A balance sheet of Angela Merkel’s 16 years of rule in Berlin

Peter Schwarz

On Wednesday, Angela Merkel’s chancellorship came to an end after 16 years. After 5,860 days in office, she missed the record of her fellow Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chancellor Helmut Kohl by only 10 days. The tenure of the other six German chancellors since 1949 was considerably shorter. An objective examination of the balance sheet of her chancellorship shows that the axis of German politics has shifted far to the right under Merkel.

Merkel at the Chancellor’s Office in February (AP photo/Markus Schreiber, pool)

Socially, Germany is more deeply divided than at any time since the 1930s. The DAX stock index has tripled from 5,000 to 15,000 points since Merkel took office. While the richest 10 percent owned on average 50 times as much wealth as the lower half of the population at the beginning of her term, they can now call 100 times as much their own.

On the other hand, never before have so many worked for so long for such low wages. Even a full-time job is often no longer enough to live on. In 2019, one in five children and one in six inhabitants of Germany were living in poverty, a total of 13.2 million people. The chances of escaping poverty are slim. Among the 26 OECD countries, Germany is fifth from the bottom in this regard. In addition, there are dilapidated infrastructure, broken schools and hospitals, falling pensions and unaffordable rents and heating costs.

In domestic politics, too, the country has moved far to the right under Merkel. Four years ago, an extreme right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), entered the Bundestag (federal parliament) for the first time. Since then, it has set the tone in refugee and domestic policies and is courted by all other parties.

For six years, the head of the federal secret service, Hans-Georg Maaßen, was an AfD sympathizer who declared the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) to be an object of surveillance on the grounds that the demand for an “egalitarian, democratic and socialist society” violated the constitution. As under Bismarck and Hitler, socialist politics are again being suppressed.

The powers of the police and secret services have been massively expanded. The state apparatus is riddled with right-wing extremist networks. Even after extensive arms caches had been dug up, kill lists found, violent coup plans discovered, district president Walter Lübcke murdered and a synagogue attacked in Halle, the ringleaders have remained at large.

The right of asylum has been practically abolished and Europe turned into a fortress under German leadership. Tens of thousands of refugees were locked up in inhumane camps or left to drown in the Mediterranean so that none would reach European soil.

In foreign policy, 75 years after the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany is again pursuing a great power and war policy. Under Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Gerhard Schröder, “Germany took its first steps out of the culture of military restraint, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan. Under Angela Merkel, Germany is assuming its leadership role in Europe,” writes Der Spiegel.

What this “leadership role” means was first felt by the workers of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, on whom the German government imposed a brutal austerity programme after rescuing the banks from self-inflicted bankruptcy.

In order to impose Germany’s imperialist interests worldwide, military spending was massively increased; rising from $33 billion to $53 billion during Merkel’s tenure, with the lion’s share of the increase occurring in the last five years. The relationship with nuclear powers Russia and China has been systematically undermined through support for the pro-western coup in Ukraine, the NATO build-up against Russia and US provocations against China. A third, nuclear world war is a real danger.

The political shift to the right under Merkel found its sharpest expression in the coronavirus pandemic. Her government sacrificed the health and lives of millions to corporate profits. While stock prices reached new record highs thanks to billions of dollars in coronavirus aid, over 6 million people were infected and more than 100,000 died.

Merkel’s government flatly refused to close workplaces and schools and impose other lockdown measures that might have reduced the flow of profits, even though they were strongly recommended by scientists. Currently, a systematic policy of the deliberate mass infection of children and young people is taking place in nurseries and schools, with incalculable long-term health consequences.

The end of the German Democratic Republic

To understand Merkel’s chancellorship, one has to look back not 16 but 32 years. There is no other political figure whose career is so closely linked to the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the former East Germany, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as that of Angela Merkel.

The end of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not the result of democratic revolutions, as is often portrayed, but the end point of a counterrevolution that had begun in the Soviet Union in the 1920s with Stalin’s rise.

The socialised property relations created by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and extended to Eastern Europe and Germany after the Second World War represented progress, despite the Stalinist degeneration of the political regime. They provided the basis for rapid industrial development, a degree of social security and wide-ranging education and health systems. The working class in the capitalist countries also benefited. The very existence of a social alternative forced governments to make social concessions.

The initiative for the restoration of capitalism finally came from the Stalinist bureaucracy itself, which chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its leader in 1985. Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition and founder of the Fourth International, had already warned of such a development in the 1930s. If the working class did not overthrow the bureaucracy, he wrote, the bureaucracy would secure its privileges by restoring capitalist property relations.

This was confirmed in 1990. In the GDR, the dictatorship of the Socialist Unity Party (SED, the Stalinist party of state) was not replaced by the democratic rule of the people, but by the dictatorship of the West German banks and corporations, which introduced capitalist exploitation, looted state property, broke up over 8,000 enterprises and drove millions into unemployment and poverty. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stalinist SED, renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), and the newly formed “democratic opposition” had immediately come together at various “Round Table” talks to prepare for the unification of Germany on a capitalist basis.

Only the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (Socialist Workers League, BSA), the predecessor to the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party), called at that time for the formation of workers’ councils and the overthrow of the regime on a socialist basis. Outside the alternative of “bourgeois democracy or the dictatorship of capital on the one hand, or revolution, workers’ democracy and socialism on the other,” there was no way forward for the working class, stated an appeal that the BSA distributed in large numbers at the mass demonstration against the SED regime in East Berlin on November 4, 1989.

Capitalist restoration, which in addition to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union also affected China, where the Communist Party introduced capitalism without giving up power, has had reactionary consequences in every respect.

