Steinmeier, re-elected as German president, talks war

Peter Schwarz

The word “democracy” appeared a total of 23 times in the 22-minute speech in which Frank-Walter Steinmeier thanked parliamentarians for his re-election as federal president on Sunday. While Steinmeier made much play of the term “democracy,” the reality is obviously very different. The presidential election revealed a ruling class closing ranks in the face of growing social and political opposition and pulling together against the majority of the population.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Image: www.president.gov.ua/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Steinmeier’s election by the Federal Assembly, half of which consists of members of the Bundestag (federal parliament) and half of representatives of the Länder (federal states), was a foregone conclusion. It had been fixed beforehand by the establishment parties. The social democrat Steinmeier was supported not only by the governing parties—Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP)—but also by the opposition parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU). Only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Left Party and the Free Voters put up their own token candidates who had not the slightest chance of success.

Steinmeier’s speech made clear what a deep gulf separates official politics from the vast majority of the population. His focus was on fierce threats of war against Russia, for which there is no support, let alone democratic consensus. No one was asked or could vote on whether they want to risk a war in the middle of Europe that can only end in disaster.

Steinmeier attacked Russia and President Vladimir Putin with a sharpness that is extremely unusual for the highest representative of state, who is usually obliged to exercise diplomatic restraint. “We are in the midst of the danger of a military conflict, a war in Eastern Europe. And Russia bears responsibility for that!” he asserted. “Russia’s troop build-up cannot be misunderstood; that is a threat to Ukraine and is meant as such.”

“The people there have a right to live without fear and threat and to self-determination and sovereignty,” Steinmeier continued. “No country in the world has the right to destroy that—and whoever tries to do so, we will answer decisively!” He then appealed to Putin personally: “Relax the noose around Ukraine’s neck!”

Steinmeier also assured the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks and Romanians: “You can rely on us.” Germany, he said, was part of NATO and the European Union. “Without any ambiguity, we are committed to the obligations in this alliance.”

Steinmeier knows better than any other German politician that this is mendacious war propaganda. As German foreign minister, he was in Kiev in February 2014 when paramilitary fascist militias drove out the elected president Viktor Yanukovych, who had refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. And Steinmeier had prepared and enabled this right-wing coup.

Steinmeier worked closely with two right-wing nationalist parties, Yulia Timoshenko’s Fatherland and Vitali Klitschko’s UDAR, as well as with Oleh Tyahnybok’s fascist Svoboda. The latter uses neo-fascist symbols, agitates against foreigners, Jews, Hungarians and Poles, and maintains close relations with far-right parties in Europe.

After the Maidan demonstrations supported by the US and Germany failed to force Yanukovych to step down, paramilitary fascist militias were mobilised to escalate the conflict and drive the country to the brink of civil war. The leading role was played by the neo-fascist Right Sector, whose masked fighters, equipped with helmets, batons, firebombs and guns, soon dominated the centre of Kiev and brutally attacked the security forces.

Under these circumstances, Steinmeier, seconded by the Polish and French foreign ministers, persuaded Yanukovych to sign a transitional agreement with Tymoshenko, Klitschko and Tyahnybok. Immediately afterwards, the Right Sector drove Yanukovych to flee. The result of this supposed revolution was not a thriving democracy, but an authoritarian and corrupt regime based on rival oligarchic cliques and maintaining fascist militias such as the Azov Battalion.

With the regime change in Kiev, Steinmeier put into practice a great power policy that he had presented shortly before at the Munich Security Conference together with Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen and then Federal President Joachim Gauck. Germany must be “prepared to become involved earlier, more decisively and more substantially in foreign and security policy,” he had announced there. “Germany is too big to comment on world politics only from the side-lines.”

Since then, NATO has systematically armed Ukraine, making it a bulwark against Russia. A recent study by the government-affiliated Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), says: “The Ukrainian armed forces are far more combat-ready today than in 2014.”

At that time, it was “not material equipment gaps” that inhibited the defensive readiness of Europe’s nominally third-strongest army, “but its lack of fighting morale,” the study says. About two-thirds of the Ukrainian land and naval forces in Crimea had defected to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Against the pro-Russian rebels in the Donbas, the new Kiev leadership had only been able to muster 6,000 soldiers.

“In the meantime, Kiev’s armed forces have grown to a good 250,000 active soldiers and over 900,000 reservists,” the SWP notes. “NATO is helping to improve command and control capabilities; the US provided reconnaissance assets, artillery radars and—as did the UK—anti-tank missile systems. From Turkey, Kiev received Bayraktar TB2 combat drones. ... Canada, Britain, Poland, Lithuania and the US have stationed 470 trainers in the western Ukrainian region of Lviv.”

Under these conditions, the US and its NATO allies have now begun to instigate a war with Russia, using the claim of an imminent invasion of Ukraine as a pretext. Steinmeier’s speech on Sunday served to reassure Washington and NATO of Germany’s unqualified support in this, about which doubts had been expressed time and again.

The cross-party support Steinmeier enjoys—the Left Party, AfD and Free Voters also warmly congratulated him after his election—is because he has defended the international interests of German imperialism and supported all attacks on social achievements over the last 25 years like no other politician.

Joining the SPD in 1975 at the age of 19, he headed the office of Gerhard Schröder, Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, from 1993. When Schröder was elected chancellor, Steinmeier moved with him to Berlin and headed the Chancellery from 1999 to 2005.

In this capacity, Steinmeier was the real architect of “Agenda 2010,” the most comprehensive social counterrevolution since the founding of the post-war Federal Republic, which created a huge low-wage sector. He also led the “reform” of the pension and health care systems, which has dramatically reduced old-age pensions and health care provisions.

As head of the Chancellery, Steinmeier was also responsible for the secret services. Under him, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) signed an agreement on the intensive exchange of data with the US intelligence agency NSA, which was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Steinmeier was also responsible for the BND supplying the US with important information for the war in Iraq, even though Germany officially opposed the war.

