Japan plans to downgrade COVID-19 classification

Misa Boisseau

Amid the most recent COVID-19 surge and Japan’s greatest daily number of deaths to date, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced at the end of January that the virus would be reclassified on May 8, from a Category II disease (like tuberculosis) to a Category V disease (like the seasonal flu).

Shoppers wearing face masks in Tokyo, just before New Year holidays on Friday, Dec. 30, 2022. [AP Photo/Hiro Komae]

Along with normalizing the explosive spread of a dangerous infectious disease, the reclassification of COVID-19 gives the government a legal basis for reducing services and cutting corners. “We’ll consider shifting various policies and measures in stages to bring Japan back to normalcy,” Kishida told reporters, expressing a determination to fully reopen the economy and boost production.

The policy will scrap mitigation measures for close contacts when cases surge. The same government that recently announced plans to double their military budget to 43 trillion yen ($US316 billion) will also use the reclassification to end financial assistance for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

The change also means that any hospital will now be able to accept COVID-19 patients, not just those with a special government designation. This particular mechanism is especially underhanded, as non-designated facilities do not share COVID data with the government, thereby artificially suppressing case numbers.

Ken Kobayashi, the former head of Mitsubishi Corporation and the current chairman of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI), praised Kishida and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) after their announcement. Kobayashi claimed “the best economic policy” was to increase commercial activity by accepting coronavirus infection as just a part of daily life.

On February 10, the LDP leadership announced that the government will ease mask-wearing measures on March 13. The policy represents an official shift to what has long been an unofficial policy—to normalize mass infection. Japan has never mandated masks, but the existing advisories for masking in public schools and transportation will be reduced.

Despite the government’s stance, mask-wearing is heavily adhered to in Japan. On the trains during rush hour, in the grocery store, or even walking outdoors in the summer heat, residents are seldom seen without a face mask. Even after restaurants and businesses were fully reopened in 2022, Japanese residents continued to wear masks in public spaces.

However, the fact that even the most basic preventative measures like mask-wearing are now left to personal choices is indicative of that the government prioritizes profits over human lives.

In January, Japan suffered its highest number of daily COVID-related deaths since the start of the pandemic. Deaths peaked at 503 deaths on January 14, and maintained a 7-day moving average of 300 COVID-related deaths per day last month. In just over 30 days, 10,558 more people have died due to COVID-19. These grim figures were even higher than Japan’s massive surge during the summer, when 7,504 people died of COVID-related complications last August.

Japan has seen an unparalleled explosion of COVID cases due to the government’s decision to end even the most basic mitigation measures such as testing requirements and travel advisories. Two years into the pandemic, Japan had reached 2.7 million cases in February 2022. Over the course of a single year, by February 2023, Japan suffered almost 33 million confirmed cases—an increased infection rate of more than 1,000 percent.

The real figures are much higher than those reported by the Japanese Ministry of Health, as their COVID-19 data only reflect cases reported at designated medical facilities, and do not count the cases of individuals recovering at home. Those most at risk including individuals with chronic illnesses and the elderly are often not even counted in the official totals as their “preexisting conditions,” prevent their deaths from being marked as COVID-related. Deaths are also not counted if they occurred in non-designated hospitals.

According to Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID), the medical care system was severely overloaded this winter. Patients in need experienced severe difficulty in sourcing emergency transportation for both COVID-related illnesses and other medical emergencies. Still recovering from previous surges, the health care system and medical workers in Japan are severely understaffed and undersupplied as hospitals struggle once again with high bed occupancy rates in prefectures such as Kanagawa (78 percent), Shiga (80 percent), Fukuoka (77 percent), and Kagoshima (78 percent).

The spread of COVID-19 is highest in the medical services industry, and among the elderly. During the mid-January peak, 828 outbreaks were reported by the government over the course of one week; 615 of these occurred at elderly welfare facilities, according to data from the Ministry of Health. In Japan, 50,997 of the total death toll of 70,923 dead over three years were 70 years-of-age or older. Under present conditions, those in the most vulnerable state of health, and those tasked with caring for them, are being effectively sacrificed to ensure profit margins.

Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, former regional advisor for the World Health Organization, observed, “In smaller prefectures and rural areas, the proportion of the elderly population is even higher than the national average. This changing geographic pattern may also contribute to the increasing trend of deaths.”

Dr Oshitani warned that the public must prepare for an even greater surge in deaths in the months ahead, especially considering the dwindling supply of affordable antiviral treatments at hospitals. This makes clear that the pandemic, contrary to official propaganda, is far from over.

As with the cessation of travel restrictions in fall 2022, increasing production and profit accumulation is the main logic in officially downgrading COVID-19’s classification. The government has accepted demands from industry leaders to end COVID-19 measures. It is a class decision to remove all protections and condemn workers and their families to severe illness in order to maximize the profits of the corporate elite.

European Union decides on massive intensification of assault on refugees

Ela Maartens

On February 9, the 27 heads of state and government of the European Union (EU) met in Brussels to decide on a massive tightening up of the common asylum and immigration policies. Another key topic was the escalation of the Ukraine war against Russia.

In contrast, the devastating earthquake disaster that had devastated the Turkey-Syria border region just two days earlier was not a topic of discussion. The EU, ostensibly founded on freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, human rights and human dignity, has no response to the devastation occurring on its periphery, which has affected some 23 million people. Hundreds of thousands have lost their loved ones, their homes and everything in the Turkish-Syrian border region. But European governments stubbornly stick to their murderous deportation routine.