In the working class, it led to confusion and disorientation. The social democratic parties and the trade unions, which had already been moving away from their policies of social reform since the late 1970s, now turned openly into bitter opponents of the workers—a development most clearly embodied by British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and his German colleague Gerhard Schröder. The bourgeoisie hailed its own triumph, believing there were no longer any barriers to its unrestrained enrichment and attacks on the working class.

Imperialist strategists raved about a “unipolar moment” and imagined that the global domination of US imperialism and its European allies could be secured forever through military force. Since then, entire countries and regions—such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria—have been militarily devastated and the world is approaching a third world war.

Under these circumstances, Angela Merkel rose to become Germany’s leading politician.

Merkel’s political ascent

Merkel came from those middle-class layers which had received an excellent education and led a relatively carefree existence in the GDR and now enthusiastically welcomed the introduction of capitalism because they expected better career opportunities from it.

Born in 1954 and raised in a priest’s household in rural Uckermark, Merkel had never been politically active until the age of 35. She had a successful academic career as a physicist, was a member of the state youth organisation FDJ and was repeatedly allowed to travel abroad for academic meetings, once also to West Germany. This would not have been possible if even the slightest suspicion of oppositional activity had weighed against her.

She did, however, meet later civil rights activists in her father’s parsonage. At that time, the traditionally state-loyal Lutheran church offered the only free space in which political discussions were possible outside the official structures. In return, the church ensured that opposition to the SED regime was kept within narrow limits. Many of its leading representatives later turned out to be informers for the Stasi (state security).

This was also true of Angela Merkel’s first political supporters. For example, the chairman of Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening), Wolfgang Schnur, who was in close contact with Merkel’s father Horst Kasner in the GDR and “discovered” Angela for politics, worked as an unofficial Stasi collaborator from 1965 to 1989.

Merkel herself joined Demokratischer Aufbruch only in December 1989, when the Berlin Wall had already fallen, and experienced a meteoric political rise. Although Demokratischer Aufbruch only received 0.9 percent of the vote in the GDR’s parliamentary elections in March 1990, Merkel became press spokesperson for the last GDR prime minister, Lothar de Maizière (CDU). In this capacity, she was involved in the negotiations for German reunification and was present at the conclusion of the “Two Plus Four Treaty” in Moscow, which sealed the end of the GDR.

After German unification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl brought her into his government, first as Minister for Women and Youth and later as Minister for the Environment. When Kohl lost the 1998 federal election to the SPD and the Greens, Merkel proved that she had learned from her patron, a master of backroom deals and intrigue. She used a donation scandal to push Kohl and his crown prince Wolfgang Schäuble from the throne and take over the CDU leadership herself in 2000.

In contrast, in the 2002 federal election she had to relinquish being chancellor candidate to Edmund Stoiber, leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU. Stoiber lost the election to incumbent chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

The CDU’s Leipzig Party Congress the following year, at which Merkel consolidated her leadership of the party, was a celebration of neo-liberalism. It decided on a radical departure from its previous social policy. Capitation fees in health policy and a radical tax reform were to smash up all mechanisms of social equalisation. Kohl’s long-time Labour Minister Norbert Blüm, who spoke against this at the party conference, was booed. Merkel also backed US President George W. Bush’s war preparations against Iraq.

However, she quickly realised that such a course of social confrontation would trigger massive resistance, and the radical plans disappeared into the drawer. Instead, as leader of the opposition, Merkel worked closely with Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-Green Party government in drafting and passing “Agenda 2010.” The CDU approved these legislative changes—including Hartz IV, introducing major “reforms” in welfare and employment law—in the lower and upper chambers of parliament.

This remained Merkel’s preferred approach during her chancellorship.

Many commentaries on Merkel’s time in office praise her calm and pragmatic style. The “Tagesschau” news programme calls her the “antithesis of populist machos like Trump, Putin or Erdogan.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes that she was not a “visionary” but a “crisis manager.” The “role of moderator in the middle and a policy of small steps were enough for her. The grand plan, the ‘historical project,’ was not her thing. Ideologies of all kinds are suspect to her.”

Merkel managed without the ideological fanaticism and aggressiveness of a Margaret Thatcher or a Donald Trump because she realised her right-wing policies with the help of the SPD, the trade unions and the Left Party (successor to the SED/PDS), which spared her an open confrontation with the working class. She governed three out of four terms in a grand coalition with the SPD. Only from 2009 to 2013 did she form an alliance with the Liberal Democrats (FDP) instead, which subsequently was eliminated from the Bundestag, failing to clear the 5 percent hurdle required for parliamentary representation.

Merkel used the SPD and its close ties to the trade unions to push social attacks on the working class. The birthday party she threw for then IG Metall union boss Berthold Huber in the chancellery in 2010 is infamous. In addition to trade union colleagues, the heads of several large corporations were among the invited guests.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Merkel and then finance minister Peer Steinbrück (SPD) worked together like a well-rehearsed team to hand out billions to the ailing banks, which were then squeezed back out of the working class through social cuts. The same thing was repeated in the coronavirus crisis with Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, now the new chancellor.

Alongside the SPD, the Greens also merged ever more closely with Merkel’s CDU. In Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, they have governed together for a long time. In the federal government, they had negotiated a ready-made coalition agreement in 2017, which only fell through because the FDP, the third coalition partner, pulled out at the last second.

The Left Party also played an important role in protecting Merkel’s back. Although it has not governed together with the CDU at federal and state levels, because the CDU has always refused to do so, it has supported the social attacks and militarism of Merkel’s government practically and lent it political backing.