It was also Steinmeier, in cooperation with Hans-Georg Maassen, then head of division in the Ministry of the Interior and later president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as Germany’s domestic secret service is called), who ensured that Murat Kurnaz, who grew up in Bremen, was not allowed to return to Germany and sat, innocent, in the Guantánamo prison camp for five years.

After the premature end of the Schröder government, Steinmeier became foreign minister in Angela Merkel’s first administration. In 2009, he ran as the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in the Bundestag elections and had to go into opposition for four years after losing. From 2013 to 2017 he was again Foreign Minister under Merkel.

In 2017, Steinmeier was elected federal president, as Joachim Gauck’s successor. Even then, he was supported not only by the governing parties of the grand coalition of the SPD and CDU/CSU, but also by the FDP and the Greens. The office, which mainly fulfils representational tasks, took on ever greater political significance in view of the decline of the political parties.

In 2017, it was Steinmeier who persuaded the SPD and the CDU/CSU to continue the hated grand coalition after an election defeat and months of fruitless negotiations. The result was that the AfD, as leader of the official opposition, received enormous media exposure and was systematically strengthened.

In his speech on Sunday, Steinmeier behaved as a presidential figure standing above the parties and holding the nation together. “The office of the Federal President is a non-partisan one, and I promise you: that is how I will continue to lead it,” he declared. He spoke about the “deep wounds” that the pandemic had inflicted on society, which now needed to be “healed,” but did not spare a word about the government’s coronavirus policy and its victims—the 120,000 people who have died from COVID-19 so far in Germany alone, and their relatives.

Steinmeier’s speech was somewhat reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm, who at the beginning of World War I said he no longer recognised any parties, only Germans. Four years later, Germany was shaken by the November Revolution, the greatest revolution in its history.

Pandemic and vaccine inequality have exacerbated global inequality

Jean Shaoul

Reports by the United Nations and its International Labour Organisation (ILO) provide a searing indictment of the vaccine nationalism and rampant profiteering that have deprived low-and middle-income countries from accessing the vaccine.

Not only has the pandemic dominated the global economy for a second year, making it impossible for employment to recover, but every new outbreak brings setbacks particularly in developing and middle-income countries where access to vaccines is far lower than in developed economies. According to the UN, by the end of last year just 23.9 per 100 people had been vaccinated in the least developed countries compared with 147.4 in the developed countries.

Unequal access to vaccines has widened the differences between countries’ abilities to respond to the pandemic via their healthcare and social systems, institutional capacity, tax revenues and employment systems.

The ILO report, "World Employment and Social Outlook-Trends 2022"

The ILO flagship report, “World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2022 (WESO)”, detailing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on employment, points out that the pace of economic recovery has varied across regions, countries and sectors. Employment recovery depends largely on the extent to which the virus has been contained and vaccines made available. It insisted that “Equitable access to vaccines is crucial to ensuring a human-centred recovery across the world’s regions.”

Behind the dense language of these reports, written for the capitalist world leaders and policy-makers and often obscuring as much as they reveal, this was an admission that world output and profits may have at least partially recovered but workers’ jobs and incomes have not.

The impact has been particularly severe for those poorer nations that had “higher levels of inequality, more divergent working conditions and weaker social protection systems even before the pandemic.”

The ILO notes that job prospects have worsened substantially since its last projections, making it unlikely they will return to their pre-pandemic levels for several years. It predicts that the total number of hours worked globally will be 2 percent below pre-pandemic levels, corresponding to a loss of 52 million full-time jobs (assuming a 48-hour working week), nearly double the fall predicted just six months earlier. Global unemployment, or at least that which is recorded, is likely to be around 207 million in 2022, an 11 percent increase on 2019.

While it does not say so explicitly, the ILO’s report makes clear that the refusal to implement an elimination strategy, using both vaccines and stringent public health measures on the basis that it would cost too much, has worsened economic prospects.

Not only are employment levels below those of 2019, they are unlikely to return to those levels in 2023 due to the impact of the pandemic because of broader structural changes to the global economy that are affecting jobs, conditions and wages.

While there was a strong economy recovery in 2021, global growth momentum—and with it employment levels—is losing steam amid new waves of infections, supply chain constraints and rising inflation. This is due, although the report did not say so, to the trillions of dollars handed over to the corporations and super-rich by central banks around the world.

The problems are particularly acute for poorer countries where job creation has not kept pace with population growth and earlier job losses, “amid lower vaccination progress and limited stimulus spending.” While the UN’s World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) report 2022 predicts that full employment will return in the richer countries by 2023, poorer countries in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East are likely to see a much slower return to pre-pandemic levels of employment.

International financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and UN development agencies had announced various financial packages to help low-income countries, but very little has yet been approved and allocated for healthcare and social support.

The WESP report makes clear that the loss of jobs has had a substantial impact on poverty, dashing any hope of achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of ending extreme poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day in purchasing power parity). Extreme poverty remains well above pre-pandemic levels at a massive 876 million people in 2022, equal to 11 percent of the world’s 7.9 billion population. In Africa, the absolute number of people living in poverty is expected to continue rising.

Higher inequality is emerging as a longer-term legacy of the pandemic, with inequality increasing both within and between countries. While GPD per capita is expected to almost fully recover in the advanced economies by 2023, there is no hope of any such recovery in the poorer countries. Trade in manufactured goods has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, but trade in services, particularly tourism and travel on which poorer countries depend, has yet to recover.

Even before the pandemic, inequality was growing as reflected in the declining share of global income earned by workers, disparities in earnings, stagnation in the real value of wages and much greater income insecurity. Again, while the ILO employment report did not say so, workers’ incomes have fallen as corporate profits have risen and inflation has eroded their value.

