German federal and state governments cut quarantine period to five days

Tamino Dreisam

Despite official propaganda about the “end of the pandemic,” 1,500 people are falling victim to the coronavirus every week in Germany. New strains are spreading that are even more infectious than the BA.2 Omicron variant.

Nevertheless, all the parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament) are removing the last remaining protective measures and are prepared to accept tens of thousands more deaths. This is illustrated by the recent decisions of the federal and state governments to shorten the isolation period to five days.

The new Infection Protection Act passed in mid-March reduces coronavirus measures to “basic protection”—mandatory mask-wearing on short- and long-distance transport, as well as in nursing homes and hospitals. At the beginning of April, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party—SPD) also tried to completely lift the quarantine requirements but had to withdraw this proposal just one day later due to public anger.

People wait to make a corona test in the city center of Essen, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

On 28 April, the federal and state governments nevertheless decided to shorten the isolation period to five days. On 2 May, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) updated its guidelines on isolation and now recommends a quarantine period of only five days. A negative test after the five days is only a recommendation. Previously, a quarantine period of 10 days applied, with the possibility of release after seven days.

The concrete implementation of these guidelines is left to the individual federal states. In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, the quarantine period has already been reduced to five days. Berlin, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania follow on 6 May. What is also new is that quarantine is completely waived for all contact persons—even if they are unvaccinated and live in the same household as an infected person.

The cut in the quarantine period is emblematic of the profits-before-lives policy of the ruling class. Following the lie of the “end of the pandemic,” coronavirus protective measures have been all but abandoned. As a result, infections have spread massively in the population, causing a loss of working hours due to illness that threatens to reduce the profits of the banks and corporations. Therefore, even potentially infectious people must be forced to continue working.

By spreading mass infection in workplaces, the government is putting the health and lives of tens of thousands of workers at risk. Yet it is fully aware of the consequences of its policy.

Lauterbach himself regularly warns on Twitter of the effects of a COVID infection. On 1 May, for example, he wrote, “Even if you are in top shape, a coronavirus infection can change everything for you. A well-trained body usually protects you from severe COVID disease. Unfortunately, not nearly as well from Long Covid.”

That does not stop him from immensely increasing everyone’s risk of COVID by shortening the quarantine period.

The federal government is still pursuing the plan to abolish quarantine altogether. Liberal Democrat (FDP) parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr, for example, told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland that the rules on isolating infected people should be lifted completely. “Anyone who has tested positive but is symptom-free should be allowed to leave the house with a mask while observing social distancing,” he said. “I am firmly convinced that people can make a decision on this issue on their own responsibility. There is no longer a need for government regulation for this.”

In addition to cutting back quarantine, other pandemic measures were dropped in numerous German states on 1 May. In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein, testing is no longer mandatory at schools.

In Saarland, the number of tests was reduced from three to two per week. Berlin follows on 9 May. Thuringia even plans to test only once a week from 6 May. There is no longer a mask-wearing requirement for schools in any of the federal states. Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are also no longer considered hotspots, so wearing a mask is no longer compulsory in retail outlets there.

Contrary to the claims of politicians and the media, however, the pandemic is far from over. Although the number of registered infections has fallen—after testing capacities were reduced and compulsory testing was abolished in almost all areas—it is still at a very high level. The seven-day incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants is close to 600, with more than 750,000 infections reported in one week.

In medical treatment facilities, as well as old people’s homes and nursing homes, the number of outbreaks increased compared to the previous week—from 94 to 101 in medical treatment facilities and from 314 to 368 in old people’s homes and nursing homes. Between 35 and 160 people died in each of these outbreaks.

However, due to overburdened health authorities and because not all infected persons have a PCR test—only those tested appear in the statistics—experts assume a very high rate of under-reporting. This is underlined by the figures of the RKI. According to the institute, 55 percent of all transmitted test results are positive.

The situation at hospitals also remains extremely fraught. The adjusted number of hospitalised COVID-19 patients is about 7,000 per week, with 1,446 people currently needing intensive care.

The number of deaths is particularly alarming. Since the reduction of coronavirus measures to the level of so-called “basic protection” in March, 12,000 people have already died. Every week, about 1,500 people fall victim to the virus.

Numerous scientists warn that the situation is getting worse. Lars Kaderali, a bio-informatician and member of the Coronavirus Experts Council, believes it is possible that the Delta variant could return in autumn. “That would be problematic because Omicron infection does not protect well against an infection with Delta—unlike vaccination. So there really is an immunity gap.”

The recombination of Delta and Omicron strains and the emergence of new variants are also a danger, he said. “It could be that we get another Omicron variant or even a completely new variant. I think the only thing that can be said for sure is that by autumn the coronavirus pandemic will not be over.”

In South Africa, Omicron mutations BA.4 and BA.5 are already causing a rapid increase in infections. According to current information, the two variants are considered significantly more contagious than their Omicron siblings.

Labour’s party of NATO and austerity tanks in UK local elections

Robert Stevens

Thursday’s local elections saw Boris Johnson’s Conservative government lose hundreds of council seats as expected. But the real disaster was the Labour Party’s total failure to muster significant popular support out of this sea of opposition to Johnson and the Tories, such is the hostility to Sir Keir Starmer’s equally right-wing party.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer visits Barnet after his party won the London borough in the local elections (Credit: KeirStarmer/Twitter)

Councils were contested across the UK, including in most major cities. By the end of counting Friday evening, the Tories had lost 397 council seats across England, Wales and Scotland and Labour had picked up just 252. The Liberal Democrat’s gained 189, won mainly at the expense of the Tory Party in the South of England. The Green Party gained 81, taking from both the Tories and Labour.

This translated into an additional eight councils won for Labour, 12 lost for the Tories and five more won for the Liberal Democrats.

