Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy sentenced to three years in prison

Pierre Mabut

On Wednesday December 18, the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) had his final legal appeal rejected and was definitively sentenced by the Court of Cassation to a three-year jail term. Two of those years will not be served, on condition of good behavior, and the remaining year has been reduced to the wearing of an electronic bracelet for that period. Sarkozy has been found guilty of “corruption” and “influence peddling” mainly in connection with his electoral campaign contributions.

France's former President Nicolas Sarkozy during commemorations marking the 106th anniversary of the November 11, 1918, Armistice, ending World War I, at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Monday, Nov. 11, 2024. [AP Photo/Ludovic Marin]

The electronic bracelet wearer is normally obliged to stay home under surveillance with his/her movements limited to a defined perimeter of one’s domicile. Sarkozy’s limits have not yet been set by the judges.

Sarkozy has announced that he intends to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights against the French State, claiming his democratic rights were infringed upon by the State’s wiretapping of his private, privileged discussions with his lawyer which led to his initial conviction.

The ruling that a former head of state of France is a criminal underscores the illegitimacy of the French capitalist regime. The bourgeois newspaper of record Le Monde admitted that it was “an earthquake in the history of the French Fifth Republic, the first time an ex-French President has been dealt such a severe punishment.”

In reality, the ruling marks the second time, after the conviction of former President Jacques Chirac on embezzlement charges in 2011, that a former French president is condemned to prison. Chirac’s prison term was however entirely suspended by the courts. Sarkozy’s was not, and in that sense the ruling against him marks a new stage in the official recognition of the criminality of the French political system.

Indeed, the undemocratic 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic grants the president vast powers in terms of the launching of war, police repression, and dictatorship. The president can repeatedly dissolve parliament, arrange foreign policy at his own discretion, and can invoke powers to suspend parliament and the judiciary to rule unchecked, effectively as a dictator. The fact that these powers repeatedly were wielded by criminals is a warning of the enormous danger of dictatorship posed by the French capitalist regime.

The case against Sarkozy dates back to charges laid in 2014 when evidence came to light of his attempt to bribe a high-ranking judge at the Court of Cassation, Gilbert Azibert, for feeding him information about an ongoing enquiry into illegal electoral campaign contributions from Liliane Bettencourt, the multi-billionaire heiress to French cosmetics empire L’Oréal.

The now 70 year-old Sarkozy, ex-right-wing leader of the former UMP Gaullist party, now renamed the Republicans and reduced to a rump in the National Assembly, faces in total five legal cases brought against him. He is charged with falsifying invoices relating to his election campaign expenses for president in 2012: the so-called Bygmalion affair, the latter being the publicity agency charged with running his campaign.

Next January sees the opening of his trial for receiving illegal donations from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 election campaign. If found guilty, Sarkozy faces a heavy penalty of 10 years jail and five years of disqualification from public office.

In 2012, the Mediapart online investigative magazine published two documents purporting to show a €50 million contribution from Gaddafi in aid of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign. This contrasted with the €20 million officially declared for the campaign’s expenses.

Sarkozy, during his term as president he played a central role in launching the criminal 2011 NATO war of aggression which destroyed Libya, reducing it to a country beset by warlords and Islamist militias. It should be noted this was supported by all of the pseudo-left who make up today’s New Popular Front, and especially the Pabloite New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). After leaving office in 2012, Sarkozy called for “rapid action of the international community” to intervene in Syria for regime change; again with NPA support.

As a pillar of the French establishment, Sarkozy has played a major role in the suppression of struggles by the working class and youth. Already in 2005 as Minister of the Interior, he suggested that working class neighborhoods be cleaned out with “high pressure hoses” after mass urban riots in response to the police killing of two youth.

In 2018, when current President Emmanuel Macron was under siege from the mass mobilization of the “Yellow Vest” movement in 2018, Macron called upon Sarkozy for his advice. While demonstrators were being beaten to pulp by the riot police and dozens lost their eyesight and limbs, Sarkozy advised “respect for law and order.”

A spokesperson for Macron’s office commented on the judgment against Sarkozy, saying that “the two men have a mutual respect for each other.”

Another example of President Sarkozy’s vile attacks on oppressed workers and nations was a trip he made to the French colonial possession of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean in 2010. He said: “I have come to help Mayotte develop itself, but let’s be clear about one thing, there are rights and duties; among duties there is respect for law and the State representatives and police who have the heavy responsibility to enforce the law.”

In 2011, he incorporated Mayotte into the French State machine as a fully-fledged French department, but all the investment necessary was and has been absent. All the island’s social crises are now blamed on clandestine immigration from the Comoros. Because of his and all French governments’ failure to invest in economic development and social care, the 350,000 impoverished population has just been decimated by the cyclone Chido, leaving possibly thousands dead and over half of makeshift housing destroyed.

In the recent period, Sarkozy has sought to shore up his position by signaling his support for far-right forces.

In a BFM-TV interview he approved of Trump’s strategy of appealing to “the nation’s greatness” and “the national flame,” attributing Trump’s victory to speaking about “America to Americans.” In line with most of the rest of the French political establishment, Sarkozy defends the line that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” His son, Louis, brazenly supported the Gaza genocide, saying, “let them die, Israel is doing Humanity’s work.”

