Tire workers die of COVID in Argentina after pseudo-left-led union enforces return to work

Andrea Lobo

In a matter of five days last week, two workers at the tire factory of the Argentine company FATE died of COVID-19 after the Tire Worker Union (SUTNA) led by the Partido Obrero (PO; Workers Party) collaborated with management and the Peronist government to keep the plant operating despite growing outbreaks.

Víctor Sotelo, 42, passed away on Tuesday and Javier Gimenez died on Saturday, both due to COVID-19.

FATE plant at San Fernando (Wikimedia Commons)

Workers immediately called attention to the SUTNA’s responsibility, with one writing on the union’s Facebook page, “Gentlemen, adopt different measures; don’t come looking for votes from your co-workers, they are risking their lives and those of their families. I’m greatly saddened by what happened to Javier, a great friend and co-worker who passed away today from Covid…”

With hundreds more that have been infected at the FATE, Pirelli and Bridgestone plants where the SUTNA is present, the pandemic has exploded the claims of the Partido Obrero and its pseudo-left partners in the union leadership that they represent a “combative,” “left” and even “revolutionary” alternative to the right-wing Peronist bureaucrats that dominate the Argentine unions.

At the service of the multinationals and the Argentine oligarch and owner of FATE, Javier Madanes Quintanilla (whose net worth was listed as $1.6 billion in 2018), the SUTNA and its pseudo-left leaders used their radical phraseology as a tool to better suppress opposition among workers to keeping the factories during almost the entire pandemic.

This week, beyond a minute of silence for Giménez, the union refused to even shut down the plant where there is clearly an ongoing outbreak.

Just like the openly right-wing unions, the SUTNA not only failed to mention that Gimenez died of COVID-19 in its official statement, but the union did not even report the death of Sotelo, who worked as a contractor for a third party.

While competing for the SUTNA leadership from the Partido Obrero, even the union officials that belong to the Morenoite Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS; Socialist Workers Party) have joined the union’s secretary general Alejandro Crespo, a longtime Partido Obrero official, in seeking to deflect blame from the union.

On Saturday, the PTS members of the SUTNA Steering Committee, Victor Ottoboni and Enzo Pozi, along with the union delegate at FATE, Hernán Minguez, wrote a piece reporting both deaths and indicating that Giménez got infected inside the plant.

“The position adopted by the national leadership of the SUTNA and the San Fernando branch, controlled by the [PO-led] Black List was to guarantee production,” they wrote, adding that the union “does not place as its first priority protecting the lives and health of the families of its members and does everything possible to prevent disrupting production.”

The original article taken down by the PTS

Without providing any explanation, the PTS website, La Izquierda Diario, took down the article shortly after it was posted and uploaded a new version on Sunday without the above-cited passages or any mention of the active role of the union in herding workers into the plant. Instead, the article complains of the “lack of intervention” by the union and its “grave error” in not convoking an assembly of members and a meeting of the Steering Committee this month—a complaint that shamelessly seeks to provide an alibi for the PTS and other forces on the Steering Committee.

After over a year of keeping the plant open, the PTS union officials cynically write that “tires are not only nonessential, but these companies have enough stock for months.” They add, “many co-workers think that we should not be working.”

Instead of fighting for these demands of the rank-and-file, however, the PTS officials ultimately propose another avenue that may ultimately be acceptable to the corporations: a 15-day shutdown to disinfect the plant and test all workers, only to send them back into the factories under the promise of vaccinations.

While mouthing slogans about “workplace democracy” and opposing the union bureaucracy, the Argentine pseudo-left organized in the PO and PTS and their electoral alliance, the so-called Left Workers Front (FIT), have been thoroughly exposed by the pandemic. Constituting an instrument for preventing workers from freeing themselves from the shackles of the union bureaucracy and their pro-corporate policies, they have assumed a direct role in enforcing a policy of mass social murder.

While the SUTNA leadership seeks to pin the blame solely on the government, the union’s drive to reopen began last April 2020, even before the government lifted its brief and initial lockdown.

Last year, bowing to pressures by the corporate and financial oligarchy, Peronist President Alberto Fernández ordered the gradual reopening of workplaces starting on April 13, while extending the official “quarantine” until April 26. It sought to mask this homicidal policy by asking companies to demonstrate that they could “guarantee the isolation and distancing among workers” before re-opening.

Anticipating this, the SUTNA leader Alejandro Crespo issued an open letter as early as April 3, 2020, with a short protocol “to re-start the activity in conditions that will protect the health of all workers.”

The measures did not go beyond those that were already proving to be fatally inadequate at workplaces all over the world. The list included temperature screening; distancing rules in the entrances, workstations, changing rooms and transportation; frequent cleaning; masking; hand sanitizer; sending workers home with symptoms and notifying workers about positive cases.

While knowingly endangering the lives of workers for profits, the Partido Obrero repeatedly declared in its publications, union and party activities that the SUTNA protocol provided an example for the “safe” reopening of other nonessential workplaces, most recently of schools. As the Partido Obrero wrote last August, when the government was initiating its campaign to reopen schools, “The solution to this crisis is easily implemented and with effective results: safety protocols in every workplace and activity… just like the SUTNA comrades have been doing.”

A few days earlier, on August 5, a FATE worker wrote on the union’s Facebook page that these measures “are worthless. More than 50 infected. The only thing that can save us is to shut down the factory for a while.”

Whenever anger surged over infections, however, the SUTNA implemented one-day “Hollywood” strikes as a safety valve, while isolating the tire workers from other sectors in Argentina and internationally facing the same situation. To no effect, a mere 24-hour strike was even carried out when Bridgestone fired two workers in January to intimidate growing opposition over the refusal of the company to even follow the existing protocols.

Last August 14, with a euphemism worthy of management, the Partido Obrero wrote that these partial strikes had achieved “the isolation of more than 700 cases” at the tire factories.

Most recently, on May 20, 2021, the government decreed a new “lockdown” while classifying several manufacturing sectors as “essential,” but not tire production. This measure was not taken until daily cases and deaths in the country had already increased fivefold since March.