In Wales—a Labour stronghold—the party gained 62 new councillors and two councils. It lost control of Neath Port Talbot council as the nationalist Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) gained seats there. Most of Labour’s gains in Wales were at the expense of the Tories. The Conservatives lost 67 councillors and lost control of the only council they controlled, Monmouthshire. While Labour became the largest party, their total in Monmouthshire of 22 seats was two short of a majority. Plaid Cymru lost three seats overall but took control of three more authorities in the process—Anglesey, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire. The Greens won eight seats in Wales, their best ever result.

In Scotland, while Labour became the second largest party at the expense of the Tories, the Scottish National Party (SNP) easily maintained its position as the largest party in local government. Across Scotland’s 32 councils, the SNP increased its total number of councillors by 22. Labour gained 20 seats and one council, but finished 13 percentage points behind the SNP in the vote share.

Elections were also held to the Northern Ireland Assembly, where results so far suggest Sinn Féin will be the largest party. This would be the first time an Irish nationalist party has held the most seats in the parliament, allowing them to select the First Minister, and would likely produce a political crisis. The rival Democratic Unionist Party has already signaled its intention to refuse to nominate a Deputy First Minister if Sinn Féin win. If one is not in place after six months, the administration collapses.

According to a projected national share of the British vote released by the BBC on Friday afternoon, Labour’s share was 35 percent, the Conservatives’ 30 percent, and Liberal Democrats’ 19 percent.

Whatever spin is put on it, the results are an indictment of Labour who made the minimum gains possible under the circumstances. Starmer’s declared campaign to rescue the party from former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral disaster in 2019—which he and his fellow Blairites were as much responsible for as Corbyn—has been a dismal failure.

Labour was up against a prime minister who has overseen the mass murder of almost 200,000 people in the pandemic at the head of an austerity imposing Tory party in power for 12 years; and now overseeing a price surge making life literally unaffordable for the working class. Prior to the election, the Labour supporting Mirror predicted that the Tories would lose up to 800 seats, sending the Tory Party into meltdown and leading to the possible resignation of the widely hated Johnson. Others like the Guardian suggested Tory losses of over 500 seats.

In the event, Johnson was able to brush off a “mixed set of results” and comment, “We had a tough night in some parts of the country but on the other hand in other parts of the country you are still seeing Conservatives going forward and making quite remarkable gains in places that haven’t voted Conservative for a long time, if ever ...”

According to a Sky News projection, based on local election results from 1,700 wards and an analysis of the change in vote share since 2018 across 87 local authorities, Labour would fail to win the next general election set for 2024. It projected a hung parliament with the Tories on 278 seats—seven more than Labour on 271.

In the so-called “Red Wall” of historically Labour strongholds in the north of England, Starmer’s party flopped entirely. In the 2019 general election, the Tories took many of these constituencies—whose working-class areas had been long abandoned by Labour—for the first time in decades, if not ever. There were no signs of this rot being reversed. In Hull, after being in power for a decade, Labour lost control of the council to the Liberal Democrats. Hull was one of the ports hit by the recent mass firing of 800 P&O ferry workers, which Labour and the trade unions did nothing to fight.

Where the Tories suffered heavy losses, Labour was far from harnessing or monopolising the opposition. Most workers simply voted with their feet and did not turn up to the polls. As for those who did cast a ballot, the Liberal Democrats and Greens between them gained more seats than Labour. The further lurch to the right under Starmer has been so extreme that these parties picked up many voters, predominantly from the middle class, repulsed by the reactionary stench of both the main parties.

Since being handed the reins by Corbyn in April 2020, with both professing that they would offer Johnson only “constructive” criticism during the pandemic, Starmer has moved ruthlessly to purge the party of any connection even with his predecessor’s watered down “left” policies.

The Labour leader has launched an extended audition for the role of British imperialism’s chief warmonger and the support of the City of London’s financial oligarchy. Starmer declared  “Labour is the party of NATO” and assured the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) last November, “As I said in my speech at Labour Party conference: Labour is back in business… Labour is also the party of business.”

The first fruits of his efforts were summed up by victories in Westminster council, held by the Conservatives since 1964, and Wandsworth council, in Tory hands since 1978—the year before Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to office. Wandsworth was the Tory flagship council, reputed to be Thatcher’s favourite, such was its commitment to her privatising, free market agenda.

Starmer pointedly chose to celebrate a stronger performance for Labour in London with a televised visit to newly won Barnet, where false accusations of Labour anti-Semitism have played a major role due to its high concentration of Jewish votes. He declared that his party had won there as a result of this rotten right-wing witch-hunt, which has seen Corbyn expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party and countless others from the party altogether.

Even then, Labour group leader Barry Rawlings had to acknowledge of the party’s victory: “I’ll be honest, it’s not us being wonderful. I think a lot of Conservatives haven’t voted this time, I think they feel alienated from No 10… they’ve been disappointed with Boris Johnson”.

Two other London councils—Croydon and Tower Hamlets—will not declare results until Saturday morning and Saturday evening respectively. Labour is threatened with the loss of Croydon after declaring bankruptcy due to years of financial skulduggery, including the sell-off of public assets.

Financial Times columnist Camilla Cavendish delivered a blunt assessment: “If Starmer can’t enthuse voters now, he might never beat Johnson”. She writes, “The local elections, which Conservatives had feared would represent a huge backlash against the prime minister, have turned out to be just as much a verdict on Labour. Boris Johnson will be quietly concluding he is safe—and Keir Starmer still has a very long way to go if he wants to win the next election.”