South Korean president stonewalls removal from office

Peter Symonds

A week after South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was impeached by the National Assembly, the country’s political crisis continues to deepen. Yoon, with the assistance of the ruling People Power Party (PPP), is seeking to block investigations into his extraordinary declaration of martial law on the evening of December 3–4 and to prevent his removal from office.

Protesters carry a caricature of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a rally demanding his arrest in Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, December 21, 2024 [AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon]

After being impeached on December 14, Yoon was suspended from office pending a decision in the Constitutional Court on whether or not to remove him. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who was appointed by Yoon and is now acting president, used his presidential powers on Thursday to veto six bills passed by the National Assembly, where the opposition Democratic Party (DP) holds a majority.

This is only the second time since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s that an acting president has exercised the veto power. The bills included four providing financial assistance to the agricultural and fishery sectors, and another giving greater power to the National Assembly to summon and require information from officials. The bills have now returned to parliament, where a two-thirds majority is needed to overturn Han’s vetoes. The DP and its allies hold only 192 out of 300 seats.

Significantly, Han also has refused to date to approve National Assembly nominees to the nine-member Constitutional Court to fill three vacant positions. If the nominees are blocked, it sets a very high bar for Yoon’s removal from office. Constitutionally, all six existing judges must vote in favour of the impeachment.

The political confrontation between acting president Han and the DP-controlled National Assembly will come to a head tomorrow. The Democrats yesterday issued an ultimatum to Han, demanding that he approve bills establishing special counsel investigations into insurrection charges against Yoon and corruption allegations against Yoon’s wife, or face impeachment himself. In addition, they have suggested that Han may have been involved in the martial law decree.

Yoon is also stonewalling. In the immediate wake of his failed attempt to impose martial law and the wave of outrage that swept the country, the president publicly apologised and promised to cooperate with legal and constitutional proceedings. Since then, however, he has refused to answer summonses or hand over documents.

Yoon also failed to appear last Wednesday at the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) for questioning over charges of insurrection and abuse of power. A CIO statement declared that his no-show would be “considered as a failure to comply with the first summons.” A second summons has been issued and the CIO is reportedly considering the possibility of Yoon’s arrest.

The fact that Yoon feels he can brazenly impede his removal from office is a result firstly of the perfidy of the Democrats and their allies in the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). They have wound back the mass protests and strikes that erupted over the declaration of martial law and channeled the widespread anger into the narrow confines of parliamentary manoeuvres.

Yoon’s attempt to wind back the clock to the military dictatorships of the past failed in large measure because of the immediate protests it provoked and ruling class fears of a mass outpouring of anger. Thousands of people gathered around the National Assembly in the early hours of December 4 and prevented the arrest of key political figures, including the opposition leader and parliamentary speaker.

The National Assembly was able to convene and pass a motion demanding Yoon lift the martial law decree. While constitutionally required to accede to the motion, Yoon prevaricated for several hours, no doubt consulting both domestically and internationally as to whether he should simply ignore the demand. Finally, he relented.

The KCTU immediately swung into action, declaring that it would initiate a “general strike” until Yoon was removed from office. In reality, the “general strike” proved to be nothing more than limited stoppages in several sectors, such as auto and rail, some of which had already been planned.

Following Yoon’s impeachment, the KCTU announced on December 16 that it was lifting its “general strike guidelines.” KCTU head Yang Gyeong-su claimed that Yoon’s suspension from office amounted to a victory. “In the end, democracy, workers and citizens, and the KCTU won,” he said.

Mass protests against Yoon continued last Saturday. Organisers estimated that 300,000 took part in the largest demonstration, in the capital Seoul, to demand his resignation and arrest. Farmers associated with the Korean Peasants League attempted to join the protests, driving into Seoul with tractors and cargo trucks, but were blocked by police. Other protests involving thousands were held around South Korea, including in Busan, Gwangju, Jeonju, Ulsan, Daegu and Jeju.

While large, the protests were significantly smaller than those the previous Saturday, when organisers estimated that two million gathered near the National Assembly building where lawmakers were preparing to vote on a second motion to impeach Yoon. Older participants who had experienced the brutality of military dictatorship expressed their determination to never allow a return. Young people were clearly shocked that basic democratic rights could be so easily overturned.

The fact that Yoon has not resigned and the right-wing PPP has even begun to organise pro-Yoon rallies suggests that he has powerful support in international circles. The Biden administration, in particular, welcomed Yoon’s decision to forge close military and intelligence ties with Japan in what amounts to a tripartite alliance with the US as Washington prepares for war against China. Such a pact had been previously thwarted by deep-seated animosity toward Japan stemming from its harsh colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945.

While the Biden administration indicated that Yoon should withdraw the martial law decree, it has not condemned his wholesale assault on democratic rights, nor called for his removal from office. If Yoon had succeeded, South Korea would now be under martial law, all political and strike activity would be banned, and blanket censorship imposed. Yet Washington, which hypocritically exploits the banner of “democracy” to wage regime-change operations, is silent when it comes the gross abuses of political allies if its geopolitical interests are at stake.