Workers refused to work on Friday, May 21, only to be ordered by the union to return to work after a “lightning hearing” with Pirelli, Bridgestone and FATE, along with government officials.

In a cynical statement dated May 23, after the government issued a special decree to include tire production as “essential,” the SUTNA rushed to place the responsibility for future infections and deaths on the workers themselves.

“In these complex times, all tire co-workers must keep acting with the greatest responsibility and compromise, understanding that the worker’ organization is the one that has guaranteed (and will continue to guarantee) the safety, purchasing power, respect and interests of all workers in the tire union,” the SUTNA wrote.

This statement greatly angered the workers, with several expressing on social media the need to shut down the plant and denouncing SUTNA for betraying them. “Health is what matters now; we must stay home; there are infections every day at the factories. It takes them a weekend to turn the tables against workers,” one wrote on the union’s Facebook page.

Facing this growing opposition within the plant, the SUTNA unwisely took a page from their FIT “comrades” in the teachers’ unions, who have been using the demand of priority vaccinations to enforce a homicidal return to school policy.

Similarly, the SUTNA posted a series of illustrations demanding vaccines for their members, but workers were quick to identify this not only as an attempt by the union to deflect responsibility, but also to divide the tire workers from workers in other sectors.

A FATE worker, Anibal, wrote, “Even immunized, we could still take the virus to our homes. That already happened to a lot of us!” Another commenter wrote, “Truck delivery drivers like me are also essential and we are out on the streets every day without a vaccine.” And another added: “What is the difference with my husband who works in construction or my sons-in-law, or those in the markets, etc. etc… all of us workers are in the same situation.”

Macron in Rwanda: French imperialism covers past crimes to prepare new ones

Will Morrow

On Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a carefully prepared keynote speech in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to address the role of France in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The genocide, carried out by a regime backed by France, saw the extermination of between 800,000 and one million people, mainly from the country’s Tutsi ethnic minority.

Macron spoke alongside his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame. His trip to Kigali was part of an effort to strengthen French interests and diplomatic relations in Rwanda, under conditions of a growing struggle for influence in the region. Kagame and Macron announced that a French ambassador to the country would be named for the first time since 2006, when diplomatic relations completely broke down between the two countries, after a French judge had ordered the arrest of Kagame and other leading Rwandan government officials.

Rwandan Genocide Murambi skulls in Murambi Technical School (Wikimedia Commons)

Macron’s speech was a cynical attempt at historical obfuscation and falsification. On the one hand, he was compelled, given the mass of evidence of French backing to the government that carried out the genocide, to acknowledge that France “has a role, a history and political responsibility toward Rwanda” and had remained “in fact on the side of a genocidal regime.” He referred to an “overwhelming responsibility” of France in the genocide.

However, he falsely presented this as being the unintended consequence of French efforts to prevent civil war in the country, and a failure to appreciate the warnings of international observers as to what was taking place in time. According to this absurd presentation, the French intelligence agencies were simply unaware of what was already being documented by international human rights observers.

“In wanting to prevent a regional conflict or a civil war, France remained in fact on the side of a genocidal regime,” Macron claimed. “Ignoring the warnings of the most lucid observers, France bore an overwhelming responsibility for the downward spiral which led to the worst, even as it sought to prevent it,” he said.

France was therefore “not complicit,” Macron declared. He argued that this was so simply because French soldiers did not actively carry out any sectarian massacres. Macron therefore chose not to make any formal apology on behalf of the French state in the genocide. His presentation was essentially the same as that of former right-wing Republican President Nicolas Sarkozy, the first French president to visit Kigali since 1994. Sarkozy referred to “grave errors” and “a form of blindness” by French authorities which had “absolutely dramatic” consequences.

Macron’s speech was immediately hailed by almost the entire French political establishment. Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his Unsubmissive France deputy Bastien Lachaud wrote that they “share the formulation of the French president… Admitting the responsibility of the French government at the time of Rwanda is a very important thing. Drawing the lessons for the future of our relations in Africa is another that is just as important.” In an open appeal to anti-African neo-colonial racism, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, criticized Macron for being excessively apologetic.

Mélenchon’s reference to “our [future] relations in Africa” points to the real motivation for Macron’s speech. French imperialism has been involved in a decade of escalating wars and interventions across Africa as part of a scramble for influence and control over the resource-rich and geostrategically important region.

This included the 2011 war in Libya that overthrew Moammar Gaddafi, and the 2013 invasion of Mali and the Sahel. Mali neighbours critical uranium supplies used for French energy production, and is located near one of the largest gold supplies in the world. France and Germany in particular are now escalating their interventions throughout Africa, particularly fearful over the growth of Chinese influence in the region.

The lie that France was not complicit in the Rwandan genocide is critical to the French ruling class, because its exposure discredits the fraudulent arguments that French imperialist operations across Africa are “humanitarian” interventions aimed at protecting the local population.

The Rwandan genocide was one of the great imperialist crimes of the 20th century. Its origins lay in the struggles among the colonial powers to carve up and subvert Africa. Beginning with its control over the country in 1916, Belgium used what were previously largely historical social groupings, the Hutu and Tutsi, to divide and control the population, elevating the Tutsi minority into power. With the growth of its influence in the country from the 1960s onwards after Rwanda’s official independence, France continued to back the largely Hutu government.

France provided military and economic support to the Rwandan government, including the deployment of French troops, arms, and training to the Rwandan army, including in the immediate lead-up to the genocide. In the period of 1990-1994, there were already mass arrests, torture and executions of predominately Tutsi opponents by the Rwandan army.

In their 2020 book, The French state and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, Raphaël Doridant and François Graner document the ethnic killings that were already taking place beginning in 1990, under the government of Juvénal Habyarimana. Sections of the military and regime were already calling publicly for the liquidation of the entire Tutsi population. A team of international human rights observers produced a report in January 1993 pointing to the large-scale ethnically targeted killings taking place.