Major swings on Wall Street as monetary policy tightens

Nick Beams

The move by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to tighten monetary policies  and clamp down on workers’ wage demands in the face of rampant inflation is producing wild swings on Wall Street and raising major problems in financial markets in the US and around the world.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

On Wednesday, following the Fed decision to lift its base interest rate by 0.5 percentage points (50 basis points) and the remark by chair Jerome Powell that the central bank was not “actively considering” a hike of 75 basis points, Wall Street surged.

But the so-called rally lasted less than a day. On Thursday the market reversed all those gains and more, undertaking the biggest U-turn since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

The Dow fell by more than 1000 points, 3.1 percent, to record its biggest decline this year after posting its biggest rise since 2020 the day before. The S&P 500 dropped 3.6 percent. The biggest fall was in the tech-heavy NASDAQ, the most sensitive to interest rate increases.

It dropped by 5 percent to record its largest one-day percentage loss since June 2020 taking its total loss from its record high in November last year to 24 percent.

Thursday’s selloff, which continued yesterday with smaller but significant losses, was a resumption of the trend since the start of the year which has seen more than $8 trillion wiped off the market value of stocks.

There was also another sell-off in the bond market which sent the yield on the 10-year Treasury note to more than 3 percent, its highest level since November 2018, with the rise continuing yesterday. (When bonds are sold off and their price falls the interest rate or yield rises.)

Besides lifting the interest rate by 50 basis points, with Powell stating there was a “sense” on the policy-making body that “additional 50 basis rises should be on the table at the next couple of meetings, the Fed also decided to start reducing its $9 trillion holdings of financial assets. They comprise Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed will start cutting its holdings of these assets by $47.5 billion for each of three months, starting in June, and then by $90 billion a month in September.

While the media coverage focused on the rate increases, the view of some analysts and commentators is that the balance sheet reduction is more significant. It has not been undertaken before, save for a brief period in 2018 when it was rapidly reversed after a violent response on Wall Street at the end of that year.

The Fed’s assets, which stood at under $1 trillion in 2008, have increased nine-fold as a result of the quantitative easing begun after the global financial crisis and the further injection of around $4 trillion into the financial system following the crisis of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

No one in the financial world, in the Fed and certainly not Powell has any real idea of what the consequences could be.

Asked at his press conference on Wednesday about the effect that balance sheet reduction might have for monetary policy, Powell replied: “In terms of the effect… I would just stress how uncertain the effect is of shrinking the balance sheet. You know, we run these models and everyone does in this field and make estimates… And you know, these are very uncertain. I cannot really be any clearer.… We don’t really know.”

This is a telling admission, puncturing the myth that the Fed, with its vast array of information and computer-based analysis, is, if not entirely in control, has at least some idea of where it is going. But after unleashing one of the most far-reaching monetary policy changes in history—the pouring of trillions of dollars into Wall Street to prevent a collapse of the financial system—it has no idea of what any reversal might produce.

However, others have issued a warning. This week the Economist noted that the Fed is now the largest single holder of US government debt with $5.8 trillion of Treasury bonds on its books, a quarter of the $23 trillion total. It also holds $2.7 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities.

According to the article, the reversal of this “portfolio behemoth” through quantitative tightening “could spark a repeat of the temporary yet troubling breakdowns the world’s most important financial market has suffered in recent years—on a bigger scale.”

It was possible that “QT [quantitative tightening] will cause the Treasury to malfunction” and that its “smooth running matters well beyond America” because Treasury rates “are a crucial benchmark for pricing virtually all other financial assets globally.”

Recent history, it said, was not encouraging, recalling the crisis in the repo market, where Treasuries can be swapped for cash in short-term trades, in September 2019, and the COVID shock of March 2020 when the Treasury market ceased to function for several days. No buyers could be found for US debt, supposedly the safest financial asset in the world.

These crises were “temporary” but only because the Fed massively intervened becoming the backstop for the Treasury market and virtually all other areas of the financial system. The crisis was averted but, as various reports have made clear, the underlying issues that led to it have not been resolved.

The Economist noted the conditions for a new crisis are developing because there is a “thinning” of liquidity in the Treasury market. This refers to a situation in which trades can have an outsized effect on the market as a whole as opposed to a situation of ample liquidity in which their effect is small.

Pointing to this situation, the article said there was “the growing possibility of renewed dysfunction” that would make it “likelier that the market seizes up.”

Were that to take place the Fed would have to intervene with massive support, as it has in the past, but this time under conditions not of low inflation but in a situation where inflation is racing out of control.

The turn to higher interest rates is starting to impact on all areas of the financial system and the broader economy in the US and globally. Even before the latest Fed decision, interest rates were increasing across a range of US markets, from home mortgages to car loans.

The Financial Times has reported that the value of high-risk junk bonds in the US trading at 70 cents on the dollar—a level taken as a sign of distress—has risen to $27 billion compared to about $14 billion at the end of last year.

In Europe, even though the European Central Bank (ECB) has not increased its interest rate, borrowing costs are starting to rise, and investors are demanding higher interest rates when lending to more indebted euro zone countries.

This raises the prospect of a divergence between European countries of the north and the south which led to the crisis that threatened the continuation of the euro in 2012. That was only averted when the ECB president Mario Draghi said the central bank would do “whatever it takes.” But inflation, coupled with the turbulence resulting from the war in Ukraine, has vastly changed the situation from a decade ago.

In all the major economies the central aim of the higher-interest-rate regime is to batter down the wages struggles of the working class in the face of inflation.

Nowhere is this class-war agenda more clearly illustrated than in the UK. Announcing a further interest rate increase of 25 basis points on Thursday, the Bank of England said there would be a “very sharp slowdown” in the UK economy leading to a recession as inflation rose to 10 percent.

Unemployment would rise from 3.8 percent to 5.5 percent in the next three years and this would help moderate wage claims.