Australian teacher shortages worsen in public schools

Erika Zimmer

As the school year concludes in Australia, numerous studies have projected an even worse teacher staffing crisis in public schools in 2025. The federal Department of Education is predicting a shortage of 4,100 secondary school teachers across the country next year, with this almost certainly a significant underestimate.

A section of the striking New South Wales teachers’ rally in Macquarie Street, Sydney on June 30, 2022.

A study by statistician Simon Kuestenmacher looked at teacher supply into the next decade. It estimated that by 2034, Australia’s current workforce of 391,000 schoolteachers will need to grow to 414,000, an increase of 23,000 teachers. This is to keep up with the projected 6 percent increase in the number of school aged children.

These numbers, however, do not factor in Australia’s ageing teacher workforce. Kuestenmacher estimated that to replace teachers approaching retirement and those working over their retirement age, 34,000 new teachers will be needed in the next decade.

“[W]e are facing an uphill battle,” he explained. “Pumping out 3,400 new teachers (that actually end up teaching) every year was never an easy task but in our current economic environment, things are only getting more difficult.”

Graduates are shunning teaching degrees, while registered teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers.

In 2023, graduating school students choosing teaching as their first university course preference dropped nearly 20 percent from 2022. Moreover, of those who do start a teaching degree, 50 percent drop out before the end of the course. This reflects the terrible experiences that many student teachers have during their placements in public schools, prompting half of them to pursue an alternative career. Many graduate teachers quit the profession within the first few years.

Education researcher Saul Karnovsky told ABC News: “We have seen teacher shortages in the past, no doubt. There have been moments of crisis which the media would have called a crisis and policymakers would have as well. But the scale and the scope of this particular crisis at the moment is unprecedented.”

Teacher shortages exist in every Australian state. In Queensland, 78 percent of principals said they had teacher shortages this year. Schools are reported to be struggling to staff all classes in Western Australia and South Australia. Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, reported 1,500 unfilled teaching positions in August 2024, almost double the number of vacancies that existed at the start of the school year.

The Labor government in New South Wales (NSW) has claimed that the teacher shortage in that state is easing. However, new data referred to by the state opposition minister for education, Sarah Mitchell, has revealed that NSW has 200 fewer full-time and temporary teachers than two years ago, despite increasing student enrolments. In addition, hundreds more jobs are being axed following the announcement in April by Premier Chris Minns, that public school funding will be cut by $148 million this year and even more, $1.4 billion, over four years.

Overwhelming workloads are one of the key drivers of the workforce crisis. Australia has some of the world’s highest face-to-face teaching hours requirements, and every year teachers are burdened with additional administrative duties. While wealthy public schools enjoy lavish infrastructure and teacher supports, within underfunded public schools, teachers are provided with grossly inadequate support for student disabilities and challenging behaviours.

One primary school teacher in Melbourne told the World Socialist Web Site about the impact in her school of the staffing crisis. “A factor of the teacher shortage that I think needs to be highlighted, is that schools running without enough teachers, are hiring CRTs [casual relief teachers], when they can, to cover all the additional tasks that may otherwise be done by additional staff members. This exhausts budgets, meaning that inevitably in Term 4 schools can’t afford more CRTs, so classes are split.

“I frequently get 6 kids each day sent into my classroom. Teachers are then catering to 30 kids of different year levels, adding to workload, stress and exhaustion. Teachers then feel guilty for taking time off when they need it because of the burden it places on their colleagues. The expectation to work at this pace is way too high.”

A Western Australia teacher with 25 years working in both public and private school classrooms told ABC News that the workload and pressure became too much. “I was experiencing heart palpitations and breathing issues, it was related to stress… It’s not a school, it is every sector and the pay’s not the issue because there are other times when I was getting paid more—it’s the work-life balance, it’s having basically no life… physically I just could not keep doing it.”

In an article in the Conversation, another teacher pointed to the gulf between the needs of the students and the demands of the government: “It’s frustrating knowing what the students need emotionally, but the curriculum and administrative demands don’t leave room for that kind of support.”

Student learning is being badly affected by the staffing shortage. A 2023 report found that almost 10,000 lessons in NSW were being conducted without adequate educational support in public schools daily.

A high school teacher in regional Victoria explained to the WSWS that at his school, “A hundred students at a time get sent to a ‘study centre’ when staff are not present. They get supervised by usually one, at the most two, Education Support staff. These ‘lessons,’ usually online from a central lesson hub, are then counted by the school as fully delivered lessons.”

The teacher shortages are intensifying the cascade of dysfunction in Australia public schools. Decades of deliberate underfunding has resulted in the country having one of the most privatised school systems in the OECD. Students classified as disadvantaged, with a low socio-economic background, indigenous, disabled or living in a remote area make up 46 per cent of public school enrolments. 

Government schools are concentrations of disadvantage. Yet between 2009 to 2018 the total income of Catholic and private schools rose ten times higher than that for public schools. From 2019–2024, even under the totally inadequate official framework for school funding, public schools lost $13.1 billion and are likely to lose a further $13.3 billion under the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the next round of funding currently before the parliament.