Refugees at the Greek-North Macedonian border (2016) [Photo by Tim Lüddemann / flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

The following points were decided at the EU refugee summit:

• A further enhancement of the EU border agency Frontex to seal off “Fortress Europe” even more
• Mass deportations of refugees without a permanent right to remain
• Close cooperation with authoritarian regimes in the countries of origin

At the press conference after the special summit, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clarified the plans for the EU’s asylum and immigration policy. She explained that the EU’s external borders must be strengthened, and irregular migration prevented through “border management.” An “integrated package of mobile and stationary infrastructures” is to be provided for this purpose. Its content, which is to range “from vehicles to cameras, from watchtowers to electronic surveillance,” would impress any fascist ruler.

The summit’s conclusions on immigration say the EU will strengthen its measures “to prevent irregular departures and loss of life, reduce pressure on EU borders and reception capacities, combat smugglers and ensure more returns.” With countries of origin and transit, the EU wants to strengthen “mutually beneficial partnerships.”

Behind the EU’s Orwellian terminology are dirty deals with authoritarian regimes and smuggling gangs to prevent people from leaving their home countries, rather than dying first in European waters. To prevent people from entering the Schengen area, Frontex checks are to be tightened and illegal pushbacks expanded. The EU also wants to expand mass deportations from its countries and make them even more brutal.

“Adequate resources” are to cover “all migration routes” and thus block any escape route from hunger, war and suffering. To this end, financial resources had already been pooled in 2021 through the EU’s Neighbourhood, Development Cooperation and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI–Global Europe). A total of €79.5 billion is available through the NDICI until 2027.

To ensure the “improvement” of mass deportations from the EU to third countries, the European Council emphasizes the use of “diplomacy, development, trade and visas.” Behind this are measures to put political pressure and economic blackmail on the governing powers in the countries of origin to make them compliant to the dictates of the EU. Those who suffer are the workers and poor of their respective countries.

The concept of so-called safe countries of origin is also to be used more intensively so as to be able to “legally” reject and deport even more asylum applications.

EU leaders want to control their external land and sea borders even more comprehensively. To this end, they are planning “full support for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex).” The latter is to receive massive financial support from member states to ensure the “development of border management capacity and infrastructure, means for surveillance, including air surveillance, and equipment.” In other words, Frontex is to be armed to the teeth to seal off Fortress Europe.

In addition, there are apparently plans to give Frontex mandates that extend beyond the EU and its external borders. The summit announced negotiations on “new and revised status agreements between the European Union and third countries on the deployment of Frontex.”

The conclusions also speak of the “specificities of maritime borders” in terms of “the protection of human lives,” indirectly confirming that countless people have already drowned miserably off its borders as they flee to a supposedly better future. According to the International Organization for Migration (IMO), more than 25,000 refugees have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014—the number of unreported cases is likely far higher.

A look back at the 2022 refugee numbers in the EU

One pretext for the special summit was the increased number of asylum seekers in 2022 in the EU, reportedly up by a dramatic 46 percent compared to the previous year. In total, according to figures presented by von der Leyen at the summit, 924,000 people had applied for asylum. Compared to the population of the European Union (447 million), that’s just 0.2 percent. This does not include the more than 4 million Ukrainian war refugees who have come since the Ukraine war.

The EU is using the figures for a targeted propaganda campaign. According to Mediendienst Integration, an information platform of the Council for Migration e.V., the number of refugees in Europe in 2022 has indeed increased compared to the previous year. However, these are predominantly people who have fled the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, some 8.05 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered (as of February 2023).

Based on the EU’s so-called mass influx directive, 4.8 million Ukrainians received temporary protection status. Ukrainian war refugees are largely not included in official EU statistics under this measure. Ukrainian nationals are also automatically granted humanitarian residence permits in EU member states, giving them access to education, employment, social benefits and medical care.

At the same time, according to Mediendienst Integration, in the period from February to October 2022, around 111,000 refugees arrived in Europe via the main Mediterranean escape routes. It goes on to say that in the first half of 2022, a total of just over 400,000 people applied for asylum in the EU (excluding refugees from Ukraine). This is about 63 percent more than in the same period in 2021.

The reason for this is that due to the coronavirus pandemic and associated travel restrictions, the number of asylum applications had fallen sharply in the previous two years, 2020 and 2021. Especially in comparison with the figures for 2015, when numerous refugees from war-torn countries poured into Europe, the absolute numbers are still comparatively low.

The European ruling class is running its propaganda machine at full speed in this regard: Allegedly, the number of irregular border crossings has reached an all-time high since 2016. Frontex reports that there were around 230,000 such border crossings in the first nine months of 2022 alone. However, in the fine print, Frontex notes that all “attempted border crossings” are counted, resulting in multiple counts.

The pitiless measures against refugees that the EU heads want to push through with their special summit in Brussels are an expression of a sharp turn to the right by all European governments.

Sweden holds the presidency of the European Council until June 2023. The country is dominated by a coalition of three right-wing parties: the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party with neo-fascist roots, are currently the second-largest faction in the Swedish parliament; it was only with their help that Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson (Moderate) was elected to office in September 2022. Since then, the Swedish government’s policies have been characterized by harsh attacks on refugees. For example, there are calls for “asylum transit zones,” or reception centres for asylum seekers.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni from the openly far-right Fratelli d’Italia governs in Rome together with the right-wing parties Lega and Forza Italia. One of the Meloni government’s first decisions was to make sea rescues in the Mediterranean more difficult. This involves, for example, forcing ships belonging to non-governmental organizations with refugees on board to divert to ports in the north such as Ancona or Ravenna, Ravenna being closer to Germany than to Sicily. Ahead of the special summit, Meloni had called for the EU to “intervene in the defence of the external borders.”