Three members of the Monetary Policy Committee who wanted a 50-basis point rise said they did so to prevent “recent trends in pay growth” from becoming more widely and deeply embedded. Under conditions where wages overall have not kept pace with price hikes, the interest rate increases are a pre-emptive strike to crush an emerging movement of the working class.

Turkish doctors mount nationwide strike as prices explode

Ulaş Ateşçi

Hekimsen, a Turkish doctors union with nearly 20,000 members, went on nationwide strike on Thursday and Friday, demanding better wages and benefits. This strike, held in all departments “except for Emergency Services and Polyclinics, Delivery Room, COVID, Oncology, Hematology Polyclinics and all inpatient services,” will be followed by strikes on May 17-18 and May 26-27.

Largely ignored in mainstream media, even in the pseudo-left press, this important strike is part of a larger international movement emerging in the working class and especially among health care workers.

Striking doctors at Topraklık Oral and Dental Health Clinics,in Ankara, Turkey on May 5-6. [Credit: @hekimsen on Twitter]

The wave of strikes against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s failure to meet the demands of doctors and health care workers in Turkey continues to grow. National strikes had previously been held in December, January, February and March. The doctors strike also comes after a wave of wildcat strikes by various sections of workers in January and February 2022. There were at least 106 wildcat strikes in these two months alone.

The cost of living raised by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia is increasingly driving workers into struggle in Turkey and internationally. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, official annual inflation in Turkey reached 70 percent as of April, while this rate was 105 percent in transportation and 89 percent in food and non-alcoholic beverages. However, the real inflation rate has risen to 156 percent, according to a report by the Inflation Research Group, made up of independent economists and academics.

According to the pro-government Türk-İş union confederation, the poverty line for a family of four in Turkey reached 17,340 Turkish lira (currently $1,165) in April. The “hunger limit” (monthly food expenditures required for a family of four to have a healthy, balanced and adequate diet) rose to 5,323 Turkish lira ($360), 1,070 lira more than the minimum wage (4,250 TL, or $285).

Nonetheless, “specialist physicians receive a salary of 12,000-13,000 TL and other physicians 9,500-10,000 TL with a fixed additional payment,” according to Hekimsen. Doctors are protesting the government’s failure to keep its promise to pay them bonuses during the pandemic.

The doctors are demanding that COVID-19 be counted as an “occupational disease,” as health care workers have fallen ill with COVID-19 10 times more often than the broader population, and doctors have lost their lives four times more than the average. To date, over 500 health care workers in Turkey have died of COVID-19.

However, the Erdoğan government has lifted the latest measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic. At the end of April, the obligation to wear masks in all indoor areas, except public transportation vehicles and health institutions, was removed.

The government, which has reduced the number of daily tests to 100,000, cites the official daily number of cases falling below 2,000 as proof that the “pandemic is over.” However, the rise of the pandemic in the US and European countries, which are lifting restrictions like the Turkish government, shows that a similar rise is virtually inevitable in Turkey.

Doctors are also demanding that “malpractice” decisions be stopped against them, stating: “Remove compensation penalties from physicians’ concerns. In the committee to be formed for malpractice decisions, there should be a sufficient number of physicians who have medical knowledge to make decisions in the relevant field and who are competent in health law.”

Also, doctors are against working over 36 hours non-stop. Hekimsen pointed out that the number of physicians in Turkey is one-third the average in OECD countries. Also, the physicians are also opposed to reducing the time to examine a patient to five minutes.

Besides better benefits, pension and working conditions, the doctors are demanding legal measures to deter assaults against them in the health care facilities. Each day there are 40 acts of violence against health care workers in Turkey.

The physicians who went on strike are calling for public support, stating: “Support us for your health. Say, ‘The perpetrators [of violence] are interfering with my health care, punish them.’ Say, ‘I do not want to get an operation from a doctor who has worked for hours and has not slept until the morning.’ Say, ‘Give the most distinguished people of the country, who have decades of labor, experience and knowledge, the wages they deserve.’ Say, ‘Increase our examination time.’”

The doctors struggle is part of the growing unrest among all workers due to increasingly unbearable living conditions amid rising inflation. According to the daily Karar, an Ipsos poll found that 82 percent of Turkish people say the Turkish economy is “bad.”

A total of 19,000 people in 27 countries were interviewed from March 25 to April 3, and 78 percent of the participants from Turkey said “the country is going in the wrong direction.” Moreover, 58 percent of the participants in Turkey said the biggest problem was inflation.

Growing discontent among broad sections of the population and the growing strike movement increasingly worry business leaders, who have amassed vast wealth in the past decades, especially during the pandemic. This is fueling tensions within the ruling elite itself.

Orhan Turan, president of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), representing the dominant sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, criticized the government for “not struggling with inflation” at the end of April. “There is inflation in the world, but it is around 9-10 percent. Consumer inflation in Turkey has exceeded 60 percent,” he said.

Turan also gave a green light to raising the minimum wage again this year, to prevent the growth of a working class movement against ever-increasing inflation. Reflecting the bourgeoisie’s fear of a social explosion in the working class, he said: “We need to think about this [wage increase] for labor peace, and if possible, to pass this process without crushing them [workers] with inflation.”

President Erdogan reacted sharply to this. He declared: “TÜSİAD does not care about ‘How can we contribute to the future of the country?’ On the contrary, it cares about ‘How can we remove the current government? And how can we bring a government that we can use comfortably?’” Erdoğan also effectively admitted to having been in the service of the bourgeoisie for nearly 20 years, saying: “In the last 20 years in Turkey, they [TÜSİAD] earned money with us, they earned growth with us.”

The Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) testified to what Erdoğan said about the enrichment of the corporate and financial elite. It announced that the banking sector’s net profit increased by 295.1 percent over the previous year, reaching 63.25 billion TL as of the end of March. In 2021, the profit for the same period was 16.01 billion TL.