It is the world’s temporary workers, without any access to social support or welfare systems, who have suffered most. Temporary workers include:

• Seasonal agricultural workers who may travel from Ethiopia to Sudan to access jobs for 3-4 months, typically with no benefits or paid leave
• Construction workers, where nearly half of all workers are employed on a project basis, even in major industrialised countries such as Germany
• Tourist guides who work on a seasonal basis
• Garment workers in Bangladesh working on a short-term basis to meet short-term requirements for overseas orders
• Casual agricultural labourers in Ecuador, hired daily with a verbal contract and who may be denied pay on the whim of the employer who decides whether the work is satisfactory or not
• High skilled office workers as in the US and other developed countries, hired on temporary contracts but on a long-term or semi-permanent basis

Temporary work is most prevalent in agricultural economies and the informal economy—in the very same countries where employment protection legislation where it exists is unlikely to be enforced, and social support is minimal or non-existent. While it is less prevalent in the advanced countries, it is increasing everywhere. As the WESP report notes, although temporary workers were the first to lose their jobs as the pandemic hit, permanent workers soon follow. Such jobs become available as they are often temporary or increasingly gig or platform work where workers are classified as self-employed. They enable employers to easily impose lay-offs when demand falls.

Temporary workers have little bargaining power and thus are extremely vulnerable to exploitative employers, leaving them trapped in endless cycles of intermittent jobs and forced to cope with irregular income. Having run down whatever savings they had, a further 30 million adults fell into extreme poverty in 2020 as they lost their jobs, while the number of extreme working poor who do not earn enough to keep themselves above the poverty line rose by 8 million.

Temporary workers are typically paid less than permanent workers, suffering a 26 percent penalty compared with the median monthly wage. Temporary employment as a percentage of all employees has therefore been rising steadily. The average temporary employment rate was 28 percent in 2011-19, up from 15 percent in 1991-2000.

The WESP report highlights the role that the central banks have played in all this. Asset purchase programmes (APP) became the primary stimulus tool in the advanced countries, with the US, UK, European Union and Japan adding around $10 trillion to their balance sheets bringing total “assets” to nearly $26 trillion. Many developing country central banks followed suit, implementing asset purchase programme for the first time.

The report cautions about the longer-term growth impacts, pointing out that APPs in the 2010s led to little in the way of capital investment but instead went on share backs and reduced firms’ ability to cope with economic downturn. These APPs threaten inflation and financial stability even as they have disproportionally benefited the wealthy.

Scientists protest Johnson government ripping up UK COVID restrictions

Robert Stevens

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a media briefing on COVID-19, in Downing Street, London, Wednesday Dec. 15, 2021. (Tolga Akmen/Pool via AP)

The Johnson government has provoked a wave of criticism from scientists and healthcare professionals by lifting all remaining COVID restrictions, with the legal requirement to self-isolate ending February 24.

The UK’s Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance, who have served as yes men for Johnson’s herd immunity agenda, have said nothing in response. Ignoring calls to present the “evidence” backing ditching restrictions, neither have been seen in public since Johnson announced February 9 that the UK would be the first country in the world to end all measures against the spread of COVID.

The Conservative government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has not issued a formal statement endorsing the ending of restrictions. But 30 SAGE representatives met on February 10, including Whitty and Vallance, publishing a paper the same day titled “COVID-19 Medium-Term Scenarios – February 2022”.

Written by academics on “COVID-19 Medium-Term Scenarios”, the two-page “note” is a devastating argument against the withdrawal of public health measures. It opens, “This note sets out a range of scenarios to illustrate possible courses of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic for the UK. All assume that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to circulate for the foreseeable future and that variants will emerge.”

The academics outline four scenarios from “Reasonable Best-Case” to “Reasonable Worst-Case”. They warn, “An outcome that lies outside the range covered by the four scenarios—better than the reasonable best-case scenario or worse than the reasonable worst-case scenario—cannot be ruled out.”

The “best case” predicts, “In the next 12-18 months: Relatively small resurgence in Autumn/Winter 2022/23 with low levels of severe disease.” Scenario two, “Central Optimistic”, predicts over the same time span, “Seasonal wave of infections in Autumn/Winter with comparable size and realised severity to the current Omicron wave.”

A screenshot of a section of the February 10 report written by academics at the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Scenario two, “Central Optimistic”, predicts over the next 12-18 months, “Seasonal wave of infections in Autumn/Winter with comparable size and realised severity to the current Omicron wave.”

The third worst scenario, “Central Pessimistic”, predicts over the next 12-18 months: “Emergence of a new variant of concern results in a large wave of infections, potentially at short notice and out of Autumn/Winter. However, severe disease and mortality remain concentrated in certain groups (and lower than pre-vaccination), e.g., unvaccinated, vulnerable and elderly.”

Scenario four, the “Reasonable Worst-Case”, warns that in the next 12-18 months, “This leads to a very large wave of infections with increased levels of severe disease seen across a broad range of the population, although the most severe health outcomes continue to be felt primarily among those with no prior immunity.”

The authors write, “In each scenario, it is assumed that a relatively stable, repeating pattern is reached over time (two to 10 years), but it is likely that the transition to this will be highly dynamic and unpredictable. It may not be possible to know with confidence from what happens in the next 12 to 18 months which long-term pattern will emerge.”

Even the “optimistic” scenario accepts, “Seasonal wave of infections in Autumn/Winter with comparable size and realised severity to the current Omicron wave.”

No one in the political establishment or media is making public what this means. Not a single article has appeared in the UK media on the SAGE paper.

Since the detection of Omicron in Britain on November 27, just 11 weeks ago, a staggering 8.2 million people have been recorded infected with COVID and 14,880 more people have died from the disease. This mass suffering and death is the real “severity” of the Omicron wave and has taken place among a heavily vaccinated population. With immunity waning and no plan in place for a further booster programme, and the end of all mitigations, self-isolation and even reporting of cases and deaths, the ground is being laid for a social catastrophe.