In Austria, Chancellor Karl Nehammer of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) had called for an EU “rejection directive” shortly before the special summit. According to this, people with no prospect of asylum should be able to be deported while still at the border. Nehammer’s idea means legitimizing illegal pushbacks. In Vienna, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said the demand was a “blatant violation of refugee law.”

Nehammer also spoke out in favour of expanding border fences and called for additional border guards, saying any fence was only as good “as it is monitored.” Hungary, Poland and Greece also spoke out in favour of border fences financed by European funds. In the meantime, 2,000 kilometres of border fencing has been built at the EU’s external borders. Ten years ago, the figure was 300 kilometres.

Other EU member states are also increasingly implementing far-right policies. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrat, SPD) rolled out the red carpet for fascist Meloni in early February and is implementing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) refugee policy in his coalition with the Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens. At the EU summit, Scholz explained that on the one hand, immigration was necessary to combat the shortage of skilled workers, but on the other hand, it was necessary to ensure that people without the right to stay were deported. His government was working on this, he said.

The European Council summit ended with the typical EU “agreement to disagree” on the implementation of the measures decided. But at least on one point, the 27 EU heads did agree: they will drastically tighten measures against refugees—whether in combination or at the national level. The only exception will be if they can exploit the victims of hunger, suffering and war for their own economic and war policies.

Turkey-Syria earthquake death toll tops 41,000: A colossal social crime

Ulaş Ateşçi

The devastating consequences of the 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes that struck on the Turkey-Syria border on Monday, February 6 continues to worsen. Yesterday, the official death toll in Turkey rose by nearly 4,000 to 35,418, while the death toll in Syria exceeded 5,800. More than 8,000 people have so far been rescued in Turkey, but it is still unknown how many people remain under the rubble in both countries.

Six days after an earthquake, people line up for water in Kahramanmaras, Turkey on February 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Emrah Gurel]

Thousands of those who died were children. UNICEF estimates that more than 7 million children were affected. In its report yesterday, UNICEF said: “While the total number of children affected remains unclear, 4.6 million children live in the 10 provinces of Turkey hit by the earthquakes, and more than 2.5 million children are affected in Syria.”

“We are witnessing the worst natural disaster in the WHO [World Health Organization] European region for a century, and we are still learning about its magnitude,” Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said yesterday. He added, “The needs are huge and increasing by the hour. Some 26 million people across both countries need humanitarian assistance.”

Scientists and experts agree that the February 6 earthquakes, which caused devastation across hundreds of kilometres, were historic. However, this does not mean that the devastating consequences of the earthquakes were not foreseen or could not have been prevented. On the contrary, for years, geologists and other scientists, both in Turkey and internationally, have been drawing attention to the danger of earthquakes in the region and calling for the necessary safety measures to be taken quickly.

However, no safety measures were taken by the state. Moreover, in 2018, the government, with the complicity of the opposition parties in parliament, granted a “construction amnesty” to around 75,000 buildings in the earthquake zone that did not comply with building codes.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is working deliberately to cover up its obvious responsibility for this social catastrophe. Erdoğan, who spoke of “fate” immediately after the earthquake, claiming that “it is not possible to be prepared for such a major catastrophe,” now speaks of the “disaster of the century,” calling it an “exceptional natural event” in every speech.

But Erdogan’s own statement yesterday after his cabinet meeting points to the criminality of his government. He tried to create a “success story” out of a disaster that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and devastated millions, stating: “The fact that 98 percent of all buildings collapsed in the recent disaster were built before 1999 shows the progress we have made in building standards and inspections, but also reminds us that we need to tighten our grip.”

In the region, where scientists warned that a major earthquake was imminent, especially after the nearby Elazığ earthquake in 2020, many cities were built on fault lines, and many buildings were found to be unsafe by Turkish officials. Despite experts’ warnings, city plans were not changed, nor were buildings made earthquake-resistant. Millions of people were instead left to their fate. The main reason for this was that such a long-term investment, requiring extensive state expenditure, was not considered profitable.

The extent of the destruction in Turkey’s 10 provinces was evident even in the incomplete report Erdoğan released yesterday. Analyzing 369,000 buildings in the region, it found that 47,000 were collapsed, in urgent need of demolition, or heavily damaged.

“We will relieve the pain, heal the wounds and compensate the losses of this disaster together, without ever falling into frustration, weariness, fatigue or despair,” Erdoğan said, as if the loss of 35,000 lives could be compensated. He announced that new buildings would be built for earthquake victims “away from the fault lines within a few months.” Had this step been taken in 2020 or before, based on the warnings and guidance of scientists, tens of thousands of people would still be alive.

Erdoğan’s statements yesterday were marked by staggering indifference to those who died in the quake, as well as by announcements of social expenditures to appease social anger. He said that 100,000 Turkish liras (TL), or US$5,310, of “cash aid” would go to those who lost relatives in the earthquake. He claimed that Turkish banks would transfer 50 billion TL (US$2.65 billion) of their 2022 profits to earthquake relief efforts. The sector’s total net profit in 2022 was 433 billion TL (US$23 billion).