These enormous profits are a product of the “profit before lives” policy jointly implemented by the government, bourgeois opposition parties and the unions during the pandemic. As hundreds of thousands died in Turkey of a disease that could have been prevented by scientific public health measures, tens of millions were infected and now face long-term effects from the disease. This criminal policy has led to close to 20 million deaths worldwide.

Turkey plans deportation of 1 million Syrian refugees

Hasan Yıldırım

As a far-right anti-refugee campaign in Turkey has intensified in recent weeks, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has decided to deport 1 million Syrian refugees back to Syria, where NATO’s proxy war for regime change continues to rage.

Speaking via remote connection to a conference in Idlib, the northwest province of Syria occupied by Turkish forces and their Islamist proxies, Erdoğan said: “We are preparing a new project to enable the voluntary return of 1 million Syrian brothers and sisters we have hosted in our country. We will implement this project with the support of domestic and international non-governmental organizations.”

President Recep Erdoğan's government keeps refugees from reaching Europe. Credit: WikiMedia

He added, “About 500,000 Syrians have returned to the safe zones created since 2016, when Turkey launched its cross-border operations amid a deepening humanitarian tragedy in Syria.”

The “humanitarian tragedy” Erdoğan speaks of, in fact, is a product of the US-NATO imperialist war, which the Turkish government has supported since 2011, to topple the Russian- and Iranian-backed government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey invaded Syria not to end the humanitarian disaster it had helped create there but to prevent the emergence of a US-backed Kurdish nationalist enclave.

Contrary to Erdoğan’s claims, deportation would not be “voluntarily” chosen but imposed on refugees, due to the far-right anti-refugee campaign and dirty deals with the European Union. The vast majority of refugees understandably do not want to return to Syria, where the war still continues. Refugees who want to cross into Europe are blocked at the borders with Greece and Bulgaria and sent back to Turkey.

They do not even have a legal status of “refugees” in Turkey. They live in misery, deprived of basic rights, subjected to uncontrolled exploitation and targeted by the far right. The World Socialist Web Site rejects this campaign and emphasizes that it is essential for the international working class to defend the democratic rights of refugees in struggle against the bourgeoisie. In the case of Turkey, this means full citizenship rights for refugees and making education available for Arab as well as Kurdish people in their mother tongues.

Turkey hosts the highest number of refugees in the world, as a result of over 30 years of US-led imperialist wars across the region since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to a report by the Association for Refugees in Turkey, there are 3.75 million Syrians living in Turkey as of March 24. According to Erdoğan’s statement last December, there are over 5 million refugees in Turkey in total.

The far-right campaign against refugees in Turkey has escalated in recent weeks, with politicians and pundits promoting anti-refugee hashtags on Twitter. Chauvinist comments are increasingly common in the bourgeois and the pseudo-left press.

The entire political and media establishment scapegoats refugees and immigrants in Turkey, and internationally, because the bourgeoisie and the affluent middle class have no progressive response to the growing economic and social crisis. The ruling class strengthens fascistic movements by taking up the old, reactionary weapon of chauvinism to divide the working class and deflect growing social opposition.

The vast majority of Turkey’s population lives with spiraling high inflation, unemployment and deepening poverty, as the pandemic continues and the danger of world war grows. And the ruling class enriches itself at the expense of the health, lives and wages of the workers.

Throughout the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine in which NATO sanctions against Russia disrupted global supply chains, the already unbearable food prices and poverty in Turkey rose even faster. Protests and strikes that broke out in January and February were only the initial expressions of growing social unrest.

Now, establishment parties spread the lie that the cause of all the problems stemming from the capitalist system and bourgeois rule is the refugees. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), backed by the pseudo-left, criticized Erdoğan’s plan to deport 1 million refugees to Syria from the right. Adopting far-right rhetoric, he said: “Come off it! There are still flows of fugitives coming from the border. We will send the rest in two years, and we are all fed up with your fake projects.”

Right-wing parties like the fascistic Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the main ally of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), as well as the CHP’s partners—the Good Party, DEVA, Future Party and Felicity Party—also call to expel refugees from Turkey.

This bipartisan attack on defenseless refugees, who form an integral part of the working class, is clear proof that the CHP and its pseudo-left allies are no less reactionary and hostile to the working class than the Erdoğan government.

However, the most prominent in the anti-refugee campaign recently has been the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi). Founded by Ümit Özdağ, who left the far-right Good Party, this middle class party brands refugees as Turkey’s main problem and hysterically campaigns for their deportation. It claims that there would be a civil war in Turkey if refugees stay in the country, and it has started to gather far-right circles around it with its furious campaign.

On April 19, Özdağ announced a “Fortress Anatolia” project to send refugees back to their countries. This is a reference to the European Union’s Fortress Europe policy, which aims to prevent refugees from the Middle East and Africa from entering Europe. This policy has already caused thousands of refugees to drown in the Mediterranean Sea and Turkey and Greece to become refugee prisons.

Moreover, a short film named Silent Invasion, broadcast on journalist Hande Karacasu’s YouTube channel on May 3 and which Özdağ personally financed, further escalated the anti-refugee campaign. Karacasu’s fascistic film, full of distortions and lies, quickly moved to the top of the press and social media. Over 3 million saw it in three days on YouTube.

According to the script of the film which seeks to exploit the racial fears of the affluent middle class, Arabs become the majority in Turkey in the year 2043. The Turkish minority is exposed to oppression, discrimination and violence. Most Turkish youth are unemployed, and a small number of them consider themselves lucky as they have jobs. The state administration has passed into Arab hands, with Arabic made an official language. Turkish language and culture are being destroyed.

