SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange | Photo by Cancillería Ecuador
Attorneys
for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plan to appeal to the Supreme
Court in the United Kingdom after the country’s appeals court overturned
a decision that blocked the extradition of Assange to the United
States.
The High Court of Justice was “satisfied” with diplomatic
assurances offered by the U.S. government related to how Assange would
be treated in jail or prison, and they stated, “There is no reason why
this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say.”
“There is no basis for assuming that the U.S.A. has not given the assurances in good faith,” the High Court also insisted.
More
significantly, the High Court remitted the case back to the district
court and instructed a district judge at this level to send the request
to the Secretary of State in the Home Department for extradition. The
Home Department previously allowed the extradition request to be considered by a district court.
The
High Court decision came on Human Rights Day, a day marked by countries
in the United Nations, and the decision was immediately condemned by
press freedom and human rights groups, and various other civil society
organizations throughout the world.
Assange is detained at Her
Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London, a high-security prison where he has
been held since he was expelled from the Ecuador Embassy on April 11,
2019. He faces 18 charges—17 of which are charges under the Espionage
Act.
The Espionage Act is a U.S. law passed in 1917 that the
Justice Department has increasingly wielded against media sources who
share “classified” documents or talk about sensitive information with
journalists.
Assange’s attorneys at Birnberg Peirce indicated
their “appeal to the Supreme Court would relate to the question of the
assurances. Appeals on other important questions, including questions of
free speech and on the political motivation of the U.S. extradition
request, have yet to be considered by an appeal court.” (They will
likely be considered after an appeal of this decision.)
"This decision marks a disastrous turning point for journalists and journalism around the world," declared
Rebecca Vincent, the Reporters Without Borders director of
international campaigns. “It falls on the very day when we should
celebrate the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to two journalists
and urge states to respect their commitments to press freedom, which
they have just reaffirmed at the Summit for Democracy organized by
United States.”
“We call on the U.S. government to truly lead by
example and to close this case now, before it does any more damage.
Julian Assange should be released immediately and steps should be taken
so that no other journalist, editor, or source can be targeted in this
way.”
“This is a travesty of justice. By allowing this appeal, the
High Court has chosen to accept the deeply flawed diplomatic assurances
given by the U.S. that Assange would not be held in solitary
confinement in a maximum security prison,” said
Amnesty International’s Europe director Nils Muižnieks. “The fact that
the U.S. has reserved the right to change its mind at any time means
that these assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”
Stella Moris, who is Assange’s fiancé, called
the ruling a “grave miscarriage of justice.” Outside the courthouse,
she reacted, "Today is international Human Rights Day. What a shame. How
cynical to have this decision on this day, to have the foremost
publisher [and] journalist of the past 50 years in a U.K prison accused
of publishing the truth about war crimes, about C.I.A. kill teams."
"In
fact," Moris continued, "every time we have a hearing, we know more
about the abusive nature, the criminal nature of this case."
The U.S. government offered diplomatic assurances after Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition request on January 4.
According
to the assurances put forward, the U.S. government would not impose
special administrative measures (SAMs) on Assange before trial or after
he was convicted. However, it contained a major loophole. If Assange
committed a “future act” that “met the test” for SAMs, the U.S. would
designate him for such restrictive confinement conditions. They did not
specify what type of acts might justify abandoning this assurance.
The
U.S. government pledged that Assange would not be designated for ADX
Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado. Yet similar to the assurance to
not impose SAMs, they indicated if Assange commits a “future act” that
meets the "test for such designation” he could still be confined in a
maximum security prison.
Prosecutors pledged to allow Assange to
apply for a prisoner transfer to Australia to serve his U.S. sentence
under the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced
Persons.
If Assange was extradited and held in a U.S. jail or
prison, the U.S. pledged to ensure he received “clinical and
psychological treatment” as recommended by a “qualified treating
clinician employed or retained” by the facility where he is held. But if
a facility lacked resources or the psychologist of staff did not conclude that Assange needed a higher level of care, he might not receive treatment.
“The
first and fourth assurances wholly exclude the possibility of Mr.