Throughout this period, French Socialist Party President Francois Mittérand maintained and escalated its backing for Habyarimana and its military intervention in the country. French officers were attached to Rwandan army units. Following Habyarimana’s assassination, which was the starting point for the genocide, France launched a new military intervention, providing safe passage out of the country, including to many perpetrators of the genocide.

France was determined to maintain its backing for the Rwandan regime against the Rwandan People’s Front (RPF), a largely Tutsi armed group led at the time by Paul Kagame. Kagame was trained in the United States, and the RPF was stationed in neighbouring Uganda, a key US ally, which permitted the RPF to operate from its territory as it waged a civil war for control of Rwanda. Quite directly, the Rwandan genocide was the product of the imperialist struggle between France and the United States over influence within the region, which France regarded as critical for the maintenance of French control in Africa.

Even today, many participants in the genocide continue to reside peacefully in France. Victims’ associations have provided the names of 30 perpetrators but have been stonewalled by French authorities. Last year, one of the main financiers of the genocide, Félicien Kabuga, was arrested in the Asnières-sur-Seine suburbs around Paris, where he had apparently been able to live peacefully for decades.

Following his speech on Thursday, Macron evaded questions from journalists as to whether he would now more vigorously pursue the arrest of participants in the genocide who live in France. Clearly there is no interest in the French political establishment for public trials of former French allies about their role in the genocide.

The Rwandan genocide is an exposure, at the same time, of the criminal pro-imperialist character of the official “left” of France. Francois Mitterand, the head of the Socialist Party government, which was complicit in the slaughter, was supported by the entire “left” in France, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was a protégé of Mitterand. The genocide is a sharp warning of the horrific crimes that French imperialism is capable in the pursuit of its predatory interests. Macron’s speech in Kigali was above all aimed at preparing for new and even more catastrophic interventions by French imperialism to defend its interests, and crimes on an even greater scale.

Mass grave with 215 bodies found at Canadian “Indian” residential school

Carl Bronski

The bodies of 215 indigenous children have been found in a mass grave on the grounds of the now closed Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. This horrifying discovery is yet further evidence of the brutality and inhumanity of Canada’s state-sponsored residential school system, which lasted into the 1970s and was aimed at eradicating indigenous culture and transforming Native children into a pliant workforce for Canadian capitalism.

Kamloops Residential School Memorial in Vancouver. May 30th 2021 (Wikimedia Commons)

Local indigenous people, including school survivors, waged a decades-long campaign for an investigation of the Kamloops school grounds. Last Thursday Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc people of southcentral British Columbia released a preliminary report.

To date 215 corpses, some of children as young as three years old, have been identified through ground penetrating radar. Their deaths were never documented. Casimir said more bodies may be discovered as other parts of the grounds remain to be searched. Similar grisly discoveries, albeit never on this scale, have been made over the years at other former residential school sites. Native leaders have described the Kamloops mass grave as “the tip of the iceberg.”

Community members have brought flowers and other mementos to the Kamloops school site. In Vancouver, artists lined up 215 pairs of tiny shoes on the steps of the city’s Art Gallery to remember the children and the crimes committed against them. Their action has inspired similar tiny-shoe memorials to spring up in cities and towns across the country. These largely spontaneous actions demonstrate the widespread horror and disgust among the population of all ethnic backgrounds to the mistreatment and abuse the Native population has suffered at the hands of the Canadian capitalist state.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest in the entire residential school system, was established in 1890 under the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, which ran it until 1969. It was then taken over by the federal government as a day school until its closure in 1978. Over the years, school survivors have provided detailed eyewitness accounts of the malnourishment, disease and systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse to which they and other children who had been taken from their parents were subjected.

For over 100 years, a system of Indian residential schools operated in Canada under financial and administrative arrangements between the Government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United Churches. In all, over 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children passed through more than 130 residential schools in virtually every part of the country. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 former students of residential schools are alive today.

The residential school system was established in 1876 under the notorious Indian Act, shortly after Confederation, the deal put together by railway promoters, bankers, corrupt politicians and British colonial officials whereby the principal colonies of British North America were united in an autonomous federal state. Funded by the Department of Indian Affairs and run by the churches, these schools were integral to achieving one of Confederation’s principal aims—annexing and establishing the dominance of capitalist property relations in what are today the four western provinces.

In the ensuing decades, the Canadian ruling elite dispossessed the native peoples of western Canada of their lands through a combination of repression, starvation and mass killings. Native peoples were herded onto “reserves,” while their children were taken away and placed in residential schools under the so-called “civilizing” influence of the churches and other state agents. The last of these schools closed in 1996.

The schools were modelled on youth reformatories and jails. Children were collected from their parents, sometimes at Royal Canadian Mounted Police gunpoint, and cut off from their families. Once delivered to the schools, they were subjected to a controlled and brutally disciplined environment that combined religious instruction with some basic skills training. They were subjected to humiliating and dehumanizing treatment so as to eradicate the influence of Native culture and inculcate obedience.

Children were routinely beaten for speaking their native language and berated as “stupid Indians.” The system was designed by the government to be self-sustaining, i.e., to cost it no money. Much of the “school day” was given over to backbreaking chores, including working in the fields. Yet food and school books were scarce and rationed. Little to no medical care was provided to the children. This, along with the barrack-style housing conditions and inferior food, contributed to the rampant spread of tuberculosis at the schools, especially prior to 1950.

Testimony from school survivors reveal the full extent of the horrors visited upon Native children by Church administrators backed by the might of the Canadian state. Here is one such account:

“I went to residential school in Muscowequan from 1944 to 1949, and I had a rough life. I was mistreated in every way. There was a young girl, and she was pregnant from a priest there. And what they did, she had her baby, and they took the baby, and wrapped it up in a nice pink outfit, and they took it downstairs where I was cooking dinner with the nun. And they took the baby into the furnace room, and they threw that little baby in there and burned it alive. All you could hear was this little cry, like ‘Uuh!’ and that was it. You could smell that flesh cooking.”

