and three variants of interest (VOIs), as well as additional changes within the NTD (C136F) RBD (Y449H), and adjacent to the furin cleavage site (N679K).

The pre-print study noted, “Like several other VOCs, C.1.2 has accumulated a number of substitutions beyond what would be expected from the background SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary rate. This suggests the likelihood that these mutations arose during a period of accelerated evolution in a single individual with prolonged viral infection through virus-host co-evolution.”

Currently, there have been more than 220 million COVID-19 infections reported and 4.56 million deaths attributed to complications from the infections. The moving average in cases has peaked at close to 660,000 cases per day, while the average in deaths is skirting 10,000 each day. Regionally, the Americas and Europe have seen cases reach previous highs. These developments are being compounded by both the return to school and the reopening of all nonessential businesses and travel.

The United States continues to remain the epicenter of the pandemic during the Delta phase of the pandemic. It has now surpassed 40 million reported cases and 663,000 deaths. The moving average has reached 164,000 new cases per day, having climbed 14 percent from two weeks ago. The average daily death toll has jumped to more than 1,500 per day, a 67 percent rise in the same period.

US hospitalizations continue to climb, with close to 102,000 having been admitted for treatment. Approximately a quarter of these are in intensive care units.

The push to get children back to schools will only produce more devastating results as the majority of them remain unvaccinated. The American Academy of Pediatrics noted that for the week ending August 26, 2021, children accounted for 22.4 percent of reported weekly COVID-19 cases, meaning nearly one in four cases are among this layer of the population.

Since July 22, 2021, when the number of pediatric cases was at 38,000 for the week, that figure has risen to 204,000, just shy of the winter peaks. And all schools have yet to open.

However, rather than acknowledging the failed and bankrupt proposition that children must return to in-class instructions, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put her usual spin on the matter, saying at a press briefing, “Cases, emergency room visits and hospitalizations are much lower among children and communities with higher vaccination rates. Vaccination work!”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations (IHME) modeling projection, which estimates total reported deaths by December 1, 2021, has been revised upwards. The IHME now expects that more than three-quarter million Americans will have died by then, a social crime for which the capitalist ruling class and its two parties are primarily responsible.

A Johns Hopkins webinar yesterday highlighted South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida as reporting more COVID cases per capita than any other state or any single country across the globe. This demonstrates the lethal role—in a literal sense—of the ultra-right campaign against vaccination, masking, social distancing and all other public health efforts, spearheaded by Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The policies of Democratic governors and the Biden administration are merely a slower route to the same destination, since reopening schools, social venues and workplaces, with or without masking, means facilitating the spread of coronavirus with all its horrific consequences.

At the Johns Hopkins webinar, one of the experts on the panel, Dr. Bill Moss, the executive director at the International Vaccine Access Center at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, pointed out that allowing hospitals throughout much of the country where the pandemic has accelerated to be inundated by patients was a serious mistake.

Dr. Moss went on to say, “I think one of the most egregious failures of our society, one of our gravest sins as we look back at this particularly during this wave, will be allowing hospitals to be overwhelmed. We have overwhelmed the hospital staff; we are seeing shortages in nurses and respiratory therapists and other hospital personnel. We’ve seen limited bed capacity in hospitals, particularly in intensive care units in a number of counties and states. We are seeing shortages of oxygen. And we should just not be in this place where our health system is overwhelmed now that we ... have three safe and effective vaccines. That was more understandable in the winter surge when vaccines were just being rolled out. … But this is impacting on people who don’t have COVID and need health care services.”

He also went on to indirectly fault the Biden administration’s early messaging on the vaccines giving “false hope that vaccines were going to prevent infections,” calling for public health measures to prevent infection. Vaccines have always been intended for the prevention of severe disease and not infections.

At the present rate of infections, the world will reach 300 million reported cases of COVID-19 by January 2022, the beginning of the third year of the COVID pandemic. With 5.4 billion doses of vaccines administered thus far, the world will have reached 8 billion, or about one dose for every person on the planet, before the year’s end. But the inequity in the distribution continues to disadvantage the poorest nations.

This inequity could be further exacerbated if it becomes necessary to administer booster vaccines on a mass basis in the countries where most of the population has already been inoculated, particularly in Europe and America, because of declining effectiveness of the vaccines and increased ability of the Delta variant to evade immunity.

It is also conceivable that if newer strains create conditions that the vaccines are deemed insufficiently ineffective, the leading pharmaceuticals will have to return to the drawing board and manufacture the next generation of vaccines against the latest variants, with the chilling possibility that the global vaccination would have to start all over again.