Erdoğan also announced that members of his cabinet had donated a total of 136 million TL (US$7.22 million) to earthquake victims. That such a sum can be collected from a 19-person cabinet reveals the huge social inequality in Turkey, where the monthly minimum wage is only 8,500 TL (US$450).

However, if the Erdoğan government and financial oligarchy felt obliged to make a social concession, however small, it is because they fear the massive social anger they face. At the same time, they are whipping up fascistic campaigns to try to divert this social anger against Syrian refugees.

But millions of people who have lost loved ones due to the lack of public health measures in the COVID-19 pandemic, and who are struggling with the surging cost of living, are outraged at those responsible for an entirely preventable disaster. People are furious both that millions of people had to live in buildings fated to collapse in a big quake, and that those under the rubble after the quake were abandoned to their fate.

In Adıyaman, where thousands lost their lives in the earthquake, a health worker went on the Habertürk TV live broadcast yesterday. Expressing the anger of millions, she said: “Adıyaman was left alone for three days. We had to close our ears to people’s screams [under the rubble] because there was no help [to rescue them]. People died of hunger and cold. Let the President come to Adıyaman, does he have a face to come here? … Children died. Is this a disaster management?” And at the end, she made a call: “Wake up Turkey!”

Amid the massive destruction and loss of life, the political establishment has begun to focus on the presidential and parliamentary elections, previously scheduled for May this year. Some in Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) have called to postpone the elections because of the earthquake. According to the constitution, however, elections can only be postponed in a “state of war.”

The bourgeois opposition parties rapidly rejected the proposal to postpone the elections. Even before the quake, Erdoğan had suffered a significant loss of support amid the deepening economic and social crisis.

Although it is unclear when the elections will be held, one thing is certain: Neither the People’s Alliance led by Erdoğan nor the Nation Alliance of the bourgeois opposition parties can safeguard the lives and safety of the people against earthquakes. Both alliances are defenders of the capitalist system that is the main source of this social slaughter.

South Korean opposition leader under investigation

Ben McGrath

The leader of South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DP) is under investigation on corruption-related charges as well as claims that he is connected to the transfer of a large sum of money to North Korea in 2019. These charges are not simply about corruption but point to the growing social tensions in South Korea as the government targets opposition political figures.

Lee Jae-Myung on 28 April, 2021 [Photo by Gyeonggi-do Provincial Office]

DP leader Lee Jae-myung was questioned by prosecutors for more than eleven hours last Friday. It was the third time he has been questioned this year in connection to corruption allegations.. The allegations stem from his time as mayor of Seongnam (2010-2018), a city in Gyeonggi Province just south of Seoul, and during his tenure as Gyeonggi Province governor (2018-2021). Lee was elected to the National Assembly last June and became DP leader in August, following his failed presidential bid.

Lee is accused of receiving bribes while Seongnam mayor from six major companies including Doosan Engineering and Construction. As much as 16 billion won ($US12.6 million) was funneled to Lee through the city’s municipal soccer team between 2016 and 2018.

Lee is also accused of involvement in a major land development scandal centering around Hwacheon Daeyu, a small asset management company. According to prosecutors, the company and other property developers were able to rake in 809 billion won ($US635 million) in profits for apartment complexes in Seongnam’s Wirye New Town and Daejang-dong districts, projects which began in 2013 and 2015 respectively.

Lee has claimed innocence regarding all the allegations, saying on Friday that the administration of right-wing President Yoon Suk-yeol was attempting to “kill a political enemy by fully mobilizing political prosecutors.” He continued, “As a pawn of the regime, the prosecution is making up a nonexistent case.”

Members of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) have called for Lee’s arrest, which would have to be approved by the National Assembly, as sitting lawmakers cannot be arrested while the legislature is in session. The Democrats still control 167 seats out of 300, making Lee’s arrest unlikely.

However, the most serious allegations against Lee include claims that he was involved in the transfer of $US8 million to North Korea in 2019. At the end of January, anonymous prosecution sources leaked to the media that Kim Seong-tae, the former chairman of textile company Ssangbangwool Group, had transferred the money on Lee’s behalf.

Kim was arrested on January 10 in Thailand after eight months on the loose in connection to sending the funds to the North and other corruption allegations. Supposedly, $US5 million dollars was to be spent on North Korea’s smart farm project and an additional $US3 million to help pave the way for a potential trip to the North by Lee Jae-myung.

Prosecutors are also planning today to question Lee Hwa-yeong, former vice-governor of Gyeonggi Province under Lee. He is suspected of involvement in Kim’s alleged transfer of money to the North.

The allegations against Lee Jae-myung reportedly include a phone call in which he thanked Kim for transferring the funds. Kim claims the phone call took place in January 2019 while he was in China attending a dinner whose guests included Lee Hwa-yeong and a North Korean official at the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee. The organization handles inter-Korean affairs for Pyongyang. Lee Jae-myung has stated that the phone call did not occur and that he was in a court at the time it supposedly took place.

Whether or not true, there is far more to this case than just the allegations against Lee Jae-myung. Like sex scandals in the West, corruption cases in South Korea are used to settle political scores. Backroom deals, preferential treatment and illegal payoffs have been part of doing business in South Korea for decades.

The Democratic Party has served as a safety valve for the opposition of the working class. In the past, it postured as an alternative to South Korea’s three-decade-long military dictatorship. Today, it claims to be a more worker-friendly party in contrast to the right-wing PPP, which still maintains close ties to the military.