In 2015, a WSWS report summarizing the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the Canadian government established due to pressure from school survivors and their supporters noted:

Between “5,000 and 7,000 children died whilst in the custody of these residential schools from disease, malnutrition, fires, suicide and physical abuse. Many were buried even without a name recorded. Parents were not notified as a matter of course. … Healthy children were consciously placed in dormitories with children suffering from tuberculosis. Sick and dying children were forced to attend class and sit up in church. Malnutrition was rampant. Testimony from school survivors recounted how hungry children would raid the slop-buckets of livestock for additional sustenance.”

The residential school system was only one part of a broad-based policy to repress and dispossess the aboriginal peoples. An overt policy of starvation was used to drive First Nations from their ancestral lands on the Prairies. Treaty rights were unilaterally abrogated by the Canadian government. “Pass Laws” were enacted that made it illegal for indigenous people to leave the reserve without the approval of the government’s Indian agent. Authorities from South Africa tasked with framing their own system of apartheid were so impressed by Canadian policy towards the aboriginal peoples that they based elements of their own racist system on it. Only in 1960 were “status Indians” granted the right to vote and other basic citizenship rights.

Responding to the discovery of the mass grave, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett described the residential school system as part of “a shameful colonial policy.”

The shedding of crocodile tears by leading representatives of Canadian imperialism should fool no one. Their attempts to portray the horrific discovery at the Kamloops Indian Residential School as the “legacy of colonialism” are a sham. In reality, references to “colonialism” or “settler-colonialism” in the abstract are designed to blame the entire population or so-called “white society,” for crimes, including genocide, that were perpetrated by Canadian capitalism. In so doing, they absolve the profit system of its responsibility for the horrors inflicted on the Native peoples.

Along with this, Trudeau, his Liberal government, the trade union-backed NDP and much of the corporate media are promoting a reactionary “native reconciliation” agenda, which behind phony rhetoric about “justice” and “respect” aims to “reconcile” the native population to continuing Canadian capitalist oppression. It consists of granting a narrow strata of privileged indigenous professionals and business people, many of them associated with the Assembly of First Nations or other state supported groups, increased access to positions of power in the institutions of the capitalist state or on the boards of major energy, mining and other resource companies.

The crimes committed against First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples were not accidental or incidental to the consolidation of the Canadian nation-state and Canadian “democracy.” On the contrary, they arose from the very nature of Canadian capitalism, from the clash between capitalist private property and the communal social relations of indigenous society.

The legacy of the Canadian state’s violent dispossession of the Native people reverberates to this day, both in isolated Native communities in the north and in many of the poorest neighbourhoods of major Canadian cities like Winnipeg and Vancouver. Native life expectancy is 15 years shorter than that of other Canadians. More than half of all Native children live in poverty. HIV and AIDS rates are higher on some western reserves than in the most vulnerable of African countries. In the far north, diseases such as tuberculosis are rampant in some communities. Overcrowding in dilapidated homes is endemic. Almost half of all residences on reserves require urgent, major repairs.

Education opportunities are deplorable—fewer than 50 percent of students on reserves graduate from high school. For decades the federally-funded schools on Native reserves received 30 percent less funding per capita than other Canadian schools; and, despite promises by the Trudeau government to raise funding to the national average, a substantial funding gap remains. Numerous native communities do not have access to potable water, with boil water advisories still in effect, in scores of the 631 reserves at any given time. Incarceration rates for aboriginals are nine times the national average. A Native youth is more likely to go to prison than get a high school diploma. Although they make up less than 5 percent of Canada’s population, 25 percent of those held in federal prisons are aboriginal.

Poverty conditions are not restricted to those living on reserves. Natives in urban centres, which comprise about half of the rapidly growing 1.7 million Native population, have the country’s highest unemployment rates, second only to the rates for Native reserves. Nationwide, about 50 percent of First Nations people and Inuit are unemployed.

These disastrous social conditions have fuelled mounting protests in recent years, from the Idle No More movement to the Wet’suwet’en protests and railway blockades of early 2020. The Canadian capitalist state has responded with its customary ruthlessness and brutality, including by deploying armed police against demonstrators and surveilling First Nations communities.

During the Wet’suwet’en protests, there were extensive discussions within establishment circles about deploying the military to crush the protest movement—a move that ultimately proved unnecessary. The Canadian ruling elite’s readiness to employ savage repression against the indigenous population is of a piece with its growing assault on the democratic rights of all working people, including the systematic criminalization, through anti-strike laws and police violence, of social opposition from the working class.

The terrible plight of Canada’s First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples underscores the pressing need for the working class to advance a socialist program to abolish the system of capitalist private property, which has been at the root of the oppression of the Native population in Canada for the past 150 years. Rejecting all attempts to pit working people against each other along national or ethnic lines, the working class must fight to secure the social and democratic rights of all of the oppressed, of which Canada’s indigenous population is the most vulnerable section.

PSOE-Podemos debates pardon for Catalan-nationalist political prisoners

Alejandro López

In the coming weeks, the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is expected to offer pardons to nine Catalan separatist leaders, fraudulently sentenced to between nine and thirteen years in jail over their role in the October 1, 2017, Catalan secessionist referendum.

Last week, anticipating a report on the pardons by Spain’s Supreme Court, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at a press conference in Brussels that “vengeance and revenge” are not among the “constitutional values” he defends. Instead, in reference to pardons, he defended “concord, understanding, dialogue and respect for the law.”

Jordi Cuixart, Catalan nationalist leader (Wikimedia Commons)

In the coming week, Sánchez has continued to imply the pardons will be offered in the coming weeks. Yesterday, he said “We will make the decision in conscience, not thinking of those affected but of the millions and millions of Catalans and Spaniards who want to live in peace.”

The discussion over pardons, however, has nothing to do with “peace” and “dialogue.” It is part of back-door negotiations between factions of the ruling class in Madrid spearheaded by PSOE and Podemos, backed by liberal media outlets like El País, and the Catalan nationalist forces ruling the region, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Together for Catalonia, over the disbursement of billions of euros in European Union bailout funds and attacks on the working class to pay for it.