A Secondary Principals Council submission into a senate inquiry into “disruption in Australian classrooms” held this year stated: “Our [public] schools simply do not have the resources to adequately address [the students] complex and challenging behaviours.… Staff shortages, and staff teaching out of their field of expertise, supercharges disruption and intensifies disorderly behaviour, which drives teacher departure from more challenging school settings and the teaching profession generally.”

A critical factor in driving up teacher workload and stress was the introduction of the high-stakes National Assessment—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) regime by Labor’s Rudd and Gillard governments in 2008. Described by Gillard as the bedrock of Labor’s “education revolution,” the tests were implemented to make schools accountable for student “continuous improvement.” Subsequently, “poor” performance in the tests, or any other problem emerging in the schools, is sheeted home to lack of “quality teaching.”

A war on public education is being waged by the ruling elite, and policed by the teachers’ unions. In every state and territory, the union bureaucracy has collaborated with state and federal governments, including by delivering regressive enterprise agreements that have driven down real wages and facilitated the imposition of crushing workloads.

Income and wealth inequality reach record highs in Canada

Steven Fields

A key finding contained in the latest household income report from Statistics Canada is that the income gap between high-earning and low-earning households has reached record levels. Related to this is the extraordinary pace at which wealth inequality is growing in Canada. In short, the rich are getting richer, middle-income people are getting poorer, and the already poor remain poor. 

A homeless encampment in Kitchener, Ontario, in front of the former Krug Furniture factory

In its October 2024 report, Statistics Canada defined “income gap” as the gap in the share of disposable income between the top two quintiles (top 40 percent of households) and the bottom two quintiles (bottom 40 percent of households). In the second quarter of 2024, this gap stood at 47 percent, which is the largest ever recorded.

While low-income households experienced above-average growth in wages, this was offset by an increase in interest paid on mortgages and consumer credit. As a result, their share of disposable income remained mostly unchanged. For the bottom quintile, this share stood at a miserly 6.2 percent. While this is a slight increase compared to 2023, it means that a substantial portion of Canadian households remains one pay cheque away from crisis.

The middle-income (third quintile) households fared the worst. Their share of disposable income dropped from 17.4 percent in the second quarter of 2023 to 16.6 percent in 2024.

For high-income households (top quantile), the additional debt burden from higher interest rates was more than offset by higher yields on savings and investment accounts. This group saw its share of disposable income increase from 41.6 percent in 2023 to 42.4 percent today.

An even more striking feature of the report is the rapidly rising wealth gap. The Statistics Canada report blandly states that: “Most wealth is held by relatively few households in Canada.” The gap between the wealthiest and least wealthy grew by 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period the previous year, the highest increase on record.

The wealthiest (i.e., the top 20 percent) Canadians held 67.7 percent of total net worth. The net worth of these households increased by 2.3 percent in the second quarter of 2024 compared to a year earlier, bringing the average worth of a household in this group to $3.4 million.

In contrast, the net worth of the least wealthy households decreased by 1.4 percent in the second quarter of 2024 compared with the year earlier. These households (i.e., the bottom 40 percent) accounted for only 2.8 percent of Canada’s total net worth.

The report notes that younger households (defined as those under 35 years of age) were the only group to continuously decrease their mortgage debt. There are different explanations for this but, for young low-income workers, the likely reason is that they are being gradually priced out of the housing market altogether by a combination of high housing prices and interest rates. A poll from Scotiabank revealed that 29 percent of respondents in this age group now live at home with their parents or family—a nine-point increase from three years ago.

Canada’s real gross domestic product (GDP) increased only 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2024 after rising 0.4 percent in the first quarter. In other words, the widening wealth gap comes at the expense of the less affluent portion of society.

The impact of growing inequality can be observed in various aspects of daily life. The number of homeless people is rising, and tent encampments are an increasingly common sight in Canadian cities. Nearly 23 percent of the population reported some type of food insecurity in 2022. Low-income Canadians are often forced to rely on food banks due to prohibitive costs of housing and basic necessities. Food Banks Canada issued a report noting that in March 2024, more than two million people visited food banks—a new record. With such high demand, the food bank system itself is pushed to the brink. Low-income workers are often precariously employed in the so-called gig economy, often working multiple jobs to pay for rent and food.

After the release of the Statistics Canada report, Canadian politicians pledged to address the problem. Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Finance in the Trudeau Liberal government until her dramatic resignation Monday, mustered a typical pro forma statement: “We are working very, very hard to lean against this tendency in the global economy towards more inequality. We’re leaning against it with very specific policies designed to support middle class Canadians and people working hard to join the middle class.”

This is a pack of lies. The rapid growth in income inequality and the concentration of wealth in a few hands at the top of society is the product of four decades of ruthless austerity for public spending and attacks on worker rights, combined with massive subsidies and tax breaks for corporate Canada, implemented at every level by all of the establishment parties.

The nine years of Liberal Party rule under Justin Trudeau, backed to the hilt by the trade unions and New Democrats, has accelerated this process. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Trudeau government handed over $650 billion with no strings attached to the banking and corporate elite. Over recent years, the government used a combination of high interest rates and rampant inflation to impose real-wage costs on the working class, while the rich and wealthy profited handsomely.