Under conditions of economic and social crisis, however, the ruling class is turning back to its old autocratic methods of rule, making clear that the framework of the police state still exists despite so-called “democratization” in the 1980s and 1990s.

South Korea’s economy has been hard hit by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the United States-instigated war against Russia in Ukraine. The economy is expected to grow only 1.6 percent this year compared to 2.6 percent growth in 2022. The government also predicts a 4.5 percent on-year drop in exports while inflation grew to 5.1 percent last year.

At the same time, Seoul, with the support of the PPP and the Democrats, is actively preparing for war with China, in alliance with US and Japanese imperialism. This includes poisoning public opinion towards the world’s second largest economy while whipping up fear over the supposed North Korean “threat.”

Workers, however, have not passively accepted the attacks on their economic and social conditions, striking or threatening to go on strike last year in numerous industries. The sixteen-day strike by truck drivers in November and December demonstrated the power that workers have and the fear the bourgeoisie has of the working class. The unions, however, orchestrated a sellout of the truck drivers’ strike in December, which has only emboldened the Yoon administration.

When President Yoon came to office in May, he openly pledged to suppress the working class. Yoon took over for the previous administration of Democrat Moon Jae-in, who was elected in 2017 to put forward a phony progressive alternative following mass protests against the right-wing Park Geun-hye government.

While targeting Lee, the government is making clear that any opposition to the policies of austerity and big business, demanded by the looming economic crisis and war drive, will be met with police repression.

Widespread destruction from New Zealand’s worst storm in decades

Tom Peters

The New Zealand government declared a national state of emergency yesterday morning after the top of the North Island, the most populated part of the country, was hit by devastating wind and rain from ex-Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle on Monday.

Migrant workers from Tonga, forced onto the roofs of their flooded accommodation in Hastings [Photo: Lie Tu'imoala]

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told a press conference yesterday it was “the most significant weather event New Zealand has seen in this century. The severity and the damage that we are seeing has not been experienced in a generation.”

At least 10,500 people have been forced to flee their homes, with 3,000 sheltering in evacuation centres. About 144,000 properties remain without power, down from 225,000 yesterday, after lines were damaged on a scale not seen since Cyclone Bola in 1988.

The cyclone has affected Auckland, a city of 1.6 million people, and several other towns including Whangarei, Tauranga, Napier, Hastings, Gisborne and surrounding areas, including many remote towns and a large amount of farmland. The impact has been made worse by flooding in Auckland and surrounding areas in late January, which displaced about 1,800 households.

Four people have died: in the rural village of Putorino a woman died when a landslide fell on her house; in Napier, a body was found washed up on the beach; Dave van Zwanenberg, a volunteer firefighter from Muriwai, west of Auckland, died after a house collapsed. A young child was found dead in Eskdale, Hawke’s Bay, this afternoon.

Bridges have been swept away and land slips have blocked major roads across the North Island. Tens of thousands of people in Gisborne, the Coromandel Peninsula, the Hawke’s Bay and coastal communities west of Auckland including Piha, Muriwai and Karekare, were all cut off yesterday.

Thousands of people in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Waikato, Coromandel, Northland and elsewhere were without power this morning. Phone and internet services have been cut off or severely disrupted. Drinking water supplies to Gisborne, Napier and Wairoa are also damaged.

Gisborne mayor Mayor Rehette Stoltz told Stuff that the city of nearly 40,000 people is “in a water crisis, and we are having real difficulty getting word out about this. It will take months to fix this.”

Cyclone Gabrielle was known to be approaching New Zealand on February 9, four days before it hit, but many communities were clearly not properly prepared. Asked what people in isolated areas should do, Hipkins told reporters yesterday: “Make sure you’re looking after each other, pool resources where you can with your friends and neighbours.”

Thousands of volunteers have been distributing supplies and helping with evacuations of flooded properties.

The Defence Force has also been mobilised under the state of emergency. For the military, such disasters serve as training exercises to prepare for war abroad and confrontations with the working class at home.

Flooding in the town of Wairoa, which was completely cut off and lost power and communications. [Photo: HB Civil Defence Emergency Management Group]

Under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act, a state of emergency empowers the government to deploy police and soldiers to enforce evacuations, coordinate supplies and medical care, enter properties, requisition equipment, materials and assistance, and restrict access to roads and public places. The government can issue any other “guidelines, codes, or technical standards” deemed necessary to address the emergency, overriding other legislation.

Hipkins falsely said it was the third national state of emergency in New Zealand’s history. In fact it is the fourth: the first, which he did not mention, was declared by prime minister Sid Holland on February 21, 1951 during the waterfront dispute. It empowered soldiers to be deployed to replace locked out and striking workers.

The government website New Zealand History notes: “Draconian emergency regulations imposed rigid censorship, gave police sweeping powers of search and arrest and made it an offence for citizens to assist strikers—even giving food to their children was outlawed.”

A state of emergency was also declared following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and in 2020 during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Economists estimate the cost to the economy from the disaster will be in the tens of billions of dollars. There have been suggestions that it could rival the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquakes, which had a rebuild cost of about $40 billion and left tens of thousands of homes uninhabitable.

The New Zealand Herald reported yesterday that one insurance company was getting “one claim per minute.” This is in addition to what the Insurance Council estimates are 40,000 claims from the earlier Auckland floods.