For example, Left Party parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch expressly welcomed the great power policy of the grand coalition. “It is high time that the cowering towards the United States stopped, that Germany wants to play a role in the world, in the European framework, with self-confidence,” he declared in 2017.

It is significant that on Wednesday in the plenary hall of the Bundestag, members of the Left Party joined members of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and FDP in a standing ovation in Merkel’s honour. Only the representatives of the AfD remained seated.

The “traffic light” coalition

The new government, which was sworn in yesterday, follows directly on from Merkel’s right-wing policies. The “traffic light” parties of the SPD, FDP and Greens have all worked closely with Merkel in one form or another during her 16 years in office.

However, the conditions under which Merkel could implement her right-wing policies without open confrontation with the working class are over. Three decades after the end of the GDR, the confusion is beginning to subside. Workers are taking courage again. Protests and strikes are mounting all over the world, mostly—as at Volvo Trucks and John Deere in the US—in opposition or open rebellion against the unions.

In Germany, industrial action and protests have taken place this year on the railways, in hospitals, the public sector and in numerous metalworking companies. Anger at the murderous coronavirus policies and resistance to wage cuts, increasing work pressure and layoffs are growing. Sooner rather than later, this will lead to open class confrontations with the traffic light coalition.

In the Bundestag, no party remains—apart from a much reduced Left Party—that is nominally to the left of the traffic light coalition and could divert the growing opposition. And the Left Party, which governs in four federal states together with the SPD and the Greens, fully supports the policy of the traffic light coalition.

Racism and the rule of law

Jim Miles

indigenouse genocide

Consider living under a set of laws decreed by a racist theocratic dictator calling for ethnic cleansing, slavery, and cultural genocide if not outright genocide. It would probably not be the humanitarian thing to do while alternatively promoting freedom, democracy, and the ‘rule of law’. Unfortunately at its base, this is where the people of the Anglo empire – Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and their belligerent cousin, the U.S. (also the Five Eyes) – have settled their lives.

Truly settled – while the British Empire spanned the world, these countries are the main survivors of the colonial-settler nature of the British imperial quest for more land, more resources, and more power. Other colonial areas were essentially satrapies – controlled by a subservient domestic leader under British Foreign Office tutelage, or controlled by the British directly without encouraging colonial settlers. In many of the latter cases the number of indigenous people vastly outnumbered the British, resulting eventually in successful rebellions that pushed the formal British empire influence out: South Africa, the former Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and India/Pakistan are prime examples of that.

The current Five Eyes are essentially successful colonial-settler countries having created varying systems of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, cultural and physical genocide, and have retained significant traits of their colonial past – today’s broad societal racism.

Throughout the era of western European imperialism mainstream history teaches that areas “discovered” by “explorers” belonged to certain countries through the simple right of discovery. These areas were decreed to be open for possession and the indigenous inhabitants subject to “perpetual slavery,” removal, and they and their “lands, possessions, and goods” were to be used by the discoverers for “their use and profit.”

The victim becomes perpetrator

If the indigenous people objected “we will enter your land against you with force and will make war in every place and by every means we can and are able….” and further blame the victims as “we avow that the deaths and harm which you will receive thereby will be your own blame, and not that of Their Highnesses, nor ours, nor of the gentlemen who come with us.”

“Violence becomes the instrument of its own exoneration…Your fear of our presence threatens our safety and we have come to make it safe. Secure. Irrational fear and self-defense have become the rationale for global slaughter.”

Rule of Law

Consider again living under a set of laws decreed by a racist theocratic dictator calling for ethnic cleansing, slavery, and cultural genocide if not outright genocide. The Papal Bull of 1452 and a subsequent Bull, the Requerimiento of 1514, set out this set of what could be considered international law. Empires of the day, initially the Portuguese and Spanish, took this ‘law’ as promulgated by a white racist theocratic dictator and used it to rationalize their conquest of as much of the rest of the world as they could. In polite terms, it is the Christian Doctrine of Discovery and it has become embedded in the laws of many countries pertaining to all facets of governmental control over land, resources, and people.

Contemporary politicians and pundits love to use the phrase “rule of law”. They are supporting these fundamental denials of human rights as even today, 450 years later, these Papal Bulls are still referenced to impose governmental dictates in order to deny indigenous rights – and indeed as they give all lands to the “sovereign” – they are used to be able to deny all rights to the citizen as required by the state.

The U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg reasoned in a 2005 case that “fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States.” Simple really: declare the land to be owned by the reigning foreign sovereign and it is open for exploitation of all kinds, regardless of whoever lives there. However, if a previous Christian entity had already claimed the land – maybe a problem of communication in the days of sailing ships – “the prior title of any Christian” was recognized.

The case in Canada

Canada is a very strong proponent of “rule of law.” All political leaders and wannabe leaders in Canada believe their own wisdom in repeating this mantra. Unfortunately, the very “rule of law” they shout about are the laws created from the heritage of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery.

Canada has referenced earlier court cases concerning the doctrine of discovery in some of its decisions, yet only this year Bill C-15, An Act respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was passed denying the policies of discovery and terra-nullius, and supporting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The policies of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery are now labelled “racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.”

Sounds great on paper but that is where it ends, in meaningful rhetoric stuffed inside what could lead to some important legislation; but the “rule of law”, as based on the very principles essentially annulled in C-15, continue to weave their powers across Canada.

In British Columbia there are two ongoing protests by indigenous people, one concerning the destruction of old growth forests, the other an attempt to stop the construction of a gas pipeline from passing through unceded native land. The latter is the crux of the matter, at least here in British Columbia where only a miniscule portion of provincial lands (the sovereign) have been acquired by treaty. While the Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that land title has not been extinguished in many areas, little has been accomplished within the province to negotiate fairly with the indigneous people.