Shortly after the film was released, the Turkish National Police issued a press release, fearing that the situation would explode out of control. The press release announced that Hande Karacasu and the user of the “Militer Doktrin” Twitter account were detained and legal proceedings initiated against them for manipulation. Karacasu was released the next day.

Such far-right provocations have previously led to killings of refugees and pogrom attempts by far-right elements. Three Syrian refugees were burned to death in Izmir last November, and a far-right mob raided a Syrian neighborhood in Ankara in August.

The events in Doğankent, a district in the southern city of Adana, on May 1 are another serious warning. After a quarrel between Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens broke out, attacks were reportedly carried out on the homes of Syrians, and four people were injured.

White House will do nothing as COVID-19 cases surge

Benjamin Mateus

The United States is in the midst of its seventh wave of COVID-19 infections, with the combination of the BA.2 and the BA.2.12.1 subvariants dominant, while the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants that are currently causing a surge of infections in South Africa are waiting in the wings.

However, not a finger is being lifted to address the danger to the population.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, stands for a portrait, Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, in Newton, Mass. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Despite the acknowledgment by the mainstream media that more than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19, there is absolutely no urgency on the part of the White House or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to act or warn the public of the dangers posed by this new surge.

Yesterday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, was interviewed on NBC TV’s “Today” program by host Hoda Kotb. The interview conveyed the official laissez-faire attitude to the dangerous pathogen that is making its latest assault on the population.

Kotb noted that new cases of COVID-19 are up 70 percent over the last three weeks (currently at 66,000 per day, on average), and deaths are up 30 percent. Citing suggestions that New York might reimpose a mask mandate, she asked Jha if there was a correlation between the new surge and the lifting of mask mandates on airplanes and public transportation more broadly after the Florida judge’s ruling three weeks ago.

Also she alluded to last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, attended by President Biden and some 2,500 reporters, media personalities, celebrities, politicians and assorted billionaires, virtually none wearing masks—a list that included Jha himself. The superspreader event has already resulted in numerous reported COVID-19 infections.

Kotb asked, “If you had a do-over, would you have told the president not to attend?”

Jha responded with the standard comeback that everyone had tested negative at the dinner, and the president had made his personal choice. He went further, presenting the gala as an example of how such events should be conducted.

Although acknowledging that there were “worrisome” trends, he then deflected concerns by blaming the BA.2 variant’s highly infective qualities, saying, “That’s the prime driver!”

His response was a non-sequitur. The question was not about the virus but the policies that allow for a more significant social mixing of the population. That the virus is so contagious makes all the more critical a vigorous response, involving the immediate implementation of broad-based public health measures to stem infections.

Indeed, it has been confirmed by real-world data from China that comprehensive measures can turn a wave of infections, including from Omicron variants. Cases are down more than 80 percent since their highs three weeks ago, to less than 5,000 for a country with 1.4 billion people.

By comparison, on May 4, 2022, the New York Times tracker reported that close to 2,000 people died and more than 100,000 were infected that day in the US. The epidemiological curve of average deaths has sharply increased in conjunction with hospitalizations, and COVID-19 cases are rising in almost every state.

A recent study out of Harvard, Jha’s alma mater, shows that the Omicron variant is intrinsically as severe as previous variants, affirming the dangers that principled health experts have raised since the beginning of the Omicron phase of the pandemic. Refuting the lie promoted by the government and the media that Omicron is “mild,” the authors noted that “the risks of hospitalization and mortality were nearly identical” between Omicron and previously dominant variants.

From January 10 to February 22, 2022, the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron was killing more than 2,000 people daily. BA.1 killed 170,000 Americans during the three months it spread uncontrolled in every community across the country. Almost 60 percent of the population has now been infected with the virus.

Only the Alpha wave in January 2021, when barely anyone had received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, killed more and for a longer time. (From December 2, 2020 to February 19, 2021, there were more than 2,000 deaths per day on average.)

Since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, some 575,000 lives have been lost to the contagion. In January and February of this year, 52,000 fully vaccinated individuals died of their infection.

When Kotb asked Jha, “Can we expect mask mandates to be reinstated?” Jha diverted attention to the CDC’s COVID-19 map, noting that more than 80 percent of the country remains in the green. He failed to explain that the CDC had deliberately changed its classification for risk to ensure that the mask mandates would be repealed, in line with the demands of Wall Street executives to end all pandemic measures and transition immediately to “normalcy.”

Jha added that decisions on mask mandates and other mitigation measures would be taken locally. This rejection of any comprehensive science-based policy to contain and eliminate the virus—which requires not only a coordinated national, but international response—is in line with the mantra that individuals have to decide how to navigate these life-and-death issues on their own.

The import of these comments is that the population will have to learn to live permanently in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and that no serious public health measures will be taken to impede the virus. This essentially repudiates the entire understanding of community disease and the critical principles of public health that have been established over centuries of experience.

Vaccines are a crucial part of a comprehensive program of public health measures. But the Biden administration has adopted a vaccine-only policy in keeping with the demands and interests of the corporate elite. He has enforced the reopening of schools and businesses and rejected any lockdowns, so as to ensure an uninterrupted flow of workers to pump out surplus value and profit.

That the loss of life has been so pronounced in 2021 and into 2022, on the basis of the vaccine-only strategy, remains unexplained by Jha and the Biden administration.

New strains with immune-evading characteristics are evolving as a result of a policy that uses the existence of vaccines to force the population back into unsafe factories and workplaces. Studies highlighting the rapid loss of immunity and rise in reinfection rates are ignored by the health officials whose duty is to translate these findings into practical measures to protect the population. Funding by Congress to pay for antivirals, respirators, testing centers and proper tracking is denied.