It comes barely weeks after the PSOE-Podemos government submitted the “Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan” to the European Commission on how Madrid will disburse billions of euros to its banks and corporations. It also came on the same week that all 27 EU countries ratified the legal instrument that underpins the bailout fund, paving the way for money to reach national governments by July.

Spain’s regions will play a prominent part in the disbursement of the funds. In 2021, it is expected that the regions will manage around 54 percent of Madrid’s allocated bailout fund, around 18.7 billion euros. Catalonia is the second region on the list.

The bailout funds from Brussels are soaked in blood. Last July, as European governments ended the initial lockdown imposed across much of Europe in the spring of 2020 due to a wave of wildcat strikes across Italy that spread to other countries, including Spain, France and Britain, they designed multi-trillion-euro bailouts, transferring mass amounts of public wealth to the financial aristocracy.

While they all shouted in unison that there was no money for a shelter-at-home policy against the virus, including subsidizing workers and small business, they agreed to funnel €750 billion to the banks and corporations, and bank bailouts of €1.25 trillion from the European Central Bank, along with a new seven-year €1 trillion EU budget. Spain was one of the most benefitted, receiving €140 billion.

The initial price to be paid was the reopening of the economy and opening schools, prioritising profits over human lives. What the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson blurted out bitterly, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” became the official EU policy.

So far, it has cost the lives of over 1.1 million people throughout Europe. Meanwhile, as millions of workers suffered hardship, unemployment, poverty, mass death, social isolation, mourning and suffering, European billionaires reaped $1 trillion according to Forbes.

Capitalist governments are preparing a new round of austerity against the claims of the trade unions and pseudo-left forces like Podemos that these funds came without “strings attached.” France is preparing to cut unemployment benefits by 240 euros. In Spain, the PSOE-Podemos government is in advanced stages of a pension reform that will extend retirement age, a labour reform making redundancies easier and VAT tax increases affecting disproportionately the working class.

The pardons are an attempt to come to terms with the new Catalan regional government which runs the second wealthiest region in the country. The PSOE-Podemos government has signed up the Catalan nationalists to implement the draconian social cuts that, together with mass deaths, are underwriting this massive bailout of the financial aristocracy and the major corporations.

The Catalan government recently formed by the coalition of the ERC and Together for Catalonia has pledged to implement austerity, attacks on the working class and de-facto abandon secessionism, keeping it for rhetorical purposes only. Its new economy minister is Jaume Giró, a former banker at Caixabank.

The new Catalan regional premier, Pere Aragonès, made clear what was behind the pardon debate. On Wednesday, Aragonès said “Our proposal is an amnesty, but we are also clear that we will not oppose any measure that can alleviate the pain of the prisoners, their families and Catalan society.” He then said that he would phone Sánchez in the coming days to discuss the round table on the Catalan crisis and the management of the European funds.

On Sunday, interviewed by the Catalan nationalist daily ARA, Aragonès insisted that his government’s priority was the bailout funds. He said it “is one of the issues that will be on the agenda of my meeting with the Prime Minister of the Spanish government. The distribution would have to be according to objective criteria and, if this is the case, Catalonia will obtain an important part of the resources.”

The Basque Nationalists are now starting to demand a new arrangement with Madrid, to have greater access to the funds. On Sunday, the president of the Basque Nationalist Party Andoni Ortuzar which rules the wealthy Basque Country told El Correo that pardons “are not enough.” He wanted the PSOE-Podemos government to talk “clearly about the problem that the Spanish state has with its territorial model” and called for a new Basque statute which establishes the main competences it has vis a vis Madrid.

Workers and youth must be warned that these pardons will not lessen the fascistic anti-Catalan campaign.

In its contemporary form, Catalan separatism arose out of the 2008 economic crisis which blew up the class tensions of the post-Franco regime. After Madrid’s courts made clear that Catalonia’s regional powers would be limited in 2010, Catalan nationalists responded by whipping up Catalan separatism while implementing billions of euros in cuts. These tensions exploded in 2017, when Madrid seized on the pseudo referendum organised by the Catalan nationalists to shift rapidly to the right, implementing a mass crackdown, whipping up Spanish chauvinism and rehabilitating Francoism.

With wall-to-wall media coverage, the direct product of this was fascist Vox, which although representing little less than 15 percent of the vote, is increasingly dictating the national agenda of the PSOE-Podemos government as evidenced in the deployment of the army to illegally expel tens of thousands of migrants and children. The funneling of billions of euros to the financial aristocracy on the backs of the workers, while implementing mass attacks and curtailing democratic rights, will only intensify class tensions.

The pardons are already being seized upon by the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and fascist Vox to further their coup plots to bring down the PSOE-Podemos government and instal a right-wing authoritarian police state regime. On Sunday, 13 June, they are organising a demonstration in Madrid against the pardons. The PP has also started collecting signatures among the population.

In this they will be aided by the Supreme Court which has emerged in the past year as a bastion of the rehabilitation of fascism and the chief executioner of the anti-Catalan campaign. Last week it gave its consultative opinion on the pardons describing them as “unacceptable.” The same judicial institution which accepted pardons for condemned coup plotters in the 1981 fascist coup, is now declaring that pardons are not possible because the jailed Catalan nationalists are not “repentant of their crimes.” It also stated that it would be a “self-pardon” because the Catalan nationalists supported the installation of a PSOE-Podemos government in parliament.

New COVID-19 variant in Vietnam highlights global danger

Mike Head

Vietnam’s government reported last Saturday that a highly-infectious new COVID-19 strain, a hybrid between the Indian and UK variants, is responsible for a sudden rapid spread of the disease across many parts of the country.

Until recently, Vietnam was regarded as successful, in avoiding the global pandemic, as were other countries in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Thailand, which also are now suffering serious outbreaks.