Consider some domestic incidents. Within the last week, dozens of arrests of protesters – natives, journalists, and supporters – were made by a highly militarized RCMP platoon on Wet’suwet’en territory. The Alberta tar sands cover thousands of hectares of indigenous land, destroying the water, the forests, the air. Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island has become mostly an argument about climate change and deforestation, especially with old growth forests, but at its base is the element of unextinguished territorial rights.

Extinguishment

It might be a stretch but put the two references together: the illegality of the policies of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery as per Bill C-15; and the ongoing usage of the very laws created by those policies in order to support the ongoing control and extraction of land resources. It is a huge contradiction between words and action, and it is the actions that speak much louder than words.

What needs to be extinguished is the “rule of law” as determined by these ancient and racist papal doctrines. It is not likely to happen: the rights of sovereigns and large corporations over the land and people are too well embedded in the underlying culture, a racist culture from its foundation. A few token agreements may be made sporadically but the underlying nature of Canada’s domestic corporate laws, the so called ‘free’ trade regulations, and the ongoing use of militarized force to support those domains will continue.

Foreign Policy

It goes further. Canada’s foreign policy is largely determined by “racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust” policies as these policies as well reflect the “rule of law” descending from the papal bulls of centuries ago. There is no determination in Canada’s foreign policy that their support of other governments actions based on settler colonialism, militarized forces of suppression, ethnic cleansing, and the creation of apartheid societies is to be equally condemned. Nor is it ever likely to happen. Racism is built into Canada’s structures and laws as it is in most countries colonized and settled under British dominion.

Under Canada’s domestic law (Bill C-15) and current international law, settler law is null and void. Also under international law, those occupied have a right to resist that occupation (Fourth Geneva Convention). Most of western wealth is based on ethnic cleansing and genocide from the “discovered” empires of western Europe. Much cannot be changed, but reconciliation, restitution, and the true equality of all before domestic and international law need to be addressed.

UK: Johnson moves to Plan B measures over Omicron variant amid escalating government crisis

Robert Stevens

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a move to the government’s pandemic “Plan B” in order to deal with the rapidly escalating spread of the Omicron variant.

He made the announcement after Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Parliament that “Omicron is significantly more transmissible than Delta.” Delta cases had doubled every seven days but for Omicron “it’s between 2.5 and three days.”

He warned, “The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimates that the number of infections are approximately 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, and so the current number of [Omicron] infections is probably closer to 10,000.

“UKHSA also estimate that at the current observed doubling rate of between two and a half and three days, by the end of this month, infections could exceed 1 million.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a press conference on the Covid-19 variant Omicron in Downing Street with Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty. (Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/FlickR)

Having ruled out any more lockdowns months ago in order to protect the profits of the corporations, the Plan B measures are extremely limited, inadequate, and, as always, way behind the times.

Insisting “It is not a lockdown”, with everything to remain open, Johnson declared masks will become mandatory in most indoor venues, including theatres and cinemas but not pubs, clubs and restaurants, from Friday. A vaccine pass or proof of a negative test will be required to enter nightclubs and other venues where large groups of people can continue to gather, including at outside venues with more than 10,000 people.

Johnson said that those who can will be encouraged to work from home from next week, but insisted that schools, the main vectors of COVID spread, must remain open until the Christmas break and that face-to-face learning continue in the universities.

“We don’t want children to be taken out of school before the end of term, not that there is long to go now, we don’t want nativity plays to be cancelled,” he said.

Johnson had no choice but to impose a few more restrictions given that he has been warned, according to leaked minutes of a meeting of the government’s scientific advisers held on Tuesday, that hospital admissions from the Omicron variant could reach 1,000 a day in England by the end of the year without extra restrictions put in place, possibly peaking above 2,000 a day.

But he also announced the measures under conditions in which he and his government are reeling due to a series of explosive leaks.

For nearly a week the government has been fending off criticisms that a Christmas Party was held in Downing Street on December 18 last year, attended by 40-50 people in contravention of COVID safety restrictions.

The month before, London had been part of a national four-week lockdown with indoor socialising prohibited. The capital was then placed under Tier 2 restrictions which prohibited households from mixing indoors. By December 16, two days before the party, London was recording the highest COVID case rates in the country and was moved to Tier 3, meaning all indoor mixing was prohibited except in household bubbles.

Number 10 Downing Street is the headquarters and London residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. (Wikimedia)

The government attempted to ride out the scandal, denying that a party had taken place or insisting that no rules were broken. On Tuesday, these claims fell apart when ITV News published a video leaked to one of its journalists showing Downing Street officials, including Johnson’s then Press Secretary Allegra Stratton and No10’s head of digital Ed Oldfield, joking about the Christmas party as they rehearsed a televised briefing in the press room.

As part of the Q&A session, Oldfield asked Stratton, “I’ve just seen reports on Twitter that there was a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night, do you recognise those reports?”

She replied, giggling, “I went home… hold on, hold on, erm, err … What’s the answer?”

“This fictional party was a business meeting,” she continued, laughing.

The leaks provoked widespread public disgust, with the video already viewed around 10 million times. The government was brazenly flouting its own COVID laws, even as the country was about the enter the deadliest phase of the pandemic. The Downing Street party took place took place on a day when 514 people died from COVID and the Downing Street press video was shot four days later as another 641 were reported killed by the disease. At least 167,000 are now dead from COVID.