The scale of infection is likely much higher than reported. This week the i news website reported, “An average of 101,000 cases of coronavirus per day were recorded from January 16 to 22, according to the Government’s COVID-19 dashboard. But it is likely the true number was nearer 280,500 a day.” It noted, the “sharp difference” reflects “the increasing limitations of the Government figures, which count only those people who have reported themselves as having tested positive for the virus.”

SAGE posted two pages of minutes from its meeting which note, in line with the scenarios produced, “New SARS-CoV-2 variants will continue to emerge… including variants that are less susceptible to current vaccines, resistant to antivirals, or are associated with altered disease severity (high confidence).

“There is no reason why future dominant variants should be similarly or less severe than Omicron, which may be an exception in having lower severity. The next dominant variant in the UK (and internationally) could have similar pathogenicity to previous variants, such as Delta. The range of evolutionary possibilities also includes substantial change to immune recognition.”

While SAGE made no official statements opposing the tearing up of restrictions, other scientists have spoken out, warning of the dire implications.

Stephen Reicher, a professor of social psychology at St Andrews University, said, “Taking away the obligation to self-isolate is the final and most powerful way of saying ‘it’s all over’ and that infections don’t matter.”

The Guardian cited Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist of Edinburgh University, explaining, “The Omicron variant did not come from the Delta variant. It came from a completely different part of the virus’s family tree. And since we don’t know where in the virus’s family tree a new variant is going to come from, we cannot know how pathogenic it might be. It could be less pathogenic but it could, just as easily, be more pathogenic.”

In a section titled, “Countermeasures”, the SAGE document warns of the implications of the government’s criminal ripping up of all measures in place to prevent viral spread, including testing. “Surveillance, vaccines, therapeutics and testing will also have large impacts on outcomes. Waves will be worse if detected late, vaccine effectiveness is low, or if stocks of effective vaccines are low or cannot be deployed quickly. Waves may be exacerbated in communities with lower vaccinations rates, which also tend to be the most disadvantaged. Lower vaccine effectiveness will also increase reliance on antiviral drugs, extensive use of which will increase the risk of resistance developing. Access to testing has also been key for reducing transmission and is likely to impact the shape and duration of any future waves.”

In the face of these immense dangers to public health, the ruling class is accelerating its herd immunity agenda. The end of mass testing is next to be ditched. Last Friday the Guardian reported several government sources stating that “to save billions”, Chancellor Rishi Sunak “wants to end most PCR testing for people with COVID symptoms, possibly by the end of March.” The Guardian and Times said the government planned to save £10 billion in public spending by axing testing.

A date of March 24 has been mooted for ending testing; the second anniversary of the Johnson government being forced by growing anger in the working class to impose its first national lockdown.

The Guardian reported that those in hospitals, high-risk settings and the 1.3 million extremely vulnerable people eligible for antivirals if they contract COVID would be exempted, but “everyone else with symptoms would be either given some free lateral flow tests or no testing at all. A third option would be restricting the offer of lateral flows to symptomatic people over 50 and the clinically vulnerable. The advice for people without symptoms to take routine lateral flow tests is expected to be scrapped entirely.”

Turkey calls for mediation in Ukraine as US presses for war with Russia

Ulaş Ateşçi

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, applaud as Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, second left, and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, February 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

As the NATO powers led by the United States escalate their war drive against Russia over false allegations that Moscow is preparing to invade Ukraine, Turkey, a member of the NATO military alliance, is calling for de-escalation and mediation between Moscow and Kiev.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who is to meet with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov today, told CNN-Türk on Saturday that Ankara disagrees with US and European claims that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is “imminent.” He said: “If Russia attempts an invasion while this [negotiation] process is going on, it will not be right either. Even if there is no such situation, Western countries should be careful about making statements that cause panic in Ukraine.”

Çavuşoğlu stated that Turkey’s Russian and Belarusian sources had denied the Western powers’ claims. “Any tension, let alone a war, affects all of us,” he said, adding: “It disturbs the peace of all of us. It affects the economy, energy security, tourism and is important in all respects.” Calling for Russian-Ukrainian talks, Çavuşoğlu said: “We would gladly mediate if both sides agree.”

Despite Çavuşoğlu’s pose of neutrality, however, Ankara largely supports NATO’s Ukraine policy and the accelerating NATO war drive against Russia. It has supplied Kiev with critical Bayraktar TB2 armed drones. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made clear Ankara’s stance in mid-January, denouncing Russia: “These things cannot go on with a mentality of occupation. What did Russia do? It has usurped Crimea.”

“We sincerely believe that the crisis will be ended by peaceful and diplomatic means, within the framework of the Minsk Agreements,” he said during an official visit to Kiev earlier this month.

In fact, the use of Turkish-supplied drones in eastern Ukraine violates the Minsk agreements. Moreover, during Erdoğan’s visit, a free trade agreement was signed, as well as a Turkish-Ukrainian military deal to jointly produce Bayraktar drones. These drones played an important role in the victory of Turkish-backed Azerbaijan against Russian-backed Armenia in the war that broke out in the Caucasus in 2020.

At the end of January, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told the Associated Press: “The fulfillment of the Minsk agreement means the country’s destruction,” signaling that Kiev refused to implement the agreement. Moscow then rejected Ankara’s offer to host a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin is expected to come to Turkey in the coming days, but only to meet with Erdoğan.

In the CNN interview, Çavuşoğlu also said, “Our only goal now is to prevent conflict and reduce tensions. … We have shown how strong we are a NATO ally in this process, but we also need to have good relations with Russia.”