This record, and the systematic efforts of the Liberals’ union and NDP allies to suppress the class struggle by sabotaging strikes, has enabled the far-right demagogue Pierre Poilievre to pose as a friend of working people. The leader of the official opposition Conservative Party of Canada, who appears poised to take over as Prime Minister when the next election is called, tried to preposterously pose as the defender of working-class Canadians following the release of the StatsCan report. He told reporters at a press conference: “Today, Stats Canada reported that the gap between rich and poor is at its highest level in recorded history, after NDP-Liberal money printing inflated the assets of the super-rich while inflating the cost of living for everyone else.”

The reality is that the Trudeau government picked up in its policies from where its Tory predecessor under Stephen Harper left off. All of the major parties, including those of the Quebec establishment, have imposed ruthless attacks on the living standards of the working class since the 1980s. In the 1990s, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien presided over the largest social spending cuts in Canadian history despite budgetary surpluses. By 1998-1999, under Finance Minister Paul Martin, Ottawa’s spending on social programs dropped to 12 percent of GDP, the lowest level in nearly half a century.

In the early 2000s, the Liberals embraced a new campaign spearheaded by big business which centered on corporate and personal income tax cuts. These cuts were sold to the populace as a boost to middle-income Canadians. But, together with the reduction in capital gains taxes, the effect was to skew wealth distribution in favour of the most privileged.

During the financial crisis of 2008, Canada’s largest banks received bailouts from the Harper Conservatives to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. The massive state aid was offered with no strings attached. During the two-year bailout period, the banks remained highly profitable, generously rewarding shareholders and leading executives.

More recently, during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Canada’s Liberal government funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to the largest banks and major corporations. While the wealth of the country’s richest was protected, most working-class Canadians had to settle for below-inflation pay raises, further impoverishing large sections of the population. The trade union bureaucracies played an important role in helping the government and businesses ram through capped salary increases.

While the unpopular Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is touting new token measures to combat the cost-of-living crisis, including a two-month GST holiday on selected items, such tinkering around the edges will not fix the living cost crisis or the widening wealth gap. Furthermore, Canada’s international economic standing is deteriorating. The global crisis of capitalism is increasing the pressure on all world governments to squeeze the working class to make their economies more competitive to transnational finance capital and subordinate all of society’s resources to the waging of world war. Developed economies are turning to protectionism and economic nationalism, a situation reminiscent of the period that preceded World War II.

Arrest of top Brazilian general exposes military’s role in January 8 coup

Guilherme Ferreira

Gen. Walter Braga Netto (ret.) was arrested last Saturday, December 14, for alleged obstruction of justice in the investigation of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in Brazil. The arrest of a four-star general is unprecedented in a country where even the bloody crimes of the US-backed military dictatorship (1964-1985) have gone unpunished. It has further exposed the critical role played by the military in the coup plot.

Gen. Walter Braga Netto [Photo: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil]

Braga Netto was one of the military officials closest to fascistic ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. Under Bolsonaro’s administration (2019-2022), he served as the military’s chief of staff and Defense Minister. In Brazil’s October 2022 election, Bolsonaro chose him as his vice-presidential running mate.

His arrest came three weeks after the Brazilian Federal Police (PF) indicted Bolsonaro, General Braga Netto and 35 other members of the Bolsonaro government, 25 of them military officers, for the crimes of violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état and criminal organization to “maintain ... Bolsonaro in power, preventing the inauguration of the legitimately elected government” of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party - PT).

According to the PF report on the coup attempt, General Braga Netto was a “central figure in the acts aimed at subverting the democratic regime in Brazil.” He is the person most cited, with 98 references to him in the report.

One of the most sinister elements of the coup plot was the “Green and Yellow Dagger” operation, which called for the assassination of Lula and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, as well as the “arrest/execution” of Supreme Court (STF) Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who has been the rapporteur in numerous investigations against Bolsonaro since 2019, including in connection with the attempted coup. Minister Moraes was also president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) between 2022 and 2024, making him the central target of attacks by Bolsonaro and his political entourage in their baseless allegations of fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting system and the consequent results of the 2022 election.

The coup plot called for Braga Netto to become the coordinator of an “Institutional Crisis Management Office” to “advise the then President of the Republic JAIR BOLSONARO in the management of the facts arising from the institutional rupture,” according to the PF report. This office was to be primarily occupied by military personnel, serving as the pillar of a dictatorship.

Moraes’ “arrest/execution” was scheduled to take place on December 15, 2022. It was aborted because, according to the PF report, “the then [Army] commander, General FREIRE GOMES, and the Army High Command rejected the use of ground forces to provide the necessary support for then-president JAIR BOLSONARO to promote an institutional break.”

General Braga Netto’s arrest for obstruction of justice was based on testimony given by Lt. Col. Mauro Cid to Minister Moraes and the Federal Police on November 21 and December 5. Cid, who signed a plea bargain agreement after being arrested for falsifying Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 vaccination card, was the ex-president’s aide-de-camp. He was also indicted in connection with the coup attempt.