Yesterday, during Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson was forced to apologise “for the offence it [the video] has caused up and down the country and the impression it gives…” Stratton, who had already stepped down as his press secretary last April, resigned as a government adviser.

The event took place less than two months after Johnson blurted out in Downing Street, after being forced to agree to a second truncated lockdown late last year: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

The leaks to the media are widely believed to have come from the prime minister’s far-right former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Indeed, every major embarrassing leak aimed at destabilising Johnson over the last year, including the “let the bodies pile high” statement, came from him.

Cummings was forced to resign last November after it was revealed he drove hundreds of miles from London to Barnard Castle in the north of England, flouting national lockdown restrictions. His exposure and exit was part of a power struggle in Downing Street in which Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds played a significant role.

After Cummings was forced out, Stratton, a close friend of Symonds, was among those brought into the governments inner circle. Before he left government, Cummings was instrumental in setting up the £2.6 million Downing Street media briefing room in which Stratton mocked COVID regulations.

In June this year another leak, of images taken from CCTV footage showing then Health Minister Matt Hancock kissing an aide in his Whitehall office, quickly led to Hancock’s resignation. The previous month, Cummings had told a parliamentary committee that Hancock should have been fired for “at least 15 to 20 things—including lying to everybody on multiple occasions” during the pandemic.

On Monday, Cummings warned that it would be “very unwise for No 10 to lie” about social events that occurred in Downing Street during last year’s Christmas lockdown. On Wednesday, he tweeted, after Johnson authorised an investigation into the December 18 party, “Will the [Cabinet Secretary] also be asked to investigate the *flat* party on Fri 13 Nov, the other flat parties, and the flat’s ‘bubble’ policy.” Cummings should know what happened in Downing Street that day, as it was the day he was sacked as chief adviser.

Another Cummings tweet yesterday, “Fish rots from the head. #Regimechange”, made his agenda clear.

The implications of these machinations in the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite must be understood by the working class.

Johnson was only able to take office because he was handed a massive parliamentary majority in a betrayal of a mass movement for social change by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn took the Labour leadership in 2015 after winning a landslide against his Blairite opponents fuelled by hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters who wanted an end to Tory rule based on a socialist agenda.

Having lost to Johnson in the 2019 General Election, Corbyn then handed the party back to the Blairites when Sir Keir Starmer took the reins of the party in April 2020, operating in a de facto coalition with the Tories ever since.

The damaging leaks undermining Johnson are evidence that the most right-wing sections of the Tories are planning ahead. Large sections of the parliamentary party and their business backers were content with using Johnson as their figurehead against Corbyn, but do not consider him capable of steering British imperialism through the stormy waters ahead as Omicron threatens to spread out of control and with multiple indications of an upsurge in the class struggle.

As difficult as it will be for many workers to believe, the moves afoot to replace Johnson would see a sharp lurch to the right. Cummings is a fascist who has made clear his wish for a “strong man” to run the country.

Among those being touted for taking over as prime minister are the multi-hundred millionaire Chancellor Rishi Sunak or multi-millionaire health minister Javid. Both oppose any further COVID restrictions as an intolerable threat to big business.

Turkish currency, living standards in free fall as pandemic rages

Barış Demir

The depreciation of the Turkish lira and the sharp increase in the prices of basic necessities affecting tens of millions of people are creating a deep economic and political crisis, as the raging pandemic infects tens of thousands and killing hundreds every day.

The Turkish lira has lost half of its value against the US dollar, from 7 TL to the US dollar in February to 13.70 TL today.

The depreciation of the Turkish lira was previously accelerated by Ankara’s conflicts with its imperialist allies, particularly over NATO’s regime change war in Syria.

The Turkish government has opposed the US decision to make the Kurdish militias the main proxy force in Syria, fearing that a Kurdish proto-state in Syria would strengthen separatist tendencies within its borders. Growing tensions in the relations led to a NATO-backed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016. After the failed coup attempt, Ankara has further increased its geopolitical, economic and military ties with Russia.

A man buys food at a market in Ankara, Turkey, Friday, Dec. 3 2021. Turkey's annual consumer price index rose by 21.31%, the largest increase in three years, according to official figures released by the Turkish Statistics Institute, or TUIK on Friday. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozblici)

While this situation has created an unstable political environment, it also caused Western finance capital to stay away from the Turkish markets.

In addition to this and increasing turmoil in the global capitalist economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Erdoğan’s financial policies have accelerated the massive depreciation of the Turkish lira in 2021. Just in the last month, the US dollar has risen from 10 to 13.7 TL.

Erdoğan has been pressing the Turkish Central Bank for a while to cut interest rates to support economic growth based on exports and the construction sector. The Central Bank’s 4 percent interest rate cut in the last three months has triggered the purchase of US dollars by companies having foreign currency debt and deposit account holders.

The interest rate of 15 percent is below the official inflation rate of 21 percent, which means a 6 percent negative interest for the TL. Economist Mustafa Sönmez stated: “In all developed and developing countries facing the problem of inflation, central banks have been hiking their policy rates to cool their respective economies. In sharp contrast, Turkey’s Central Bank has cut its policy rate by 400 basis points to 15 percent since September at Erdoğan’s behest despite a nearly 20 percent inflation, which is well above the mean of emerging markets.”

This policy contradicts the rising inflation and interest rate increase expectations of the international financial oligarchy and accelerates the flight from TL into the dollar. It is stated that the rate of foreign currency deposits in banks of Turkish citizens exceeds 60 percent.