After his visit to Ukraine, Erdoğan also said: “We have serious bilateral relations with Russia at the moment. These relations are not ordinary.” His government is increasingly afraid of the devastating consequences of a NATO-Russia war, amid an explosive economic crisis at home.

The Turkish lira has lost a record amount against the US dollar this year, with official annual inflation reaching 48 percent in January. Amid a general impoverishment and a murderous policy of mass infection of the COVID-19 pandemic, the working class is beginning to take action. Turkey is witnessing an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes in 2022.

Erdoğan criticized his NATO allies for provoking the conflict, declaring: “Unfortunately, the West has not contributed anything to the solution of this issue until now. I can only say that they are creating difficulties. … When we look at the situation with the US, Biden has not yet been able to show a positive approach to this process as of now.”

The Turkish bourgeoisie has traditionally had deep military-strategic ties with the US-led imperialist powers. Home to many NATO bases, it has NATO’s second-largest army. Turkey sends about 50 percent of its exports to Europe. It has pursued a historical rivalry with Russia over the Mediterranean and Black Seas as well as ongoing conflicts over Syria, Libya and the Caucasus between Moscow and Ankara.

As such, while voicing occasional impotent complaints about the NATO imperialist powers’ drive to war against Russia, Ankara has aligned itself with it, despite Turkey’s growing geopolitical, economic and military ties with Russia—especially after growing tensions between Washington and Ankara led to a NATO-backed coup attempt against Erdoğan’s government in 2016.

Chief among these Turkish-Russian ties was the purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia, over sharp US objections. Washington responded by removing Turkey from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and imposing sanctions on the Turkish defense industry, claiming that the S-400 system could put US and NATO security at risk.

There are deep economic ties, especially on energy. According to official data, 33.6 percent of Turkey’s natural gas consumption in 2020 (16.2 billion cubic meters) came from Russia. The gas arrives via the Blue Stream and TurkStream pipelines linking Russia to Turkey via the Black Sea. TurkStream also supplies gas to Eastern Europe. There is also nuclear energy cooperation between Ankara and Moscow. While the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in the Turkish southern city of Mersin is still under construction, Erdoğan announced a possible new nuclear plant deal with Russia.

Turkey also imports more than 60 percent of its wheat from Russia, which is also the country sending the most tourists to Turkey.

Turkey, which borders the Black Sea neighbor like Ukraine and Russia, would quickly be drawn into a war due to its NATO membership, the Montreux Convention and its geographical location.

The 1936 Montreux Convention gives Turkey control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits and regulates the passage of ships between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It strictly limits the access of warships from countries outside the Black Sea region. After Erdoğan questioned the convention over his Canal Istanbul project, the Kremlin, which is a party to the convention, stressed the “importance of preservation of the 1936 Montreux Convention in order to ensure the regional stability and safety of the regional Black Sea straits regime.”

At the end of January, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar confirmed his government’s commitment to the agreement, stating: “Within the framework of the Montreux regime, we are in favor of the countries bordering the Black Sea living in peace, dialogue, tranquility and prosperity.” He also added, “We have always argued that the status provided by Montreux is beneficial for all parties and that it is out of the question to give up on it in today’s conditions.”

Speaking to the Russian daily Izvestia this weekend, Russian Ambassador to Turkey Alexey Erkhov said: “Tensions around Ukraine seriously worry Ankara, both due to geographical proximity and various regional military and political alliances. … Therefore, Turkey, which does not want an escalation here, sincerely wanted to help the solution as much as possible, and such a desire is certainly worthy of praise.”

Last week, he also told the Turkish daily Türkiye: “We are of the opinion that the disagreements between Russia and Ukraine are related to Kiev’s non-fulfillment of the Minsk agreements. If our Turkish partners can penetrate the Ukrainians and encourage them to fulfill their previous obligations, we would welcome it.”

Erkhov stressed that the conflict was not between Ukraine and Russia, but between NATO and Russia. “In fact, the core of the problem is not between Moscow and Kiev, but between Moscow and Washington, Moscow and Brussels, that is, Moscow and NATO. Essentially, it has been NATO’s relentless advance to the East, towards Russia’s borders, for years,” he said.

To Izvestia, Erkhov pointed out that “the notorious Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and its so-called leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani have become extremely active in recent weeks.” Al-Jolani was the founder of the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, one of the main CIA proxy forces in the NATO war in Syria. Erkhov’s remark that HTS “insistently advised foreigners to leave Idlib” shows that US-led NATO powers may prepare for another escalation in Syria as well.

The 2014 US- and German-backed far-right coup in Kiev came after Russia directly intervened in that war to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s and help prevent a direct NATO attack on Syria.

“Endemic” COVID-19 may lead to 250,000 deaths each year in the US

Benjamin Mateus

The silence on the number of COVID-19 deaths occurring in the US is chilling. The entire state and federal apparatus has shifted gears to declare COVID endemic and to end all mandates that had provided the population with a modicum of protection against infection and death.

It bears reviewing Tuesday’s statistics from various COVID trackers.

BNO News reported that 3,349 more Americans died from COVID, with a seven-day average of 2,488 deaths every day. The Johns Hopkins COVID tracker placed the figure of additional deaths at 2,777, with a seven-day average of just under 2,000 per day. The New York Times’ COVID tracker reported the fourteen-day daily average of additional deaths to be 2,454. The Worldometer COVID dashboard reported that 2,013 people had perished on Tuesday. Its seven-day average of daily deaths is now at 2,121.

Workers burying bodies in a mass grave on Hart Island, April 9, 2020. (Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Yet, there is no mention of these grim statistics by any major news outlet. Since Omicron first emerged in the US, more than 137,000 people have lost their lives. The cumulative total is approaching 950,000 deaths. At the current trajectory, one million will have died before April.