Damage to food crops, farms and supply chains is expected to further push up food prices, which have already soared by 10.3 percent in the past year while fruit and vegetable prices increased by 15.7 percent—far outstripping the 4.1 percent increase in wages in 2022.

The flooding will greatly exacerbate the country’s housing crisis. Already more than 100,000 people (2 percent of the population) are either homeless or living in rundown or unsafe housing.

The disaster comes at a time when the ruling elite is ruthlessly imposing the full burden of the global economic crisis onto the working class. The Reserve Bank is increasing interest rates to push up unemployment in order to keep wages down.

The Labour Party-led government, which includes the Greens, is imposing austerity measures, starving healthcare and other essential services. Hipkins told Radio NZ earlier this month that “[government] expenditure is actually going to track downwards for the next few years.”

According to Newsroom, funding for the health system “to fight COVID-19 in the first half of 2023 is less than half of what it had been in the second half of 2022.” This is based on false claims by the government that the pandemic is over. Thanks to Labour’s removal of public health measures, dozens of people are dying and hundreds are being hospitalised every week from the coronavirus.

The floods, like the Christchurch earthquake, are already being used as a pretext for more cuts and privatisations.

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has reversed planned cuts for storm water management and announced an additional $20 million a year for prevention and mitigation of severe weather events. In a press statement, however, Brown declared that the council still had to address an “operating budget gap of $295 million.” He also declared that the flooding “highlights the need to think very seriously about selling underperforming assets.”

It is widely acknowledged that the recent extreme weather—two so-called “one in a hundred year” storms in the space of a fortnight—is due to climate change.

In response to popular anger about the lack of action to stop global warming, minister for climate change and Green Party co-leader James Shaw told parliament he was also “angry” about “the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not, because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse.”

The Greens, however, uphold the very capitalist system that is responsible for catastrophic climate change. During the 2021 nationwide climate strike by school students, Shaw praised the “chief executives of some of our largest companies” who he falsely claimed were acting to address climate change.

Human rights complaints mount against Bukele’s state of exception in El Salvador

Andrea Lobo

Last week, human rights organizations in El Salvador issued a joint report that includes over 4,500 human rights complaints against the security forces during the ongoing “state of exception” launched 10 months ago by the government of President Nayib Bukele, ostensibly in a “war against gangs.”

The complaints are mostly of arbitrary detentions, as Bukele openly boasts of having detained almost 63,000 “terrorists,” or 1 percent of the population, without a fair trial. The report also cites “harassment, threats and battery.” One of the organizations, Cristosal, has recorded at least 102 deaths of inmates during the regime of exception.

The Salvadoran ombudsman, moreover, has gathered evidence of hundreds of cases of torture, while Human Rights Watch accessed an official database of 1,082 children detained, as of August 2022.

Military police patrol the Tutunichapa market in San Salvador, February 12 [Photo: @FUERZARMADASV]

The state of exception authorizes troops and police to make warrantless searches and arrests, including of minors as young as 12. It also allows mass trials and trials in absentia, includes 45-year prison sentences for suspected gang members and suspends democratic freedoms, including freedom of speech and the press. As the country approaches a total of 100,000 inmates, Bukele inaugurated this month the largest prison in the world with a capacity of 40,000.

In a country smaller in size than the US state of New Jersey, the massive scale of the roundups is comparable to those carried out by the military dictatorships in Central and South America during the 1970s and 1980s.

Moreover, these policies have been accompanied by an avalanche of fascistic propaganda by officials and most of the media glorifying the security forces and portraying impoverished youth as “rats” and “terrorists.”

In this context, polls show that the state of exception is supported by almost eight in every 10 Salvadorans, with similar numbers feeling “safer,” and the measures have reportedly reduced the number of homicides and other crimes. Recent investigative reports have found that the largest gangs, Barrio 18 and MS13, have been “dismantled” as functioning organizations in the communities surveyed.

The popular support for these policies is partly explained by the fact that workers and small shop owners in El Salvador have faced decades of daily terror and killings by gangs, which have connived with state authorities to profit from “taxes,” drug trafficking, and robberies.

At the same time, only one or two generations ago, a series of brutal military dictatorships backed, armed and trained by the United States, and a subsequent “civilian-led” regime plagued by death squads, massacred tens of thousands of left-wing youth, workers and peasants. The lack of mass opposition from below against what is clearly the establishment of another dictatorship can only be explained by the political bankruptcy of the organizations that claim to be “left.”

When elected to power, the official “left” composed of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) quickly abandoned its reform promises to oversee IMF austerity measures, while maintaining El Salvador as a cheap labor platform for transnational corporations. Ultimately, the ex-guerrilla FMLN dropped any opposition to US imperialism, whose brutal domination over the course of a century engendered the economic conditions that have proven to be so fertile for gangs and criminal activity.

While Bukele was expelled from the FMLN, and has since exploited the widespread hatred for all the political forces involved in the civil war (1980-1992), and heading the governments since to refashion himself as an “anti-establishment” figure, he offers no real alternative. This is demonstrated by three facts.

First, his key campaign promise of ending impunity for the crimes committed during the civil war, like the Mozote massacre by the military, has largely been abandoned.

Second, several media reports have found that part of the leadership of the gangs has remained unscathed and moved temporarily to rural areas and neighboring countries. Amid worsening poverty under the boot of a police state, and countless youth unrelated to the gangs now locked away with actual gang members and far from their studies and work, conditions could again be ripe for a violent resurgence of the same gang structures.