The rise in inflation is not unique to Turkey, but it is a global tendency. As the World Socialist Web Site recently explained: “The US consumer price index (CPI) had risen by 6.2 percent in October compared to a year ago—the fastest annual rise since 1990. … The global character of the inflation surge is reflected in rising CPI figures elsewhere. The Eurozone inflation rate was 3.4 percent in September, the highest level since before the global financial crisis, and well beyond the European Central Bank’s target of 2 percent. In the UK the inflation rate is expected to reach 5 percent in the first months of next year.”

This surge in inflation adds pressure on central banks to start tightening their monetary policy to continue providing positive real returns on capital to investors.

Erdoğan’s financial policy is however based on the claim that inflation in Turkey is a result of interest rates in the country, regardless of economic trends in the world. For this reason, there has been a growing government pressure on the Central Bank to cut interest rates and close the current account deficit, rather than price stability. The Turkish Central Bank’s chairman has been changed three times in the last three years. After the latest developments, moreover, Finance Minister Lütfi Elvan recently resigned.

Elvan reportedly did not adopt Erdoğan’s policies. Shortly before his resignation, Elvan made the following statement, tacitly criticizing Erdoğan: “The central bank’s main responsibility is to ensure price stability. … Narrowing the current account deficit is a responsibility of the government. The tools to be used in monetary policy are obvious, and it is the central bank that is supposed to apply them.”

Moreover, social unrest in the working class has reached the boiling point in the face of an unprecedented increase in cost of living as hundreds of people have lost their lives from a preventable pandemic. The Erdoğan government hopes that encouraging an export-based economic growth by lowering interest rates will alleviate this unrest.

Terrified of the impending social explosion among working people, the government is preparing to make a significant increase in the minimum wage at the beginning of 2022. It is stated that the monthly minimum wage, which is 2,825 TL, will be increased to the range of 3,500-4,000 TL.

However, this increase will neither eliminate growing social anger nor substantially increase the purchasing power of the working class. The minimum wage, which was nearly US$383 at the beginning of the year, is now just US$206, and Turkey now has the lowest minimum wage among all European countries. Even with the alleged increase, the 2022 minimum wage will be as much as US$100 lower than in January 2021.

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK), annual consumer inflation reached 21.31 percent with an increase of 3.51 percent in November. The producer price index increased by 9.99 percent to 54.62 percent in November.

Official data, especially the consumer price index (CPI), are far from truthful. Independent Inflation Research Group (ENAgroup) announced that the CPI increased by 9.91 percent in November. According to the group, the 12-month price increase thus became 58.65 percent. It means the minimum wage hike will not cover these losses, and inflation will continue to rise throughout 2022.

This has already led to a surge in the class struggle as part of the global tendency among workers. After several wildcat strikes and factory occupations in recent months, teachers, health care workers and all other sections of the working class are increasingly unsatisfied with their wages and living standards, demanding serious improvements with protests. Over 150,000 metal workers and autoworkers also expect a revision and a sharp increase in their proposed contracts by pro-company trade unions.

Forced to work in extremely dangerous conditions during the pandemic, workers are outraged that they and their families are being put at great risk every day. The policies followed in this process are based on sacrificing the lives of the working class in exchange for the protection of the profits of the ruling class and covering the entire cost of the pandemic process with an attack on the social conditions of the workers.

While a handful of corporate and financial elite have made massive profits from this criminal policy, the impoverishment of broad sections of workers has brought the Erdoğan government’s support in the polls down to its lowest level since 2002, when it first came to power.

As Omicron begins to spread in India, school reopenings put tens of millions of children at risk of infection

Yuan Darwin

Reports continue to emerge of the Omicron variant’s spread in states scattered across India. At least 30 cases had been identified as of December 7, with government officials acknowledging that some of them have no connection to travel. Given India’s notoriously poor record of mass testing, this strongly indicates that community transmission of the potentially more infectious and virulent variant has already begun.

With initial data from South Africa suggesting that children are at greater risk of being infected and sickened by the new variant, the Indian ruling elite’s continued drive to reopen schools threatens to produce mass infection, compounding an already dire social crisis facing children and families that has been decades in the making.

There is widespread public apprehension about the Omicron variant in a country that has already experienced two devastating waves of COVID-19 that, according to studies of excess mortality have left at least 4 million and most likely 5 million Indians dead. But India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government and state governments, whether led by the BJP or the Congress and various other opposition parties, are determined to prioritize profits over lives. Reopening schools is seen as a vital element in forcing Indians to “learn to live with the virus.”

Students wear face masks and wait outside a school on the day schools partially reopened after they were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

The reopening of schools for in-person learning has taken place across the country this fall. In Kerala, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government reopened higher educational institutions from October 4 and schools from November 1.

The DMK-led Tamil Nadu government reopened schools for Classes 1 to 8 from November 1. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led Delhi government ordered in-person classes for all grades to recommence November 1. In Madhya Pradesh, the state government resumed physical classes for students of primary and senior classes from September 21. In Karnataka, in-person classes for Classes 1 to 5 began October 25. Schools, colleges and universities in West Bengal were reopened for physical classes on November 16.

Meanwhile, the University Grants Commission (UGC), which is part of the Ministry of Education, released a circular on November 4 claiming that higher educational institutions can restart physical classes with 50 percent attendance in areas outside containment zones. All colleges affiliated with Delhi University partially reopened on September 15.

Although India’s current 7-day average of COVID-19 daily cases is around 10,000, representing a decline from the figure reported in early September, i.e., above 40,000, these numbers are highly undercounted, due to a lack of reporting and testing. With the arrival of the Omicron variant, a new COVID-19 surge among the country’s large, overwhelmingly unvaccinated population of children and young people threatens to occur.