Less than 65 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, with just over half a million vaccinations being given each day. The campaign to vaccinate has essentially stalled. This will be a significant factor as the newer variants of SARS-CoV-2 are driven by selection pressures to develop more immune-evading characteristics that will take advantage of the population’s waning immunity.

However, federal public health officials and policymakers have little stomach to discuss such prospects or consider what the so-called “new normal” will look like when the coronavirus is allowed unimpeded access to every home on every street across the country.

This is the burning question that was raised in a recent segment of the “In the Bubble” podcast featuring Dr. Kristian Andersen, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research in California. The show is hosted by Andy Slavitt, who was an interim senior adviser to the COVID-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration. The discussion centered on the implications of Denmark’s nearly complete abandonment of public health measures against the pandemic.

This is being done under conditions where, despite having very high rates of vaccination, Denmark is experiencing levels of infection and death not seen since last winter’s highs.

Andersen authored the critical “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which carefully reviewed the scientific evidence against the notion that the virus was constructed in a laboratory or purposefully manipulated. On this week’s podcast, he said of Denmark’s action:

The problem is again that we need to be realistic about what that means, and probably what that means is that—in a country like Denmark, for example, it probably means that we should expect if we go back to 2019 that everybody should expect to get infected probably at least twice a year… If we are looking at the number of deaths resulting as a result of this, we have to be realistic too that this is not going to be no common cold or flu.

Slavitt followed with this chilling observation:

Look, I don’t think they want to say that, but I do think that implicit in this is an acceptance that there are going to be, at least in the US, 200,000 to 250,000 deaths a year at baseline.

Both Andersen and Slavitt agreed that such a scale of death could continue for 10 years, if not longer.

As epidemiologists such as Dr. Ellie Murray have predicted, a cyclic pattern is emerging in which there is one dominant winter wave followed by one or two smaller waves in summer and fall. The scale of death we have witnessed in the supposedly “mild” Omicron wave has been massive and informs us that even estimates of 250,000 annual deaths in the US for years to come may be low.

Moreover, the last several months have provided ample objective evidence that children suffer considerably from infection. The Omicron wave saw hospitalizations among children rise to record highs, especially among those under the age of five.

According to the CDC’s data, COVID-19 killed 539 children in the US in 2021, mostly in the second half of the year, after schools reopened. By comparison, the flu killed three children in 2021.

This only underscores the difference between these viral infections despite the limited mitigation measures in place. With little infrastructure spending to address the need for highly reliable heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, the lifting of all mask mandates and complete opening of schools and businesses will have a considerable impact on the lives of these innocents.

In response to the federal government and states’ reckless ending of the mask mandates, over 300 public health experts and professionals have signed an open letter urging elected officials to re-evaluate “the end of school mask mandates.”

The letter, written by Sonali Rajan, EdD; Katherine Keyes, PhD; Kara Rudolph, PhD; Dustin Duncan, ScD; and Charles Branas, PhD of Columbia University, notes:

Over the past several weeks there have been sustained calls by a vocal minority to actively reduce COVID-19 mitigation measures in schools. Elected officials, pundits on cable news, and national media outlets have been pushing for mask “off-ramps.” And as of this week, several states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, among others) are planning an end to indoor mask mandates in schools by a specific date. These calls, however, are not guided by rigorous accumulated scientific evidence. Removing indoor mask mandates by a particular date—as opposed to tying them to a threshold of community transmission and hospitalizations—is unscientific.

According to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), over 12.3 million children in the US have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic. Almost 4.5 million of these infections occurred since New Year’s Day 2022. For 27 straight weeks, pediatric COVID cases have remained over 100,000 and COVID-19 has become the sixth leading cause of death among school-aged kids.

These figures do not include the long-term implications of heart disease and diabetes among children infected with the coronavirus. And the long-term impact of post-COVID syndrome remains unknown. Long COVID has significant impact on the mental health of children and may have a considerable negative influence on their adult lives.

As the “In the Bubble” podcast was ending, Andersen reflected on the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is extremely fit and has been able to mutate and survive over the last two years, underscoring not just the immediate dangers it poses to the population, but its tenacity to persist.

As he has explained, SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin. But the current strains of the coronavirus and the prospect of a pandemic in perpetuity are a product of human activity—in particular, the deadly and reckless policies, driven by the financial interests of the corporate ruling elites, which are forcing the populations of nearly every country on the globe to accept the coronavirus as a permanent threat to their lives, their health and their livelihoods.

Donor list leak exposes business and far-right forces sponsoring Canada’s “Freedom Convoy”

Niles Niemuth

Data from the crowdfunding website GiveSendGo was leaked online Sunday. It provides insight into the right wing donors who have helped bankroll the far-right “Freedom Convoy” movement, which has occupied the neighborhood around Canada’s parliament in Ottawa for more than two weeks and set up blockades at border crossings with the US.

Endorsed by former President Donald Trump, various January 6 coup plotters, Fox News and the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the Convoy organizers have been flooded with donations from across Canada, the US and the rest of the world. A GoFundMe initiative raised US $7.9 million before it was shut down for violating the crowdfunding site’s terms of service which prohibit the use of funds to promote violence and harassment.

Following the suspension of the GoFundMe initiative, Convoy organizers moved to GiveSendGo, a self-proclaimed Chrsitian crowdfunding site. GiveSendGo has been used by the far-right in the United States to raise funds for the defense of fascist shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, members of the Proud Boys, a designated terrorist group in Canada, as well as the insurrectionists who took part in the invasion of the US Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021.

Rally in support of the far-right Convoy in Vaughan, on the outskirts of Toronto, Jan. 27. (Photo by Arthur Mola/Invision/AP)

On Sunday night the GiveSendGo website was taken offline in an apparent hack and redirected to GiveSendGone.wtf. A message posted on the site read in part, “You helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the US. You helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa. In fact, you are committed to funding anything that keeps the raging fire of misinformation going until that it [sic] burns the world’s collective democracies down.” A file was released which exposed the data of all the donors, including their names, businesses and addresses.