One must ask why Jha has chosen to study public health, his expertise, when he dismisses its importance in protecting society. This, however, is the universal line of virtually every government around the world, which claims that the pandemic is “over” and has entered a new “endemic” phase—a falsification of both the facts and the scientific meaning of “endemic.”

Who benefits? The capitalist ruling elites, who reject the necessary public health measures to protect human life because they cut across the drive for profit.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion: The spearhead of a massive assault on democratic rights

Eric London

The Supreme Court’s draft ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization not only abolishes the basic democratic right to abortion, but it is an attempt to radically transform the country’s legal superstructure by stripping the population of the democratic protections established in the American Revolution and Civil War.

The opinion would overturn the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade in the most sweepingly reactionary way imaginable. It establishes a new test in which (1) constitutional rights previously upheld by clear legal precedent can be stripped away without warning, and (2) rights not listed verbatim in the Constitution are deemed unenforceable if they were not widely recognized in 1791, a time when the US was home to three million people who used horses for transportation and candles for lighting.

An anti-scaling fence surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday, May 5, 2022 in Washington. [AP Photo/(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)]

In the Dobbs decision, the Republican majority curls a beckoning finger toward its far-right partners, imploring legal challenges to a host of other basic rights. It suggests that the new legal test could be applied to all “fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution” and calls all “unenumerated rights” into question by referring to them as “putative rights,” i.e., rights which have been assumed to exist but which may not exist in reality.

The decision criticizes the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. It rejects the constitutional right to privacy, claiming that this right “is also not mentioned” in the text of the constitution, paving the way for a massive intrusion of the state into the private lives of individuals. Homosexuality was not accepted in society in 1791, after all, and neither was interracial marriage.

The right-wing is scanning the darkest periods of American history to inspire its political strategy today. Alongside the specter of “morality squad” police raids on gay bars and private homes, Republican leaders are planning to re-introduce segregation, this time with immigrants as the victims.

The day after the decision was leaked, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he will ban the children of undocumented immigrants from attending public schools, the modern revival of Governor Wallace’s pledge to “stand at the schoolhouse doors.” The law would involve fines or criminal prosecution if immigrant children are caught on school grounds (and perhaps for using drinking fountains intended for “Citizens Only”). Abbott said states should enact their own restrictions on immigration and wage legal battles to overturn a 2012 Supreme Court decision barring Arizona from declaring that undocumented immigrants had no constitutional rights and could be jailed simply for being undocumented.

Police organizations are also preparing to argue that there is no constitutional right to Miranda warnings or other protections for arrestees and criminal defendants, opening the door to even more brutal waves of police violence. The fascist Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) declared on a podcast Thursday that the decision “is a big tool in our arsenal” and is “shaking things up in a way that could help us in the long game.” After all, since police forces did not exist at the time the Constitution was ratified, necessary democratic protections against police abuse could not have been rooted in the traditions of the time.

The Supreme Court’s ruling did not arise from nowhere, it is another manifestation of the disintegration of bourgeois democracy in the United States and the uncontrollable drive toward ever more extreme forms of political reaction. To understand what this decision arises out of is to understand how to fight it.

The ruling class has cultivated and promoted obscurantist and fascistic layers for decades as a bulwark against the working class. Under conditions of permanent war and social counterrevolution—led by both parties—these figures have become the dominant force in bourgeois politics and within the state’s repressive apparatus.

The last half century has been defined by financial parasitism, militarism, nonstop attacks on democratic rights, the end of restrictions on campaign finance, and unrelenting efforts to prevent masses of people from having any say on government policy. America’s 50 richest families now possess $1.2 trillion in assets. The oligarchic principle is manifest in the entire two-party, bicameral set up, characterized by undemocratic and unrepresentative structures from top to bottom.

As Oxford University professor Joe Foweraker wrote in his recent work Oligarchy in the Americas, “High returns to capital and super-rents deriving from market power and monopolies have created a new financial oligarchy and a step-change in the private command of public policy, leaving the oligarchy largely unaccountable to democratic government.” (Emphasis added). The oligarchy, Foweraker writes, “is so far detached from the society from which it extracts its wealth that it can act entirely independently of it.”

The character of the entire political establishment and corporate media flows from this fact. But despite this, the American ruling class declares itself the champion of democracy in the fight against Russia. Every day provides new confirmation that this is a lie.

This includes recent revelations that Donald Trump proposed launching missile strikes against Mexico and ordered the military to fire live rounds against those protesting the police killing of George Floyd, that Fascist Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes was in contact with the Trump team in preparing to administer “lethal violence” on January 6, and that Joe Biden privately confided to a Democratic Congressman in the days before the 2020 election that if he didn’t win, “I’m not sure we are going to have a country.”

Despite this, the leading conspirators in the plot of January 6 remain are at liberty to plan their next steps, including Trump and every one of his congressional conspirators. The Democratic Party continues to insist on “bipartisanship” even with those “Republican colleagues” 

The Democrats will do nothing to reverse the attack on the right to abortion. When it comes to pouring missiles into Ukraine, there is no risk the Democratic Party is not willing to take, not even risks that bring the world to the edge of nuclear war. But when it comes to defending basic democratic rights, there is always a Joe Manchin or a Senate Parliamentarian to blame for their own fecklessness.

In reality, the Democrats’ political trajectory is entirely of a piece with the Republicans’ transformation into a party of open authoritarianism. The Democrats abandoned social reform decades ago and transformed themselves into a vehicle for the race and gender-obsessed upper middle class, which the Democrats view as a necessary constituency for waging imperialist war. The politics of identity does not represent an opposition to the right-wing degeneration of the Republicans; it is merely another expression of the rot at the heart of the entire two-party system.

The extremely anti-democratic character of the Dobbs decision is a sign that basic democratic rights can only be secured through social revolution. As Lenin wrote in his 1916 work Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, “The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive.”