Numerous infections related to schools have already been reported. More than 400 school students and nearly 50 teachers tested positive for COVID-19 in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district last month. A 13-year-old girl student from Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur district died of COVID-19 on October 21. Meanwhile, the northeastern state of Sikkim had to shut all schools and colleges within a week of reopening on September 6 due to the high number of positive tests. During the last week of October, 32 students tested positive for COVID-19 at a residential school in the Kodagu district of Karnataka. At least 30 students and teachers have tested positive for COVID-19 since the reopening of schools in Tamil Nadu.

A study conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) found high COVID-19 rates among the 0-19 age group in India. “Using viral genomic sequences from 9,500 COVID-19 patients, the study found an increased number of infections among younger age groups (0-19 years) and women, a lower mean age for infection and symptomatic illness/hospitalisation, higher mortality and more frequent incidences of post-vaccination infections with Delta variant compared to the non-VOC (B.1) variant,” the WHO update said.

Doctors have warned that school reopenings will lead to the spread of the virus. “Children can be potential reservoirs of the Sars-CoV-2 and vaccinating them becomes a public health imperative,” commented Indian virologist Dr. T Jacob John. “We have underestimated the epidemic among children as they are not falling sick so much, but we must think of children as a reservoir of the virus.”

India currently has no vaccination program for children and adolescents. Since the late spring, the Modi government has claimed to offer free vaccinations to all adults, but it insists on distributing 25 percent of vaccines through private hospitals who charge fees that represent well over a day’s wage per shot for hundreds of millions of workers and toilers.

Only 29.4 percent of India’s population is fully vaccinated. This means that broad layers of workers as well as school-aged youth are highly vulnerable to contracting the disease.

Children and adolescents who contract COVID-19 are at risk not only of dying but of developing Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which attacks multiple organs and creates other possibly permanent illnesses. Already, 4 children have died and over 300 were infected by MIS-C, a post-COVID complication, in Kerala in the last five months, according to the state health ministry. Twenty-nine MIS-C cases were reported in neighbouring Karnataka and 14 in Tamil Nadu in the last six months.

The Union and state governments have cynically seized on the dire social conditions confronting children and their families across India to legitimise their school reopening push. The horrendous levels of poverty and misery that exist in the country’s teeming slums and rural areas—the product of the ruling elite’s refusal to adequately fund social services and education for decades—left the vast majority of children deprived of any schooling whatsoever during the period of pandemic-related school closures.

The results of a recent survey on School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL), carried out in 15 states and Union territories and prepared by a coordination team that included Indian economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera, points to a massive educational crisis. Titled “LOCKED OUT: Emergency Report on School Education,” it found that a lack of access to the proper tools required for online learning was one of the main impediments to children’s participation in any kind of education during the period of school closures. The report found that only 51 percent of rural households surveyed had even one smartphone—and only 8 percent of children in rural areas had attended regular online classes.

According to a report released by the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), merely 8.5 percent of students in India have access to the internet. The overall availability of computing devices (desktops or laptops) in school is 22 percent for all India, with rural areas seeing much lower provisioning (18 percent) than urban areas (43 percent).

A recent report titled “A Future at Stake–Guidelines and Principles to Resume and Renew Education” prepared by the National Coalition on the Education Emergency, a group of academics and educationists, revealed that the “overwhelming majority of India’s 250 million children had no structured learning opportunities during the pandemic, leading to an education emergency of incalculable proportions.” The report highlighted “the loss of the most basic language and mathematics skills” among children of the rural and urban poor, and migrant labourers.

If India’s fabulously wealthy super-rich and the political establishment that does their bidding were so concerned about the educational development of the country’s hundreds of millions of young people, why have they permitted the disastrous social conditions documented in the reports on childhood education to develop and fester? The lack of access to basic necessities of life for the vast majority of India’s population was not a phenomenon that emerged overnight with the adoption of lockdowns, but the product of decades of underfunding of critical social services to pay for India’s ever-expanding military and the enrichment of its billionaires. The Union government spends a pathetic 3.1 percent of GDP, while providing India’s military with the third-largest military budget in the world, behind only the United States and China.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 2021 State of the Education Report (SOER) for India, entitled “No Teacher, No Class,” there are as many as 110,971 single-teacher schools in the country and 89 percent of such schools are in rural areas. The UNESCO report noted that the country is short of 1.1 million skilled teachers, with the rural areas accounting for the lion’s share of the deficit. Teacher vacancies in schools in some rural areas reach as high as 69 percent.

Across the country, over 200,000 schools (16 percent) do not have a library facility, 900,000 schools do not have functional computer facilities for the students (28.55 percent), and over 1.1 million schools do not have internet facilities, states the Unified District Information System for Education Plus report. According to official estimates, 10 percent of schools do not have hand wash facilities, leading to unhygienic conditions for the students. A total of 29,967 schools do not have drinking water facilities within the school premises and over 6,000 schools across India do not have a building. A recent official report by the Parliamentary panel on education stated that only 56 percent of schools have electricity and almost 40 percent of schools do not have boundary walls.

Philippine Justice Department files charges for just one murder in the Bloody Sunday massacre

Isagani Sakay

On December 1, eight months after nine activists were gunned down and six arrested in simultaneous police raids on March 7, the Philippine justice department announced that a special investigating team had recommended the filing of murder charges against 17 police officers for one of the killings, that of labour leader Emmanuel Asuncion.

The horrifying events became known as “Bloody Sunday.” The killing of Asuncion was part of a crackdown on legal political and activist organizations staged by the police just two days after President Rodrigo Duterte delivered a speech in the city of Cagayan de Oro in a meeting of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELAC).