Vietnamese people registered for COVID-19 rapid testing in Hanoi, 18 April, 2020 (Wikimedia Commons)

Vietnam’s announcement highlights the reality that no country is “safe” from the worldwide resurgence of the virus. New, more transmissible and deadly mutations, which may not be effectively curtailed by existing vaccines, have been able to emerge because governments around the world have repeatedly prioritised corporate profit over public health and lives.

The rush to satisfy the demands of big business, by prematurely lifting public health restrictions and fully reopening workplaces, combined with inadequate vaccination programs and quarantine facilities, has created the conditions for millions more people to die, or suffer severe illness in coming months.

Vietnam’s Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long told an online media conference on Saturday that the new hybrid strain had taken the number of variants active in Vietnam to eight. The previous seven were B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7—the variant first identified in the UK—B.1.351, A.23.1 and B.1.617.2—the one detected in India.

Long said recent outbreaks had seen the virus spreading quickly in the air, particularly in narrow, unventilated spaces. “The new variant is very dangerous,” he said. Laboratory cultures of the variant showed the virus replicated itself very quickly, possibly explaining why many new cases had appeared in a short period of time in 30 of the country’s 63 municipalities and provinces.

More than half of the 6,396 COVID-19 cases reported in Vietnam, since the pandemic began, have been found in the past month, according to Johns Hopkins University. So far, there have been 47 deaths—12 of them during May.

Industrial workers are being worst affected. Most of the new transmissions were found in Bac Ninh and Bac Giang, two provinces with numerous industrial zones, where hundreds of thousands of people work for major companies, including Samsung, Canon and Luxshare, a partner in assembling Apple products. One company in Bac Giang discovered that one fifth of its 4,800 workers had tested positive for the virus.

In Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest metropolis and home to 13 million, the city administration is now planning to test all residents, setting a target of 100,000 tests a day, but that will take weeks.

Vietnam’s government has since ordered a nationwide ban on all religious events, while keeping factories open. In major cities, authorities have prohibited large gatherings, and closed public parks and non-essential businesses, including restaurants, bars, clubs and spas.

Like many poorer countries, Vietnam is struggling to secure vaccines from the international pharmaceutical giants. The government so far has vaccinated only 1 million of its 96 million people with AstraZeneca shots. Last week, it signed a deal with Pfizer for 30 million doses, which will not be delivered until the third and fourth quarters of this year.

The government is also in talks with Moderna, while seeking to secure 10 million vaccine doses under the World Health Organisation-backed COVAX cost-sharing scheme. It is negotiating as well with Russia to produce the Sputnik V vaccine and working on a home-grown vaccine.

An even worse disaster is already underway in Malaysia. It managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic last year, but suffered a second wave in January-February, and has been hit by more infectious variants over the past month. In May alone, more than 1,200 deaths were recorded, compared with 471 during the whole of 2020.

Its authorities reported 9,020 new cases on Saturday, the fifth straight day of record infections, taking the total past 550,000. The number of daily new confirmed cases, per million people in Malaysia, passed the equivalent figure in India a month ago.

The number of daily fatalities has also grown, with a record 98 on May 29, and the toll approaching 2,800. The numbers of patients in intensive care and on ventilators have hit record highs.

According to media reports, some hospitals in Malaysia’s worst-affected areas have run out of mortuary space. At least two have brought in refrigerated goods containers to store the bodies of COVID-19 patients.

After long opposing calls for a national lockdown, saying the country could not afford it, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin performed a partial U-turn last Friday, ordering the shutdown of “non-essential” businesses for at least two weeks, from June 1. In a show of military force, the government will deploy 70,000 troops to enforce the lockdown.

Muhyiddin has placed Malaysia under a state of emergency since January, supposedly to curb the spread of the virus, suspending parliament and essentially putting an end to political activities. However, the inoculation rollout has been slow. About 1.7 million of the country’s 32 million people had received at least one dose of a vaccine by last Thursday.

During the lockdown, millions of workers will be kept on the job in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector, with 60 percent workforce capacity, despite the rising danger.

An “essential services” list covers factories producing electrical goods and electronics, oil, gas and petrochemicals, chemical products and personal protective equipment, including rubber gloves. Also on the list are food and beverages, aerospace, packaging and printing, health and medical care, personal care and cleaning supplies, as well as banking, palm oil and rubber plantations, agriculture, fishery and livestock.

People in neighbouring Thailand are experiencing a deadly third wave, with the most severe concentrations in factories, construction camps housing migrant workers, densely populated slums and the prisons. More than 2,000 cases were detected at a single factory in Phetchaburi, southwest of Bangkok, more than half of whom were migrant workers from Myanmar.

Thailand too was depicted as a coronavirus success story for most of last year, recording just under 7,000 cases and 60 deaths as 2020 drew to a close. But since April 1, the country has recorded more than 150,000 cases.

The military-backed government officially reported 4,528 new COVID-19 cases and 24 fatalities last Sunday, taking the national death toll to 1,012.

Health authorities say there are currently around 46,000 people with the coronavirus, including 400 on ventilators. Hospitals have been overwhelmed. In one publicised case, Kunlasub Watthanaphol, a well-known video gamer, died on April 23, after repeatedly pleading unsuccessfully via the government’s hotlines and social media for help.

With a prison population estimated at over 307,000—three times larger than the official capacity—the prisons are dangerously overcrowded. On May 17, prisoners made up more than 70 percent of the 9,635 new cases reported nationally that day. At one prison in Chiang Mai, 61 percent of inmates tested positive.

The full scale of the prison catastrophe only came to light after several student activists, involved in anti-government protests last year, and detained on charges of insulting the king, revealed they had tested positive to the virus.

Authorities have belatedly imposed limited restrictions. In Bangkok, schools, entertainment venues, bars, cinemas, gyms, pools, and parks are closed, while office workers are being urged to work from home.

Of Thailand’s population of 66 million, only about 2 million people have received a first vaccination dose and 1 million have received both doses.

The inoculation level is similar in Indonesia, the region’s most populous country, where infections are soaring too and hospitalisations in isolation beds increased by 14.2 percent to 23,488, between May 20 and May 26.