In mid-November, Cid’s plea bargain agreement was placed in question after the PF managed to recover messages and documents deleted from his electronic devices that showed he had omitted information about General Braga Netto’s role in the coup plot.

In his subsequent testimony, which let the PF maintain his plea bargain agreement, Cid gave new details about the “Green and Yellow Plan” and confirmed that Braga Netto contacted his father, Gen. Mauro César Lourena Cid, asking for details of his son’s plea bargain.

Cid confirmed that there was a meeting at Braga Netto’s house on November 12, 2022, shortly after Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat, which approved the “Green and Yellow Dagger” plan. Cid testified, according to the Federal Police, that “General Braga Netto delivered the money that had been requested to carry out the operation [Green and Yellow Dagger]. The money was delivered in a wine bag. General Braga Netto said at the time that the money had been obtained from agribusiness people.”

In fact, Brazilian agribusiness was one of the powerful sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie that most supported the Bolsonaro government. After Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat, it financed the protests by truck drivers who blocked roads across Brazil and the protest encampments in front of military headquarters demanding the intervention of the armed forces against alleged electoral fraud.

The Federal Police report pointed out that Gen. Mario Fernandes (ret.), “then Executive Secretary of the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, was the link between the then government of President JAIR BOLSONARO and the coup protesters, who were camped out in front of military installations calling for an institutional break.” General Fernandes is also the alleged author of the “Green and Yellow Dagger” plan and took part in the meeting at Braga Netto’s house on November 12, 2022.

Since Cid’s testimony, three more military officers were indicted on December 11 by the Federal Police in connection with the coup attempt. Among them was Lt. Col. Aparecido Andrade Portela (ret), who helped raise money from agribusiness for the January 8 coup. He is a close friend of Bolsonaro’s and was a deputy to Senator Tereza Cristina, who was Bolsonaro’s minister of agriculture and previously one of the most prominent representatives of agribusiness in the Brazilian Congress.

Braga Netto’s arrest prompted the Lula administration’s defense minister, José Múcio, to repeat the fraudulent narrative that the January 8 coup plot was the work of rogue military personnel, while the Armed Forces as an institution supposedly saved Brazilian democracy. On December 17, he said that although the military was “embarrassed” by Braga Netto’s arrest, it “was no surprise to anyone.”

However, General Braga Netto is no mere rogue officer. On the contrary, he personifies the military’s growing prominence in the country’s political life, a process that began at the end of the PT governments that ruled the country from 2003 to 2016, and which was fueled by the last decade’s growing economic and social crisis.

Having been blooded in the criminal United Nations “peace-keeping operation” in Haiti, under the PT government of President Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), the Armed Forces began to suppress domestic social unrest through Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) operations, which allow the military to take charge of public security.

The government of Michel Temer (2016-2018), Rousseff’s successor, intensified this use of the military, particularly in the 2017 general strike against his labor and pension reforms and in the 2018 truckers’ strike. Meanwhile, he increasingly turned to the generals to fill key positions in his government, including in an unprecedented way in the Ministry of Defense.

It was during Temer’s administration that General Braga Netto began to stand out politically. As Eastern Military Commander (2016-2019), he headed the GLO operation in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics, and, in February 2018 he was appointed federal intervenor in Rio’s public security. The appointments of Gen. Joaquim Silva e Luna as Minister of Defense, also in February 2018, and Braga Netto as head of public security in Rio were unprecedented milestones in the erosion of the civilian control over the military established after the fall of the military dictatorship in Brazil.

The Bolsonaro government intensified this process, filling its cabinet with military personnel, including the tapping of Gen. Hamilton Mourão for vice-president. The presence and importance of the military in the Bolsonaro government increased as the economic and social crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic intensified. The most notorious of these appointments was that of General Braga Netto as chief of staff in early 2020, when he took charge of the Bolsonaro government’s criminal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April 2021, Braga Netto took over as Bolsonaro’s defense minister amid both the deadly second wave of the pandemic and the most serious military crisis since the end of the dictatorship after Bolsonaro fired the entire military command to align the Armed Forces behind his coup plans. In July 2021, Braga Netto, accompanied by the three heads of the Armed Forces, threatened the Brazilian Congress, saying that there would be no elections in 2022 if there were no “printed and auditable” ballots—a longstanding demand of Bolsonaro in his campaign to discredit electronic voting in Brazil.

Shortly before leaving the Army High Command and the Defense Ministry to run for vice president alongside Bolsonaro, Braga Netto ordered the publication of an order of the day to be read to the troops commemorating the military coup of March 31, 1964, as a “historical milestone in the political evolution of Brazil” against “the anti-democratic ideals of the communist uprising.”

10th COVID wave now surging in the US, amid total silence in the corporate media

Bill Shaw

The latest wastewater surveillance data show that the COVID-19 pandemic has entered its tenth wave in the United States. Last week’s spike in wastewater was the highest percentage increase in transmission in almost three years, though these figures could be revised downwards and the full severity of the wave will only become clear in the coming weeks. One reason for the rapid jump appears to be a later start for the “winter surge” than is typical, and thus the virus could be quickly rising to a level that has now become typical for this time of year.