Contractors linked to fascist paramilitary groups paid to train police in at least 12 US states

Jacob Crosse

A new report by Reuters details ties between Trump-aligned fascist militia groups and police departments across the country. The report identifies five “police trainers” who have been paid, with tax-payer money, by police departments in at least 12 states, including, Idaho, Washington, Texas and Missouri.

The report asserts that the trainers have ties to the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys militia groups. Members of these groups are currently facing the most serious charges stemming from Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021, including seditious conspiracy, to which three Oath Keepers have already pled guilty.

One of the trainers identified by Reuters is Richard Whitehead, the current owner of Richard Whitehead & Assoc. LLC. The company, per Reuters, is one of “35 training firms that advertised at least 10 police or public-safety training sessions in 2021” on policetraining.net, a website used by police departments around the US to find for-profit trainers.

In addition to being a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers from 2016 to 2017, Whitehead ran for sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho in 2020. Prior to, and during the campaign, he openly aligned himself with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right movement founded by former sheriff and Oath Keeper co-founder Richard Mack.

Whitehead cut a promotional video with the Three Percenters group as part of his campaign, Reuters notes.

Public records analyzed by the news agency show that Whitehead has taught “at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 85 sessions in 12 states over the past four years.”

Trump supporters storm the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Whitehead boasts that prior to training police full-time, he spent 33 years in law enforcement, including leading “homicide, SWAT, communications and intelligence” sections. He claims to have “trained investigators of all types in statement analysis,” including detectives, private eyes and members of the Texas Rangers.

Reuters wrote that its review of Whitehead’s social media postings found that he previously called for the “execution of government officials he sees as disloyal” to Trump. In language echoed by Michigan Boogaloo Boys militia members who plotted to kidnap and possibly assassinate Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the lead-up to the November 2020 elections, Whitehead called on police to ignore COVID-19 public health orders issued by “tyrannical governors,” warning, “We are on the brink of civil war.”

Whitehead is currently scheduled to host training courses for police in May, June, July, August, September and October 2022, per policetraining.net. The courses are scheduled to take place in Belton, Harker, Heights and McKinney, Texas; Missoula, Montana; Neosho, Missouri; Fruitland, Idaho and Seattle, Washington.

Another far-right police trainer identified by Reuters is Ryan Morris, founder of Tripwire Operations Group. Morris claims his company held some 50 training classes in 2021, “about half” of which were attended by law enforcement types.

In an interview with Reuters, he admitted that he and other Tripwire trainers were in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. Prior to January 6, Tripwire’s social media accounts promoted Trump’s lies about the election having been stolen. In one post, written a month before the attack on the US Capitol, Morris called Biden’s victory a “coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our constitutional republic and the merge [sic] of capitalism into the slide toward socialism.”

In his interview, Morris admitted that he and “several other” Tripwire trainers were employed at the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021.

Morris refused to tell Reuters who hired him, or in what capacity Tripwire trainers were employed at the rally, but he did say they were sometimes hired to “help law enforcement agencies” or “protect high-level executives.”

Another fascist police trainer identified in the report is an individual named Tim Kennedy, who told Reuters he held “about 200 training sessions across the United States in 2021” for police officers. The previous year he shared a post in which he aligned himself with the Boogaloo Boys.

In that post he wrote about his desire to “boogaloo,” a euphemism for violent race war. Two months later, Kennedy posted a photo of himself wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the unofficial uniform of the Boogaloo movement, while aiming an assault rifle. The picture was captioned: “If you choose to be an asshole... I picked out a special shirt for the occasion.”

According to Reuters, in addition to promoting the Boogaloo Boys on social media, Kennedy interacted frequently with Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs. Biggs is currently incarcerated for his actions on January 6.

A US Army veteran and correspondent for the fascistic “Infowars” program hosted by Alex Jones, Biggs is facing multiple charges, including obstruction of Congress, obstruction of law enforcement, destruction of government property, and assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement.

Reuters notes that “Kennedy’s Twitter account shows that he has been an associate of Joe Biggs… their online interactions were as recent as May 2018, several months before Biggs’ Twitter account was suspended.” In the Twitter posts, Kennedy discussed going on motorcycle rides with Biggs and offering him the position of interior secretary in his imagined administration.

The pair also discussed an alleged Antifa rally, with Biggs writing, “Going downtown to cause havoc,” to which Kennedy replied enthusiastically, “Same. Sounds like a date!”

Biggs, whose trial is set for August 8, was photographed at the Trump International Hotel with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in November 2019.

That police departments and federal agencies around the country employ the services of fascistic paramilitary types with ties to militia groups to “train” their forces will not come as a surprise to regular readers of the World Socialist Web Site.

Last year, the WSWS reported that during the January 6 attack on Congress, the US Capitol Police’s Containment Emergency Response Team, or CERT, which was tasked with evacuating members of Congress, failed to respond to calls for help.

In testimony before Congress, now-retired Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton revealed that the Capitol Police had paid a private contractor, Northern Red LLC, over $90,000 in 2018 and 2019 to train CERT. According to a report authored by Bolton, the CERT team refused to fire its “less-lethal” rounds to protect Congress.

The founder and CEO of Northern Red, John-David Potysnky, is a former US Army Special Forces soldier who continues to this day to use neo-Nazi iconography in his company’s logo and uniform patches, and on his website. Bolton warned in his testimony that it was urgent for the Capitol Police to immediately sever all ties with the neo-fascist outfit. It appears, however, that other US government agencies did not feel the same way.

On the Northern Red website, the company continues to advertise training services for police and military members “only.” The website notes that in March, Northern Red held a “Close Quarters Combat” course for military and police personnel at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, commonly known as Fort Dix, located south of Trenton, New Jersey.