As of last Friday, according to Our World in Data, the vaccination rates in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia were less than half of those in India, which remains an epicentre of the worldwide COVID-19 disaster.

US financial system awash with Fed money

Nick Beams

The extent of the wave of money surging through the US financial system flowing from the ongoing massive financial asset purchases by the Fed, running at an annual rate of more than $1.4 trillion, was underscored last week.

Last Thursday, it was revealed that a facility that allows money market funds to place their surplus cash with the Fed came in at $485.3 billion—an all-time record that eclipsed the previous high of $474.6 billion recorded on New Year’s Eve in 2015.

The parking of nearly half a trillion dollars with the Fed at zero interest was the result of a fall in yields on short-term Treasury bonds to below zero. The yield on short-term Treasury debt had moved into negative territory because the price of the assets has been pushed so high an investor would make a loss if they held them to maturity.

Treasury bills with a maturity of less than one month were reported to be trading at yields of between minus 0.01 and 0.02 points, making the Fed’s reverse repurchase program (RRP) paying zero the better option.

John Canavan, an analyst at Oxford Economics, told the Financial Times (FT): “The surge in demand for the Fed’s RRP operations has been incredible. It is also not over yet.”

Gennadiy Goldberg, a senior analyst at TD Securities in New York said the RRP facility was “the only safety valve” for the pressure building up in money markets and was “just holding back the flood of cash coming.”

The central role of the Fed in the operations of the money markets was highlighted by Priya Misra, the global head of rates strategy at TD Securities.

“The Fed’s role in markets is only growing,” she told the FT. “Clearly the market is not functioning on its own.”

A major component in the massive build-up of dollars in the money markets is the Fed’s asset purchasing program of $120 billion a month, comprising $80 billion of government debt and $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities, that was implemented after the market meltdown in March 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is now growing pressure on the Fed to begin winding back its asset purchases in order to try to restore some degree of “normalcy” to financial markets. The rise in inflation is adding to this pressure but at this stage the Fed is insisting that its extraordinary interventions will continue until it begins to see “substantial improvement” in the economic outlook.

Critics of this stand maintain this improvement is already visible as evidenced by the rise in inflation and a tightening in the labour market. They warn that if the Fed continues with its present policies it will be forced to slam on the monetary brakes, prompting a crisis in the financial markets and possibly triggering a recession.

While there have been calls from some Fed officials for the initiating of a discussion on winding down asset purchases—so-called “tapering”—the majority view is still that inflation effects are “transitory” and the labour market has not fully recovered with employment numbers still 8.2 million below where they were before the pandemic struck.

The fear is that, such is the dependence of financial markets on the supply of cheap money, tapering will set off significant turbulence.

Commenting on the money wave, Subadra Rajappa, a strategist at the French financial firm Société Générale, said: “I don’t think tapering is going to solve this. Tapering is only going to add to the confusion. If they taper asset purchases, it’s going to roil global markets.”

That fear is fueled by experience. In 2013 there was major turbulence in global markets when the then Fed chair Ben Bernanke suggested that the central bank may start to “taper” the purchases of financial assets initiated after the global crisis of 2008.

More recently, at the end of 2018, the stock market experienced a major downturn—the worst December since the depths of the Depression in 1931—in response to indications from Fed chair Jerome Powell there would be further rises in the Fed’s base interest rate in 2019, following four rises in 2018, and the winding down of asset holdings would continue at the rate of $50 billion a month.

In response to the market downturn, Powell quickly reversed course. The asset wind-down was halted and the Fed began cutting rates from mid-2019, six months before COVID made its appearance.

The extent of the Fed’s intervention since March last year is highlighted by the fact that its balance sheet has doubled in size since the start of 2020 and now stands at $8 trillion. And according to estimates published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last week its holdings of financial assets will rise to $9 trillion by 2023, an amount equivalent to 39 percent of gross domestic product.

Comments reported in the FT from analysts and bank reports on the current situation focused on the dilemmas confronting the Fed and other central banks.

According to Matt King, a global markets strategist at Citigroup: “The paradox is that the more successful central banks are in driving up valuations of risky assets using stimulus, the harder it becomes for them to exit.”

He noted that it was “much more likely” that a rise in interest rates could prove destabilising as there was more debt outstanding.

According to some estimates, the effect of a 1 percent rise in bond rates is equivalent in effect to a 3 percent rise in previous times.

A study by Barclays Bank said the restoration of economic activity in the wake of the pandemic raised questions about the degree to which central bank support would be withdrawn and noted that “the risk of disorder seems meaningful in the US, where policy responses have been especially forceful” and “the prospect of a messy unwind could emerge for the Federal Reserve.”

If inflation started to rise after “transitory” effects had passed it would “likely involve painful trade-offs between prolonged unemployment and longer-term inflation.” In other words, bringing inflation under control would mean imposing a significant recession.

The ongoing turbulence in the money markets and the development of highly abnormal conditions are the expression of two significant developments.

First, the “free-market” mechanisms which operated in what were once considered “normal” times have completely broken down and the entire financial system is dependent on the capitalist state in the form of the central bank.

Second, that having intervened to rescue the system in response to the meltdown last year the world’s most important central bank, the Fed, is now caught in the ever-sharpening contradictions this intervention has produced.

Putin and Lukashenko meet as Belarus intensifies crackdown on opposition

Clara Weiss

This weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, met for talks in Sochi, a town on the Black Sea in southern Russia. The talks had been announced after Belarus hijacked a Ryanair plane carrying the opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, who is a Russian citizen. Both were detained and charged with criminal offenses. Protasevich, who now faces up to 15 years in prison, runs the NEXTA Telegram channel. With its multimillion following, it has been the main news platform for the opposition protests and strikes that rocked the Lukashenko government last fall.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko speaks during a meeting with officials in Minsk, Belarus, August 27, 2020 [Credit: Sergei Sheleg, BelTA Pool via AP]

The incident provoked a public outcry and immediate sanctions by the European Union, which banned all flights from and to Belarus. While many pieces in the Western press suggested that Lukashenko could not have acted without the direct complicity or at least approval from the Kremlin, it remains unclear whether Moscow was involved or even aware of his plans. The Kremlin did not take a clear position on it until over 24 hours later. Putin reportedly spoke about Belarus with US President Joe Biden over the phone, and later apologized for that to Lukashenko. Last Tuesday, the US and Russia announced the date, June 16, for a summit between Biden and Putin.