With more than 20,000 daily infections, Kerala emerges as India’s COVID-19 epicenter

Yuan Darwin

The south Indian state of Kerala, which is governed by the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF), has become the new epicenter of the country’s COVID-19 catastrophe. Since late July, Kerala has experienced a high and growing number of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, fueled by the deadly Delta variant.

Health workers leave in an ambulance after a COVID-19 vaccination drive at a shopping mall in Kochi, Kerala state, India, Friday, Aug. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/R S Iyer)

For weeks Kerala has recorded around half or more of all India’s new COVID-19 infections, and on some days this week Kerala accounted for 70 percent of new cases nationwide. Yet the state’s population of 35.8 million represents just 2.75 percent of India’s 1.39 billion inhabitants.

On Friday, the state’s total COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began reached 4.12 million, with 32,097 infections reported in the preceding 24 hours. According to the extremely under-reported official figures, Kerala’s death toll rose to 21,149, with 188 fatalities since the previous day.

Between August 23 and Thursday, September 2—that is an eleven-day period—Kerala recorded 355,560 new infections and the seven-day average of daily new cases rose from 17,896 to 29,804. Kerala’s test positivity rate, meanwhile, has risen to an astronomic 20 percent.

Dr. Samiran Panda, head of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said that the increase in cases in Kerala “is an early warning signal.” Pointing to the pattern in the state over the last three months—a drop in cases, followed by a temporary lull and then a surge—he warned that the third wave of the pandemic has begun in Kerala.

If Kerala is now leading India into a third wave of COVID-19 infections, it is because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led state administration has joined the Narendra Modi-led central government in prioritizing corporate profits over saving lives. The Kerala government exempted export industries from the state-wide lockdown it imposed in April and May at the height of the second wave, then when infections began to decline moved to quickly roll back any pandemic mitigation measures. This even included allowing mass Muslim and Hindu religious festivals to proceed unimpeded in late July and mid-August, a decision that was widely decried by health experts across the country and which has undoubtedly contributed to the current surge in infections.

In response to the current surge of the virus, the state government has belatedly imposed weekend curfews and, as of last Monday, a night curfew—measures which will neither affect the profit generation of big business nor bring the pandemic under control.

Kerala’s devastating second and third waves of COVID-19 infection and death constitute tragic refutation of the CPM’s and LDF’s claims that they have shielded the state from the worst of the pandemic. This narrative was promoted, at least until recently, by internationally influential corporate media voices, including the BBC, Washington Post, New York Times, and Guardian, and pseudo-left websites like Jacobin in the US. The UK’s Prospect Magazine named former Kerala Health Minister KK Shailaja as the “top thinker” of the COVID-19 age in September 2020, while the Financial Times called her one of the “inspiring women of 2020.”

In reality, Kerala’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led administration has pursued essentially the same ruinous, ruling-class driven pandemic policy as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s other state governments.

Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were quick to embrace the homicidal approach associated with the phrase “herd immunity,” with a top government advisor openly declaring in May 2020 that the economy should be reopened because this would result in “only” 2 million deaths. As India’s deadly April-May 2021 second pandemic wave peaked, hospitals turned away patients in droves for want of beds, drugs and trained personnel and India officially reported thousands of new COVID-19 deaths each day, Modi infamously declared that it was necessary to “save India from lockdown,” not the virus.

As a result, India has suffered a catastrophic loss of life. While officially India has recorded 440,000 COVID deaths, a series of studies have placed the real figure at five to ten times higher. According to a comprehensive study by the US-based Center for Global Development, based on multiple data sets, between April 2020 and June 2021 there were between 3.4 million and 4.7 million “excess,” i.e., COVID-19-related, deaths.

A review of the Kerala LDF government’s response to the pandemic demonstrates that the longer the pandemic has continued the more indistinguishable its policies have become from those of the Modi regime.

Like India’s entire ruling elite, the LDF government blithely disregarded the warnings coming from the World Health Organization and other scientific experts in the first months of 2020 about the global threat posed by COVID-19. On February 14, 2020, after Kerala’s first three COVID-19 patients were declared recovered, the Stalinist government’s then finance minister, Thomas Isaac, tweeted: “Kerala has won the battle with Corona Virus (sic).” On March 29, 2020, Kerala Chief Minister and CPM Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan wrote in the party’s English weekly Peoples Democracy: “This pandemic has brought many developed countries to a standstill. Kerala is giving a tough fight, to curtail the spread of this virus. The LDF Government of Kerala is leading this fight right from the forefront.”

All these premature boasts and lies have now been exposed. In fact, from the beginning, the Kerala Stalinist government, together with the entire political establishment, systematically downplayed the virus danger and projected an air of normalcy to justify keeping the “economy open.”