According to the leaked data, $8.4 million had been raised from 92,844 donors. An analysis by Queen’s University Professor Amarnath Amarasingam, an expert on terrorism and political violence, found that 56 percent of donors are based in the United States. The second largest group of donors, 39 percent, are from Canada.

Among other countries, donations were also given by individuals in Great Britain, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, France and Norway. Nine individuals donated $7,600 from addresses in the Cayman Island, a popular tax haven utilized by the ultra-rich. Despite the significant international support for the convoy the majority of funds, $4.31 million, came from donors based in Canada while $3.62 million came from the US.

Monmouth University graduate researcher Sara Aniano found that among statements left by donors were: “I look forward to the day you tyrants are swinging from a noose.”; “We have 2A [Second Amendment] here in America send your mounties and see what happens.”; “CABAL PIGLETS ARE CORRUPT CRIMINALS WHO NEED SEVERE PUNISHMENT UNDER LAW”; “Death to all liberal traitors.” Donors also left messages of support using language associated with the fascist QAnon movement.

The largest single donation was for $215,000 but the donor remains unidentified. This was followed by $90,000 from US tech billionaire Thomas Siebel, a prominent Republican Party funder. The next largest donation came from Brad Howland, the owner of a power washing business in Sussex Corner, New Brunswick.

Howland, who has posted statements in support of Trump on Facebook, confirmed to CBC News that he had made the donation. “We are thankful to be blessed enough to support their efforts to do what they have to do in a peaceful way until the government removes the mandates to restore all our freedom as pre-COVID,” he explained.

Ben Pogue, the CEO of a construction company based in Dallas, Texas gave $20,000 to support the Ottawa occupation. Pogue and his wife gave over $200,000 to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019 and posted photos with the Trump family on social media. Pogue’s father subsequently received a pardon from Trump in 2020 for evading $400,000 in taxes.

A vice-president of an AutoCanada car dealership in London, Ontario gave $25,000 and another $20,000 was given by the chair of a community and family support organization in Cannington, Ontario. Other donors used email addresses associated with the Correctional Services of Canada, US Bureau of Prisons, US Department of Justice, Transportation Safety Administration and NASA.

Significant business donors to the scuttled GoFundMe identified by news outlet PressProgress include: the Range Langley, Canada’s largest shooting range, located in Langley, British Columbia which gave $18,000; Marine Tech Industries, a ship repair company in Surrey, British Columbia, which provided $5,000; and Murray Wedge, a portfolio manager at National Bank Financial based in Toronto provided $5,000.

Another significant stream of funding for the convoy has come in the form of Bitcoin. The popular cryptocurrency allows for anonymous payments, which has allowed Convoy organizers to utilize donations despite their bank accounts being frozen. Bitcoin Magazine reported Monday that nearly $1 million had been raised so far from 5,511 donors in a campaign operated by the libertarian group HonkHonkHodl.

With the backing of the Conservative Party official opposition and sections of the mainstream corporate media, a rabble of small business owners, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, religious fundamentalists, fascist thugs and owner-operator drivers have been mobilized under the “Freedom Convoy” to demand the scrapping of a vaccine mandate for truck drivers crossing the US-Canada border and as a wedge for ending all COVID-19 mitigations. Organizers have openly discussed plans for overthrowing the government of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and replacing it with an unelected junta.

Despite the outsized attention given to the protests and their demands, the majority of Canadians are vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truck drivers, and COVID-19 mitigation measures remain popular.

At its peak, 5,000 to 8,000 have gathered in downtown Ottawa, while several hundred trucks block city streets where hooligans have run amuck. Occupiers have been allowed to set up hot tubs, barbecues and full music stages with video screens. The protests and blockades have been treated with kid gloves by the police from the local to federal level, with active duty and retired officers expressing their open sympathy. Organizer Tamar Lich responded to Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act on Monday by declaring that the occupiers will “hold the line.”

The exposure of the Convoy’s financial backers is another confirmation that, regardless of the involvement of a smattering of confused or backward workers, the protest is not a working class movement. It has drawn support from sections of the Canadian and American ruling elite who backed Trump and his coup attempt and mobilized enraged sections of the middle class and small business owners.

The GiveSendGo data also exposes the effort to turn the crisis of the Canadian government outward and manipulate popular anger into support for the anti-Russia war drive being pursued by Canadian and American imperialism in Ukraine. The Canadian Press published an article Tuesday with a headline which asked, without providing any evidence, “Are Canadian protest over COVID-19 restrictions a factor in Putin’s Ukraine timeline?”

The homicidal calls for an end of anti-COVID-19 measures and a “return to normal” are the opposite of what the working class requires and has been demanding. Teachers and students across Canada have been protesting the unsafe reopening of schools and demanding more, not less, protection from a virus which has infected over 3 million and killed more than 35,500 thanks to the “herd immunity” strategy which has been pursued by every party in government, including the New Democratic Party.

In response to the Convoy, provincial, territorial and federal governments are moving to rip up all remaining mitigation measures including vaccine passports, indoor crowd limits and masking requirements. Workers in Canada and around the world must oppose the rightward shift in Canadian politics now underway and take up the demand for a science-based elimination strategy to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives by bringing the pandemic to an end.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government approve anti-working class labor law

Santiago Guillén

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos coalition government has passed a reactionary anti-working class labor law. It was designed by the trade unions, big business and the Podemos-led ministry of labour; overseen by the European Union (EU); passed with thanks to parliamentary support from right-wing parties, and has received the blessings of Spain’s financial aristocracy.

The reform continues the one approved by the right-wing Popular Party (PP) in 2012, the harshest attack Spanish workers suffered since the end of the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1978.