Much of the exact content of this weekend’s talks between Putin and Lukashenko has not been revealed. Despite a bizarre photo-op, showing Putin and Lukashenko enjoying their time together on the Black Sea as if they were the best of friends, the outcome of the talks was far from unequivocal. Putin dismissed the EU’s response to the hijack incident as hypocritical, referring to the 2013 hijacking of the plane by Bolivian President Evo Morales as part of the persecution of US whistleblower Edward Snowden, and denounced the sanctions of the Belarusian airspace. The Kremlin has also agreed to allow Belarusian airplanes to use Russian airports and airspace in order to circumvent the EU. Lukashenko apparently agreed to share some internal information with the Kremlin about the Ryanair incident.

The financial outcome of the talks, a $500 million credit for Belarus by the Kremlin, has been described by one Russian observer as “not exactly a great achievement.” It is the second part of a $1.5 billion loan that the Kremlin promised Minsk back in September, when the Lukashenko regime was shaken by mass strikes and protests. Belarus, whose economy is closely intertwined with that of Russia, is in dire need of loans in the many billions of dollars.

Russian observers assume that the Kremlin has only very slowly paid out the loan because it expected Lukashenko to take steps toward a constitutional reform and a transition of power. It is unclear when the third part of the $1.5 billion loan will be paid. Despite Russia’s backing for Lukashenko in the face of mass strikes and the intervention of the imperialist powers, tensions between Moscow and Minsk have long been high, and the Kremlin has pressured Lukashenko to make arrangements to leave office this year.

Last week, the Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an analysis of the economic fallout of the EU sanctions on the Belarusian economy, which will set in in June. The sanctions, which are expected to hit substantial parts of Belarus’ oil industry and manufacturing, would cost the Russian economy, itself in a precarious position, some $5 billion. The paper quoted a political analyst as saying, “Even if the sanctions will hit only half of Belarus’ exports to Europe, it will result in direct losses of about $3–4 billion. Servicing the existing foreign currency debt will become practically impossible.” He suggested that Russia would then pressure Lukashenko to hand over power, as “Russia cannot regularly lend money to pay salaries to employees of enterprises that are idle because of sanctions.”

The crisis in Belarus is unfolding amidst growing international and domestic instability. The imperialist powers, just as Lukashenko and the Kremlin, are concerned above all about the intervention of the working class in the mass protests last fall. Strikes at some major state enterprises almost brought the economy to its knees and the Lukashenko regime along with it. Although the strikes have been suppressed, through a combination of state repression and the political intervention of the opposition, tensions remain high. Inflation in Belarus is at 8.5 percent and 61.8 percent of the population live on less than $700 a month. Almost 400,000 people live on less than $250 per month. Only 3.5 percent of the population has an income of between $1,200 and 1,500 per month, and only another 3.2 percent has more than $1,500.

These class tensions are the main reason for the Lukashenko regime’s violent crackdown on all opposition within the country. The hijacking of the plane and arrest of Roman Protasevich was immediately preceded by an crackdown on major opposition outlets.

While the Western press constantly promotes figures like Protasevich and Svetlana Tikhonovskaya, another leading anti-Lukashenko figure, and decries their persecution, the fact that the Lukashenko government changed the Labor Code last week, targeting the working class, has gone virtually unreported. Employers now have virtually free hand to fire workers. The raising of political slogans during strikes was banned entirely and any workers who encourage others to go on strike can be fired immediately. Workers who have previously been arrested, as were hundreds who participated in protests and strikes in the fall, can be fired solely on that basis. The government is clearly gearing up for an even bloodier repression of further signs of opposition within the working class.

Faced with this growing repression, workers cannot place any confidence in the imperialist powers or the EU. Their struggle against the Lukashenko government must proceed in complete independence from imperialism and the bourgeois opposition in the country, and on a socialist and internationalist basis.

The right-wing character of the pro-EU opposition is revealed most clearly in the political orientation of Protasevich himself. While workers should reject the attempts by Lukashenko to use this as an excuse for his attack on democratic rights and the hijacking of the plane, there is no question that Protasevich has well-documented, long-standing ties to the Ukrainian far right which played a central role in the EU- and US-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion which has backers in the American and Ukrainian state, has confirmed that Protasevich was part of an “anti-terror operation” by the Azov Battalion in East Ukraine during the civil war, a code name for the crackdown on opposition to the Kiev government. Protasevich was reportedly also wounded.

In an interview last September with the Russian blogger Yuri Dud, Protasevich said that he had traveled to Ukraine to “come and have a look” at the Maidan and as well as the civil war in East Ukraine, but insisted that he worked only as a “journalist” and himself didn’t participate in combat. At the time, the Lukashenko government, in fact, supported the coup. Its close relations with the Ukrainian government only soured last fall when Kiev shifted toward supporting the anti-Lukashenko opposition. Protasevich’s NEXTA channel is being run from Warsaw and receives financial backing of the far-right Polish government of the Law and Justice party (PiS).

These ties underscore the sinister character of the operations of US and EU imperialism in Eastern Europe. During World War II, tens of millions of people, including virtually the entire Jewish population of Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltics, were murdered by the Nazis and their local fascist collaborators. Now, similar forces are being again promoted under the false banner of “human rights” and “democracy.” Last Friday, the EU revealed a plan to send $3 billion to Belarus once a “peaceful transition of power” is secured. The opposition laments that so far the financial and political aid from the imperialist powers has been insufficient, and is planning to resume mass protests.