Third, and most importantly, as demonstrated by his “let it rip” policies during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bukele has little concern for the actual safety and lives of the Salvadoran people. The regime of exception responds to the pressing demands by the American ruling elite to establish a “safe corridor” to connect the North American supply chains with the cheap labor and natural resources in Central and the South America.

But this “safety” doesn’t refer to protecting workers and their families, but rather protects the foreign capital investments, factories, products and profits from the workers, even if initially this takes the form of crushing the extortion-seeking gangs.

These corridors are urgently needed by US imperialism as it tries to “near-shore” production and consolidate a North American economic platform to compete against its rivals, including China, Russia and the major European powers.

Any challenge from below that may disrupt these plans will be met by deadly repression. There are indications that the Bukele regime is already using the state of exception to crack down on social opposition. The Development Association of the rural community Santa Marta on Monday denounced the “arbitrary detention” for over a month of five of its leaders under the regime of exception. Those arrested had led protests against mining corporations.

The official poverty rate has jumped to one-third of the population, while 21.4 percent of Salvadorans would like to emigrate, according to a recent IUDOP poll. Such desperate economic conditions will eventually lead to an eruption of the class struggle.

The influential US think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published last December a report titled “Advancing U.S. Nearshoring Priorities in Central America with Special Economic Zones.” The report indicates that providing investors “inviting macroeconomic environments” is the first challenge for these nearshoring plans.

“Investors and governments must therefore seek out geographically defined areas, where rule of law, anti-corruption measures, and regulatory stability and predictability characterize the landscape,” the report indicates. Moreover, it proposes a network of US-dominated special economic zones (SEZ) with tax and regulatory incentives where management can rule unimpeded.

The CSIS report focuses in on El Salvador, where Washington has successfully pressured the government to halt plans for a Chinese-dominated special economic zone. The report says this project is troubling because it would mainly benefit China-based investors while “sidelining many U.S. and European companies.”

“With geopolitical considerations front and center, supply chains and the global investment landscape are likely to become less global and more regional,” the report concludes.

While the report describes China as a “nondemocratic competitor,” the corporate incentives and suppression of the class struggle that the CSIS proposes are incompatible with democratic forms of rule. At the same time, this competition will inevitably drag Central America into the maelstrom of a third world war.

Any hypocritical criticism by the Biden administration against Bukele is part of its pressure campaign to pull the country away from China. But even as Bukele attempts to balance ties with US imperialism and China, Washington has become more openly supportive of Bukele’s state of exception.

Human Rights Watch analyst Juan Pappier noted to CNN that, while there was initial criticism of Bukele’s measures by the White House, “more recently we have observed ambiguous positions.” This was confirmed by the response of Biden’s State Department to CNN.

“El Salvador and the United States have a personal interest in making sure these violent criminals remain off the streets,” a spokesperson said, while unconvincingly claiming “grave concerns about human rights violations, arbitrary detentions and deaths.”

Just as in El Salvador, ruling elites across Latin America are prepared to subordinate every social policy to creating “inviting macroeconomic environments” to compete for foreign capital, especially as the crisis of global capitalism worsens.

Governments identified as part of the misnamed “Pink Tide” and openly right-wing regimes alike are emulating Bukele’s repression and implementing their own militarization strategies.

On November 24, only hours after Bukele launched a new phase of his “war,” the supposedly “left” President Xiomara Castro in neighboring Honduras announced an ongoing national state of emergency and military deployment to “suspend constitutional rights where needed.” These are the same security forces that have repeatedly killed protesters and local leaders like Berta Cáceres who opposed the regime installed by the US-backed 2009 coup.

Throughout 2022, the right-wing administration of Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador declared four states of exception in different regions, including one against a national strike in June.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has enshrined into the Constitution the permanent presence of the military on the streets and created a new National Guard that has already been deployed against migrant workers and strikers.

Colombia’s pseudo-left President Gustavo Petro announced last week a US$1.1 billion purchase of military equipment. “Colombia’s forces will be better prepared, more modern, interoperable and adapted to the new realities in the national and regional context,” his defense minister boasted. These are the same security forces that killed thousands of civilians in the 2000s and used live ammunition against mass demonstrations in 2021. In December 2022, Petro renewed troop deployments to Putumayo, where only a few months earlier the military massacred 11 civilians and tried to cover it up by moving the bodies.

Chile’s pseudo-left President Gabriel Boric has kept the military deployed under a state of exception to repress the indigenous population in the south, while Brazil's Workers Party President Lula da Silva has promised massive investments in the military and protected leading military officials who were behind the January 8 fascist coup attempt.

Finally, the US-backed coup regime of Dina Boluarte in Peru has employed a state of emergency, the military and live ammunition to crush mass demonstrations ultimately driven by opposition to the policies subordinated to the mining transnationals and Wall Street.

Opposition mounts in Israel to Netanyahu’s fascistic government

Jean Shaoul

More than 90,000 people rallied outside Israel’s Knesset building in Jerusalem Monday amid a mass strike in opposition to the plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to neuter the judiciary and give his government unchecked powers.

Israelis protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government to overhaul the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Feb. 13, 2023. [AP Photo/Oded Balilty]

It follows the sixth mass protest on Saturday evening, when tens of thousands took to the streets in towns and cities across the country, including in the settlement town of Efrat in the Occupied West Bank. Polls show that more than 60 percent of the population want the plans to be either paused or halted altogether.