The PP reform led to Spain’s being one of the EU countries with the most temporary contracts. It led to mass job destruction, wage cuts and hundreds of thousands of youth leaving the country to seek jobs elsewhere. Coming after the 2008 global economic crisis, the explicit aim was to cut wages and thus increase exports to increase profits for the ruling class.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE), second left, walks next to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, second right, and First Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, left, at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 14 2020. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

The new law effectively validates the PP’s reform. Despite the attempts of Podemos, the PSOE and liberal media like El País, eldiario.es and Público, to market the new reform as “progressive,” the truth is that key aspects of the PP 2012 law remain. These include:

• The reduction in compensation for unfair dismissal from 45 to 33 days per year worked with a maximum of 24 months instead of the previous 42;
• The ability to sack workers by simply alleging foreseeable losses in the future;
• Collective dismissals are simplified through Employment Regulation Files (ERE). These no longer require administrative authorization, and corporations have sacked tens of thousands of workers using EREs;
• Employers’ ability to cut salaries, modify working hours, change employees’ place of work or job description by alleging “economic, technical, organizational or production reasons.”
• Employers’ ability to withdraw from collective agreements.
• Employers’ ability to impose overtime on workers in part-time contracts, a mechanism that facilitates exploitation, fraud and precariousness.

The continuity with the PP’s labour reform is such that Mariano Rajoy, the right-wing prime minister who oversaw the law, told the conservative ABC newspaper that the PSOE and Podemos “left the labour reform where it was.”

Juan Ramón Rallo, a neo-liberal economist, wrote in El Confidencial digital, “Honestly, I think it is good news that this reform has gone ahead. As I said at the time, it consolidates all the central elements of the 2012 labor reform and turns them, from now on, into a shared consensus from [the far-right] Vox [party] to Podemos.”

The law has been supported by various right-wing parties such as Citizens, the Navarrese-regionalist UPN and the Catalan nationalist PDeCAT. The two largest parties of the Spanish right, the PP and Vox, voted against it, not because they disagreed with its contents, but because they hoped its rejection would provoke a crisis in the governing coalition.

Major factions of Spain’s financial aristocracy have come out to defend the reform. Ana Patricia Botín, CEO of Santander, Spain’s largest bank, said, “I think it is very important what has been agreed and that it has been done by consensus, it is positive,” referring to the unions and the big business association CEOE all agreeing to the reform. Botín is fully aware that the previous labour reform helped Spanish banks earn more than 20 billion euros last year after laying off 19,000 employees.

The major change of the new law is related to rules limiting most temporary contracts to a maximum of three months. Temp agencies will have to adapt workers' terms to those of the company they are assigned to. However, given that employers often act fraudulently with job contracts, aware that labour inspectors are scarce and overstrained—so much so that they have repeatedly threatened to go on strike over the past year—these measures will likely have a limited impact.

Above all, the new law seeks to strengthen the role of the Workers Commissions (CCOO) and the General Labor Union (UGT) union bureaucracies in collective bargaining.

While sectoral collective agreements will from now on take precedence over company or regional agreements, collective bargaining will become the central instrument for negotiating wages and working conditions. This has nothing to do with strengthening workers’ ability to negotiate with employers. Rather, it aims to strengthen the unions’ role as labor police forces comprised of upper-middle class bureaucrats who enforce wage cuts, redundancies and precarious working conditions.

The unions have recently proven their credentials. In 9-day metalworkers strike in Cádiz involving 22,000 workers, the unions CCOO and UGT sold out the strike, accepting wages below inflation, while aiding the ruthless crackdown of the PSOE-Podemos government using police and military-style tanks. They then scrambled to demobilise or cancel strikes across the country, terrified that workers’ militancy could get out of their control.

Amid a surging increase in inflation and poverty hitting broad sections of the working class, the ruling class view the unions as critical to crushing resistance and imposing wage cuts. For this reason, the state recently showered CCOO and UGT with millions of euros. In 2021, these anti-working class organisations received 56 percent more than previously—an additional 3.5 million euros. It has gone from 9 million in 2020 to 17 million in the latest state budget. This does not include subsidies at the local, regional and European level amounting to many millions more.

In fact, the trade unions and Podemos never intended to revoke the 2012 reform. Yolanda Díaz—Podemos’ de facto leader, current Minister of Labor and promoter of the new law—stated that she would “repeal the labor reform despite all resistance” at the CCOO congress held in October 2021. However, Spain had already committed with the European Union to preserve this law. In exchange, Spain would receive 70 billion euros from the EU’s bailout fund, the Next Generation Plan, to hand out to its corporations and banks.

The Operational Agreement, as the agreement is known, was signed by the Spanish government on November 10. It clearly states that “the actual release of the funds to the Member States will take place in installments and will be conditional on the satisfactory fulfillment of the milestones and targets.” Among those milestones already met is the labor reform of 2012, also imposed by the European Union, and which the Spanish government therefore promised not to touch.

It exposes as a fraud the comments of then-Podemos leader and deputy prime minister of the PSOE-Podemos government, Pablo Iglesias. Endorsing the EU bailout funneling €750 billion to the banks and corporations in July 2020, he said the EU “seems to have learned the lessons after the previous crisis, this time we will not have austerity, but an ambitious plan of fiscal stimuli.”

In fact, the man who led the team supervising Spain’s commitments to disburse the funds in December is Declan Costello, former head of the European Commission Mission for Greece. Under this capacity, Costello oversaw the savage austerity packages implemented in Greece by Podemos’ ally, Syriza, under Prime Minster Alexis Tsipras, that devastated the working class.

The latest labour reform exposes Podemos for what it is: a pro-capitalist party whose record in government includes prioritising profits over lives amid a pandemic that has led to over 122,000 excess deaths in Spain, showering corporations and banks with billions of euros, and spearheading war threats against nuclear-armed Russia amid the Ukraine crisis.