Speaking of “communist terrorists” to an audience of military and police officials, Duterte declared, “If there’s an encounter and you see them armed, kill! Kill them! Don’t mind human rights! I will be the one to go to prison, I don’t have any qualms.” He continued, “make sure you really kill them, and finish them off if they are alive.”

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte (Presidential Communications Operations Office/Wikipedia)

Asuncion was gunned down in his office in Dasmariñas City in the province of Cavite. Police separated him from his wife, who they sent to another room, and then shot him repeatedly. According to the Onenews.ph website, Asuncion was shot three times in the front and three times more in the back.

The eight other activists were roused from their beds in the early morning, separated from their families and killed. Ariel and Anna Marie Evangelista were killed outside their bamboo hut in Batangas province while their 10-year-old son hid under his bed. Both were leaders of an environmental organization, composed largely of poor fishermen in their community, opposing mining, land-grabbing and climate change.

Melvin Dasigao, Marklee Bacasno, Abner and Edward Esto were leaders and members of an urban poor organization fighting for decent housing in Kasiglahan, Rizal province. They were gunned down in their homes as their families were herded outside into the cold dawn. Bascano’s killing was particularly merciless. He was shot seven times.

Their urban poor organization, San Isidro Kasiglahan, Kapatiran at Damayan para sa Kabuhayan, Katarungan at Kapayapaan (SIKKAD-K3), had previously been labelled a communist front group by the military. According to the human rights organization, Karapatan, the four slain activists were publicly portrayed by the government as members or former members of the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Puroy dela Cruz and his cousin Randy dela Cruz, farmers and members of the Dumagat indigenous group in Rizal Province, suffered similar horrendous fates. They were shot repeatedly as the police held their families outside their homes.

Out of all of these horrifying crimes, murder charges have only been filed in one. Even that case is likely to be dragged out interminably. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra told the press that Philippine judicial procedures dictate that the actual prosecution will depend on the preliminary investigation by the Dasmariñas city prosecutor who has reportedly invited the accused police to file their counter affidavits.

Guevarra also announced that the special investigation teams for the killing of the Evangelista couple, Dasigao, Bacasno, Abner and Edward Esto were still conducting their investigations. The killings of Puroy and Randy dela Cruz were not included, he stated, as he claimed that no connection to any cause-oriented or activist group had been established. The murders of these two farmers did not fall within the remit of the special investigation teams established under a 2012 order of then President Benigno Aquino to investigate the extrajudicial killing of members of cause-oriented organizations, advocates of political, environmental, agrarian, labor, or similar causes and journalists.

In the wake of the justice department announcement, police officials insisted that the killings were the outcome of legitimate police operations servicing search warrants for loose firearms and explosives. All of the victims they claimed resisted arrest, “nanlaban.” “Nanlaban,” is a semi-official term popularized under the Duterte administration for “fighting back against authorities” and any case in which “nanlaban” is reported is widely understood to be a police rub-out, or extra-judicial execution.

Extrajudicial killings, massacres, illegal detention and torture are the pillars of bourgeois rule in the Philippines. In the decades since the military-backed ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, only one of the many known torturers and killers of that dictatorial regime and of the administrations that succeeded it has been prosecuted. Two leading torturers and killers, former Police General Panfilo Lacson and former special forces commandant Gregorio Honasan, were made Senators. Lacson is now running for president and Honasan is again running for Senate on a shared slate with Duterte.

The Bloody Sunday massacre demonstrates that the ruling elite will use mass murder to protect its interests in confrontations with the working class who are being driven into struggle by soaring prices, abysmally low wages, and the social weight of the pandemic.

Last year, Philippine congress passed an Anti-Terror Law, which was signed into effect by Duterte. The law grants the government the power to arrest anyone without warrant on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of terrorism. The Anti-Money Laundering Commission announced that it would freeze the bank accounts of any organization accused of supporting terrorism. The Foreign Affairs Department has requested that the European Union stop all funding and donations from Europe to any cause-oriented organization labelled by the government as a communist front.

Under the Anti-Terror Law, government allegations of communism are now sufficient evidence to shut down organizations, freeze their funding, and arrest their membership. If, in the process of arrest, the police claim that the suspects “nanlaban,” the law is sufficient pretext for murder.

The lives of grass-roots activists and of the broader working class have been gravely endangered. Political responsibility for this peril rests with the leadership of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Under the ideological leadership of Jose Maria Sison, the CPP and the numerous organizations that follow its political line, supported Duterte’s bloody rule as mayor of the southern city of Davao, where he oversaw a notorious apparatus of death squads. The CPP endorsed the rise of Duterte to the presidency in 2016 and selected members to serve in his cabinet. Relations with Duterte soured in 2017 as a result of the intervention of the Philippine military, which threatened to carry out a coup d’état should Duterte’s ties with the CPP persist.

Only when all possibility of cultivating profitable relations with Duterte had ended did Sison and the CPP leadership begin denouncing him as “a fascist.”

Following the Bloody Sunday massacre, CPP chief information officer, Marco Valbuena, published a statement that “the targets of Duterte’s state terrorism can be absorbed by NPA units or provided safe haven within the NPA’s guerrilla base areas.”

In other words, the CPP had no intention of organizing the working class and oppressed masses to defend their democratic rights in a fight for socialism. The party, rather, is attempting to channel and isolate all political dissent into the countryside, while its leaders forge ties with a new section of the ruling class.

Preparations for dictatorial rule in the Philippines are far advanced. The mass murder of workers and the poor and the silencing of political dissent are being codified into the laws of the land. Sison and the CPP have made this possible.