Last week, around 8,000 army reservists marched 50 kilometres from Latrun to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem under the banner “Brothers in Arms: The March to Save Democracy.”

The protests come just weeks after Netanyahu returned to power with the backing of fascistic, racist and ultra-religious forces committed to an agenda of annexing the West Bank, which Israel has illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. They are determined to reinforce Jewish Supremacy, apartheid rule, and Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa Mosque; roll back already circumscribed anti-discrimination measures through sweeping changes to Israel’s legal system; and step up police and military repression against the Palestinians, and against workers, Jewish and Palestinian, in Israel itself.

Such a programme entails the gutting of what remains of Israel’s public services and massive transfers to the religious schools and seminaries, under conditions of soaring rents and prices in a country where around 20 percent of its 9.3 million population live in poverty and a handful of families have staggering levels of wealth.

This means eliminating the few restrictions on government power, with a tranche of legislation that had its first reading in parliament Monday. It enables the government to override Supreme Court decisions, while limiting the court’s ability to strike down legislation that infringes on human and civil rights or overturn ministerial appointments, like the reappointment of the thrice-convicted Shas leader Arieh Dery. It also gives the government complete control over judicial appointments.

Further legislation is planned that would abolish the post of attorney general, paving the way to end Netanyahu’s corruption trial and speeding up settlement construction.

Almost the entire legal establishment in Israel have criticised the plans. A layer of secular generals and opposition leaders from Israel’s short-lived and misnamed “government of change” under Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, many of whom have served under Netanyahu in the past, have come out in ferocious opposition, to the point that media analysts are talking about whether or not a civil war is in the offing.

Netanyahu’s coalition partners have demanded that Lapid and Gantz, along with former generals Moshe Ya’alon and Yair Golan, be “arrested and handcuffed” for the crime of “treason against the homeland” after they called for “widespread civil disobedience” to halt the judicial coup. These right-wing layers, who represent Israel’s high tech employees and the most affluent layers and have few policy differences with Netanyahu, fear that a power grab by a scandal-ridden and indicted prime minister, beholden to fascistic forces, is a danger to the stability of capitalist rule and the Israeli state.

Israel’s allies abroad, including the Biden administration, have voiced “concerns.” Washington fears that its chief attack dog in the region is about to provoke a Palestinian uprising on the West Bank that could spill over into Israel itself and involve neighbouring countries, jeopardising the covert wars against Iran and its allies in the region. This is bound up with their broader plans for war against Russia and China, with which Tehran has drawn closer in recent years.

On Monday, opposition legislators accused the committee chair Simcha Rothman of riding roughshod over Knesset procedure and violating the legislative process, leading to angry denunciations and the forcible ejection of at least 14 opposition legislators from the Knesset chamber. The vote to send the bill for hearing was held despite President Isaac Herzog's call to halt the legislative proceedings.

In the run up to the parliamentary proceedings, the various organisations that have organised the weekly Saturday evening mass rallies issued a call for a general strike on Monday, with opposition leader Lapid appealing to employers to let workers strike to “fight for democracy.”

Arnon Bar-David, chair of the Zionist trade union federation, the Histadrut, wrote to his members to say that he did not intend to join the protests or call for a general strike, declaring absurdly, “Israel is a country of laws and only the head of the Histadrut has the authority to shut down the economy.”

Doctors and health workers, high tech workers, educators, university staff and students were among those joining Monday’s strike and rally, although their trade union leaders also said they did not intend to join the protests, announce a labour dispute or shut down services. This is despite Religious Zionism leader and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich promising during the election campaign to ban strikes by workers providing essential services.

The rise of such fascistic, anti-working class forces in a state hailed for supposedly providing a safe and egalitarian haven for Jews who had suffered so terribly at the hands of Hitler’s Nazi regime is part of an international shift among powerful sections of the bourgeoisie. In country after country, right-wing and authoritarian forces are being mobilized to divert and suppress rising social discontent and the alienation of masses of working class people from the traditional parties of the ruling class.

Underlying the breakdown of democratic institutions and norms is the protracted global economic crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and the disruption to global supply chains that has massively increased social inequality and led to soaring inflation, the extreme growth of militarism and war, and, above all, the intensification of the class struggle.

To the extent that neo-fascistic forces have been able to win broader support, political responsibility rests with the right-wing and anti-working-class character of the nominal “left,” who joined a right-wing “government of change” that continued Netanyahu’s economic policies in the interests of Israel’s oligarchs and upped the oppression of the Palestinians. Last year more Palestinians were killed than at any time since 2005. Some 231 lost their lives to the security forces or far-right settlers, including two with joint US citizenship, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 78-year-old Omar Assad.

These right-wing layers opposed to Netanyahu call for a general alliance of “democratic forces” on a capitalist, pro-austerity basis, seeking little more than a watering down of the government’s plans for the judiciary and Netanyahu’s removal from office. They have no proposals to change a social, economic and political set-up that has enriched the financial aristocracy at the expense of the broad mass of the population, much less any plans to so much as ameliorate the brutal repression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. There Israeli governments of whatever party coalition operate a de facto military dictatorship, abetted by a corrupt Palestinian bourgeoisie, while Israel’s Palestinian citizens are subject to generalised economic and social discrimination. Indeed, the organizers of the anti-Netanyahu marches have actively discouraged Israeli Palestinians from participating in rallies that are dominated by Israeli flags.