On March 24, 2020, the BJP government imposed a calamitous ill-prepared lockdown with only a few hours’ notice. It failed to halt the spread of the virus because it was not accompanied by elementary public health measures and social support for the hundreds of millions who lost their livelihoods overnight. In response to demands from big business, the government started easing the restrictions from the end of April, leading to an exponential growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The return to work triggered a sharp rise in infections, with the number of confirmed cases rising by almost 500,000 in June, 1.1 million in July, and just shy of 2 million in August. This resulted in a long wave of infections and death through last summer and fall, and then to a far more devastating second wave, fueled by new variants, that began in mid-February in 2021.

In comparison with the central government and most other Indian states, the Kerala government mounted a larger public health response and took stricter anti-COVID-19 measures during the pandemic’s first wave, and this did have a material impact. Infections and deaths were kept relatively low, and this in a state that had to cope with a large number of infected migrant workers expelled from the Middle East. However, the Stalinist government’s moves in line with Modi to gradually ease those restrictions resulted in the virus’s resurgence in Kerala.

Echoing Modi, Kerala Chief Minister Vijayan told a July 24, 2020 press conference: “In the all-party meeting held to discuss the COVID-19 situation, a majority of the members had also opined against total lockdown. So at present there is no need to impose total lockdown.”

Less than two weeks later, the state government issued an order withdrawing and watering down COVID-19 restrictions. The new order allowed for the resumption of long-distance KSRTC (Kerala State Transport) bus services, and for shops, markets, banks, offices, financial institutions, factories, industrial establishments, and opened tourist spaces to function normally from Monday to Saturday. Establishments in the public sector, including government offices, Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), companies, autonomous organisations, and commissions were allowed to function as usual from Monday to Friday.

When Modi proclaimed the fourth phase in his “unlockdown” in September 2020, the Stalinist state government, ignoring all warnings of health experts, followed suit by adopting further relaxations. This included greenlighting in-house dining in hotels and restaurants across the state, and allowing government offices, including PSUs, to operate with 100 percent attendance. These unscientific relaxations led to a resurgence of mass infections and a sharp rise in deaths.

On September 29, 2020, due to an alarming rise in COVID-19 infections in Kerala, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) wrote a warning letter to the state government. It demanded the declaration of a “health emergency” in the state, which “would help the public grasp the gravity of the situation and ensure that they practice more caution” and “also help implement stricter restrictions to curb contact transmission and start preparatory measures to expand infrastructure to handle more cases.”

Flouting these warnings, Vijayan arrogantly told reporters the same day, “Everyone is aware how critical the situation is. Yet, the government doesn’t want to go toward a complete shutdown.” During October-November 2020, the Kerala government opened all tourist destinations, like hill stations, adventure and blackwater tourism spots, and beaches.

When India was ravaged by a tsunami of coronavirus infections in the second wave, Veena George, health minister in the LDF government, said, “We cannot be in an indefinite lockdown. Kerala has been implementing measures foreseeing these things.” As the virus raged across the country, leading to the collapse of hospitals, the Kerala Stalinists allowed factories and industrial sites in the state to function with 50 percent attendance.

On July 18, 2021, the IMA termed the decision of Kerala to ease restrictions ahead of various religious festivals as “retrograde.” The organisation cautioned that a third wave of the pandemic may be inevitable if appropriate steps were not taken. “The rise in cases is owing to flaws in government policies. They are allowing mass gatherings, conducting offline physical examinations, and [limited] lockdowns are being done [only] on alternate days,” said IMA President Dr. J. A Jayalal.

The fact that Kerala’s LDF government has implemented essentially the same criminal pandemic policy as Modi and his BJP underscores that the Stalinists serve the same big business masters. For the past three decades, the CPM and its close ally, the Communist Party of India (CPI), have played a pivotal role in the Indian ruling elite’s drive to transform India into a cheap labour platform for global investors, implementing what they themselves have termed “pro-investor” policies. They have responded to the mass struggles that have erupted against Modi, fueled by his government’s criminal handling of the pandemic and drive to make the masses pay for its economic fallout through intensified exploitation, by redoubling their efforts to tie India’s workers and toilers to the Congress Party and various caste-ist and regionalist parties, with a view to replacing Modi and his BJP with an alternate right-wing government after the 2024 elections.

Six people stabbed in New Zealand terror attack

Tom Peters

A man was shot dead by police yesterday after carrying out a horrific stabbing attack in a Countdown supermarket in LynMall in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city. Six people were hospitalised with stab wounds and three are in critical condition.

LynnMall, where the Auckland terror attack took place. Photo taken March 29, 2020. (Source: Wikipedia)

Auckland is currently under a strict lockdown, following an outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID-19, but many people were reportedly shopping at the supermarket or waiting for vaccinations at the nearby pharmacy.