The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) model estimates that 1.6 percent of Americans are presently infected and capable of transmitting the virus to others. That is 1 in 64 people and represents nearly 750,000 new COVID-19 cases per day. That means that on a flight of 100 people, there is an 80 percent chance that at least one person is infectious; on a flight of 300 people that rises to a 99 percent chance.

[Photo by Dr. Michael Hoerger, PMC]

This level of transmission exceeds the levels for 73 percent of the duration of the pandemic to date. Given the known incidence of Long COVID, the current levels of transmission are generating an estimated 200,000 new cases of Long COVID per week.

Not a word about this latest COVID-19 wave has been uttered by the Biden administration or any major outlet in the corporate media. The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.

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The PMC model projects that the current winter surge could peak between New Year’s Day and January 7. Because COVID-19 transmission followed a completely different pattern in 2024 than any other year of the pandemic, it is more difficult to forecast transmission during the current surge. This year’s summer surge was unusually late and sustained, while also declining abnormally rapidly, and the lull between the summer and winter surges was atypically long.

The latest data on test positivity and emergency department visits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show both these indicators on the increase. Hospitalizations and deaths are typically lagging indicators, and although they have not yet increased, they are likely to rise as well in the coming week or two.

The new XEC variant continues to increase as a percentage of COVID-19 infections, now estimated at 44 percent, compared to 33 percent a week ago. It is now the most common variant, having surpassed the KP3.1.1 variant per the most recent data.

Given the total absence of governmental support for the renovation of infrastructure to ensure that indoor air is purified in public spaces, the only defenses against COVID-19 continue to be vaccines and non-pharmaceutical measures, such as social distancing and masking. Vaccination additionally protects against the most adverse outcomes of COVID-19, including death and hospitalization, while providing moderate protection against Long COVID.

Unfortunately, misinformation coupled with the potential expense of paying for a costly vaccine have resulted in extremely low vaccination rates for COVID-19. Per the latest CDC data, only 21.0 percent of American adults reported that they have received the latest vaccine released at the beginning of the Fall. Coverage of children is even worse at 10.6 percent, or approximately half the rate of adults.

Dr. Alexander Sloboda, medical director of immunizations for the Chicago Department of Public Health, said:

There’s still a lot of misinformation, disinformation, particularly around the COVID vaccine, so just trying to overcome the misinformation, disinformation that’s out there with correct information is what we’re trying to do. Obviously, it’s a kind of an uphill battle.

In another development this week related to the science of COVID-19 treatment, a study from 2020 that purported to show that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment was finally retracted. According to the journal’s retraction notice, the paper was pulled because of ethical transgressions and major flaws in methodology.

Even though numerous scientists immediately spotted and exposed the flaws of the study, it took four years of campaigning before the journal editors finally relented and retracted the paper this month. In fact, a lead author on the study, Didier Raoult, at one point threatened legal action against the whistleblowers who challenged the study. One of the journal editors was a co-author of the study, likely a factor in the long time period between the paper being discredited and it being retracted.

The scientific discourse over the study included subsequent identification of additional serious methodological flaws in 2023. Recently, three of the study’s authors wrote a letter to the journal requesting a retraction, acknowledging that no confidence could be placed in the “results” and stating explicitly that they no longer wished to be associated with the paper.

Notably, Raoult has so far had 28 papers retracted, including this one. Raoult leads the French Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU). Overall, 32 papers authored by IHU members, including Raoult, have been retracted. Investigations are underway on at least 100 more papers by this group, mostly due to concerns that the studies violated ethical standards.

The discredited hydroxychloroquine study spawned massive misinformation promoting the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. The most infamous episodes involved then-President Donald Trump, who in a period of two months in 2020 made 11 tweets about unproven therapies for COVID-19 and mentioned them 65 times in White House briefings. Trump repeatedly referenced this now-retracted study, even after it had been discredited. During that time, purchases of hydroxychloroquine on Amazon surged by 200 percent.

With Trump returning to the presidency and having nominated a slate of anti-science quacks to every public health-related leadership position in the federal government—overseen by the notorious purveyor of anti-vaccine disinformation Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the working class must heighten its vigilance against medical misinformation and follow the advice of principled scientists. Any one of Trump’s nominees is damaging, but collectively it will be catastrophic when their pseudo-science becomes official policy.

Romania’s Constitutional Court annuls presidential elections

Andrei Tudora

Romania’s Constitutional Court decided on December 6 to annul the presidential elections, two days before the second round was scheduled to take place. The flagrant trampling upon the result of the vote was intended to block an expected win by Calin Georgescu, a neo-fascist candidate who had expressed skepticism of the war against Russia.

Calin Georgescu, center, an independent candidate for president who won the first round of presidential elections, makes his way, surrounded by media, to a closed voting station after Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the first round of presidential elections, in Mogosoaia, Romania, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. [AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda]

The Constitutional Court had already intervened in October, when it barred the participation in the election of another neo-fascist candidate, Diana Sosoaca. In Sosoaca’s case, the Court claimed that her “public discourse” threatened “the removal of essential guarantees of the state's fundamental values and choices, namely EU and NATO membership.”