The attack began without warning around 2:40 p.m. and unfolded in the space of about 2–3 minutes, before the man was shot. Videos posted to social media showed terrified groups of people running out of the mall and screaming. Others shut themselves in a room inside the pharmacy.

“People were panicking, everyone was calling their families, calling the police,” one witness told Radio NZ. A woman told Newshub the man yelled “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing two women in front of her. “I just realised, ‘Oh my god, I have to run.’ It was chaos, people started screaming,” she said.

In a press conference, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described what happened as a “terrorist attack” by a man with “ISIS-inspired” extremist views. He was a 32-year-old Sri Lankan national, who arrived in New Zealand in October 2011 and “became a person of national security interest from 2016,” she said.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said they were concerned about the man’s ideology and he was under 24-hour surveillance. The man obtained a knife inside the supermarket, he said. When the attack started, armed police officers, who had followed him into the supermarket, intervened. “When he approached them with the knife, he was shot and killed,” Coster said. The man had acted alone.

Many questions remain about the attack. Ardern said she was limited in what she could say by previous court orders relating to the perpetrator. A court last night ruled that the man’s name could be published, which is likely to happen later today.

Coster told the media he expected there would be “questions about whether police could have done more” to prevent the attack. He said officers had “intervened as quickly as they could.”

The New Zealand Herald reported that the man had been “previously arrested for allegedly planning a ‘lone wolf’ knife attack.” He “was considered a threat to public safety after twice buying large hunting knives and possessing Islamic State videos.” He had also searched online for instructions about bomb-making.

He first came to police attention in 2016 after making Facebook comments showing “support for ISIS terrorists involved in the Paris attacks in November 2015 and the Brussels bombing in March 2016.” He was arrested after attempting to leave the country in May 2017, allegedly to join ISIS fighters in Syria. He was held in custody for more than a year, and denied bail, before pleading guilty to charges of restricted material. He was released in August 2018 on a supervision order.

In July this year, the man was again sentenced for possession of objectionable ISIS propaganda materials, this time to 12 months’ supervision in the community. He was also facing charges for an alleged attack on a prison guard, while he was held on remand in Mount Eden Prison last year.

The fact that the attacker was under constant monitoring, follows an established pattern. Individuals who took part in the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, and numerous others in Europe and the United States, were already known to intelligence agencies and the police, which failed to stop them. Invariably, these attacks have been used by governments to justify increased funding and more sweeping powers for these agencies.

Islamic State (ISIS) is itself the product of US and European imperialist interventions, which were supported by New Zealand and Australia. In the Libyan war in 2011, NATO relied on jihadist militias to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi; similar forces were then funded and armed by the US and its allies for the disastrous war against the Assad regime in Syria. Many militia members subsequently joined ISIS, which invaded large parts of Iraq and Syria, and has spread into Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The LynnMall attack comes two-and-a-half years after NZ’s worst mass shooting, in which fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant massacred 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch. That massacre was followed by a royal commission of inquiry, which whitewashed the role of successive Labour Party and National Party governments in whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments—including through their participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The royal commission claimed that Tarrant acted alone and could not have been stopped. In fact, Tarrant was active in far-right forums online, and had links with such groups internationally. He had previously been reported to police in Australia, after sending a death threat on social media. A member of the gun club where he trained in New Zealand said he had informed police about violent and anti-Muslim language used by members of the club. Yet police in both countries claimed to have no prior knowledge of the gunman.

Since the March 15, 2019 attack, the Labour government has poured more resources into the spy agencies and introduced legislation to expand the state’s powers to censor material posted online. New “anti-terror” laws were passed to expand the ability to spy on individuals, including those who have not been charged with anything.

The Auckland attack, like the Christchurch attack, is already being used to demand tougher laws. Ardern said the authorities had not been able to imprison the attacker because “we haven’t succeeded in using the law to the extent we would have liked.”

Commentators have pointed to a “loophole” in the existing law, which means someone cannot be charged under the Terrorism Suppression Act for planning an attack. The Counter Terrorism Legislation Bill currently before parliament would expand the offences that can be categorised as a terrorist act, but Ardern said it was “speculative” to say whether the proposed law would have made a difference in this case.

Auckland’s Labour Party mayor Phil Goff complained to Newstalk ZB yesterday that “there was an absence of ability under the law” to imprison the perpetrator “for what he might have been thinking about doing but hadn’t done.” He also declared that the man “undoubtedly would have expressed the sort of views that might be encompassed by hate speech laws, but at the moment you can’t do anything about that.” The government is seeking to introduce hate speech legislation, which could easily be used to attack basic rights to freedom of speech, including left-wing and socialist voices.