The latest Court decision was based on the outgoing president’s declassification of secret service reports purporting to show a Russian “cyber-attack,” ostensibly responsible for Georgescu’s first round win. The reports did not provide any evidence, instead describing the candidate’s social media campaign, claiming it found a modus operandi “consistent with a state actor.” Lacking concrete arguments, the intelligence agencies instead focus on Russia’s supposed intents, which are proven by reciting previous unsubstantiated accusations and even the discussion of the topic of Romanian elections on Russian talk-shows.

Evidence or not, the reporting that followed in international and Romanian media declared the country the victim of a Russian “hybrid attack.”

The election campaign for the run-off was subsequently dominated by an atmosphere of official hysteria. It followed parliamentary elections, held on December 1st, that saw a third of the seats go to far-right parties, with traditional ruling parties—the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and National Liberal Party (PNL)—collapse to historic lows. All the main political parties, as well as editorials, podcasts, actors and universities rallied behind an official pro-EU and pro-NATO campaign, and the country’s “euro-Atlantic Road.”

This campaign was directed not against Georgescu, who was at pains to repeat that he was, in fact, a supporter of both the EU and NATO. It was first of all designed to browbeat widespread working-class opposition to the decades long policies pursued under the aegis of the two organizations.

There was a particularly surreal quality to endless pageants to the economic benefits of the European Union, as vast layers of the population throughout Europe are driven to poverty by price hikes and austerity measures.

In Eastern Europe, the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the subsequent “European road” have produced an unmitigated catastrophe over the past 35 years. All forms of backwardness, anti-communism and national exceptionalism became official state dogmas, as vast swaths of the population were pauperized. Privatizations, mass unemployment and exodus of workers have been accompanied by the degradation of social and cultural life.

Bourgeois democracy, proclaimed by the former bureaucrats in the 1990’s, remained a dead letter. Accession to NATO was marked by the torture of prisoners in CIA torture centers and Romania’s participation in imperialist wars abroad, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the decision of the traditional ruling parties to scrap the election result, while the main electoral alternative to these parties is a fascist, it is evident that bourgeois democracy, or the pretense of it, is rotting on its feet.

Eurostat figures for 2023 give a glimpse of the social wasteland left in the wake of EU integration. 32 percent of the population and 39 percent of children are classified as at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Sixty percent of people cannot afford a 1-week vacation and 23 percent cannot afford a meal with meat every other day.

Eurostat figures show 16 percent of youth are early leavers form education or training, while the Romanian Education Ministry admits to almost a third of youth were missing from the education system in the 2022-2023 school year. The number of youths that are neither in education nor in training is the highest in the EU, at 19.3 percent. According to National Statistics Institute, Romania has a 22 percent youth unemployment rate.

After the unprecedented gesture by the Constitutional Court, the main political parties are preparing for a large national unity government formed by the “pro-European parties,” a government that is set to carry out a ruthless policy of austerity and preparations for war with Russia.

President Iohannis, who will remain in office until at least the spring of next year, succinctly expressed the concerns of the Romanian ruling class: “I am saying this for the economy, for the investors, the financial markets, I am saying this for the EU. Romania remains a secure and solid ally, and I believe it is very important that we all know that Romania is not in any difficulty.”

The crisis in Romania reflects developments internationally, a broad realignment of bourgeois politics in line with the level of the international crisis. The new Government will be one of war against Russia and class war at home.

The EU has vowed to take measures against the “Chinese platform” Tik Tok, while both EU and US officials rushed to support the machinations of the Romanian establishment against the supposed Russia’s “hybrid war.”

Rather than the hallmarks of a “Russian operation,” the rise of Georgescu appears as the work of a section of the Romanian establishment that emulates the far-right movements cultivated by Trump supporters around the world. The fascist AUR party, to which Georgescu’s name is associated, attempted as far back as December 2021 a copy-cat attack on the Romanian Parliament building modeled on US President Donald Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021, on the US Capitol.

On December 8, Romanian police arrested 20 men headed for the capital, Bucharest, in possession of various weapons and explosives. The individuals were part of a paramilitary group headed by Horatiu Potra, a former mercenary and owner of a private military company. Potra, a far right activist and local politician with ties to mainstream parties, was featured prominently during the campaign as Georgescu’s bodyguard.

Sources close to the investigation told Romanian media that Potra’s men had prepared a list of journalists and politicians to be intimidated or attacked if Georgescu won the presidency. Other far right networks with ties to Georgescu have come to prominence in recent weeks, and Roma rights activists and public personalities received death threats. One of financial backers of the campaign, a crypto-currency mogul from the city of Brasov, directly compared his role to that played by oligarch Elon Musk in Trump’s campaign.

Georgescu also received support on social media from Musk and from Trump’s son, who ranted on X/Twitter about a “Soros/Marxist attempt at rigging the outcome & denying the will of the people.”

The networks linking Georgescu to international financial and fascist circles show that the antidemocratic decision to cancel his first-round victory will not stop the rise of far-right forces in Romania. While it seems likely that Georgescu will not be allowed to stand again, his networks will be reabsorbed into the fascist milieu that controls a third of the country’s parliament and that is now effectively the only opposition force in the legislature.