Assange being made subject to SAMs, or detained at the ADX, either
pretrial or after conviction, unless, after entry of the assurances, he
commits any future act which renders him liable to such conditions of
detention,” according to the High Court decision. “It is difficult to
see why extradition should be refused on the basis that Mr Assange might
in future act in a way which exposes him to conditions he is anxious to
avoid.”
Such a statement by the High Court accepts there are no
political motives behind the extradition, and none of the U.S. officials
involved in the prosecution intend to inflict harm on Assange.
The
High Court determined the U.S. has “made its decision as to how it will
respond to any request” for a prisoner transfer to Australia if Assange
is convicted. They gave “as explicit an assurance as it can.”
“The
reality is that this court is being invited to reject the U.S.A.’s
assurances either on the basis that they are not offered in good faith
or that they are for some other reason not capable of being accepted at
face value,” according to the High Court. “That is a serious
allegation,” especially since “the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. have a
long history of cooperation in extradition matters, and the U.S.A. has
in the past frequently provided and invariably fulfilled assurances.”
But journalist Richard Medhurst obtained
documents related to the 2009 extradition of David Mendoza Herrarte
from Spain to the U.S. Diplomatic assurances were given by the U.S.
government to Spain, but the U.S. violated those assurances.
Mendoza
was accused of drug trafficking. As the Assange legal team recounted in
a filing submitted to the High Court, “The Spanish Court made Mendoza’s
extradition conditional on prisoner transfer back to Spain to serve any
sentence. In response, the U.S. provided the same assurance offered
here to the Spanish Court.”
“Upon surrender, the prosecution did,
as promised, consent to the application. It was then, however, refused
by the [Justice Department]. When the Spanish court complained of the
‘clear breach’ of the assurance, the U.S.A. retorted that ‘the U.S. did
not make and therefore could not and did not renege on a promise
guaranteeing that Mendoza would comply with the sentence imposed in
Spain.”
“The promise that was made at the time,” U.S. authorities
claimed, was that Mendoza could apply for protection under the Treaty of
the Council of Europe to serve his sentence in Spain.
Similarly,
all the U.S. government is saying at this stage is that they will
consent to an application from Assange for prisoner transfer, which is
relatively meaningless, and they are not saying they would grant the
application.
Amnesty International previously stated
the so-called “assurances” upon which the U.S. government relies “leave
Mr. Assange at risk of ill-treatment,” are “inherently unreliable,” and
“should be rejected,” adding that they are “discredited by their
admission that they reserved the right to reverse those guarantees.”
Though
it did not persuade the court to uphold the district judge’s decision,
the High Court concluded Baraitser did not make an error when she
applied a test and determined extradition would be oppressive for health
reasons.
“We bear in mind that the judge had to take into account
the evidence of a witness called by Mr Assange, who considered the
[Alexandria Detention Center] to be a very well-run jail, accepted that
there had been no successful suicides at the ADC since its last
inspection in 2017, and considered that the ADC had ‘a stellar record’
on preventing suicide.”
The High Court continued, “She had to take
into account the evidence that Mr. Assange would be entitled to a
speedy trial within 70 days, and that the suggested delays caused by
pre-trial motions would not arise if he chose to take advantage of that
speedy trial provision. She also had to take into account the
possibility that Mr. Assange, who asserts that he has a complete defense
to the charges against him, will be acquitted.”
“She had to
consider carefully whether the required link between Mr. Assange’s
mental condition was satisfied when the evidence was that he would
pursue his intention to commit suicide with a ‘single-minded
determination.’”
The High Court was sympathetic but ultimately
rejected the ground for appeal that amounted to an attack on the
professional reputation of Professor Michael Kopelman. He is a clinical
psychiatrist who provided the most comprehensive assessment of Assange’s
condition in 2019 during the immediate months following his arrest and
expulsion from the Ecuador Embassy.
Declassified U.K. reported
days before the announcement that Assange’s “fate” was in the hands of
an appeal judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, “who is a close friend
of Sir Alan Duncan, the former foreign minister who called Assange a
‘miserable little worm’ in parliament.”
“The two have known each
other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan
called Burnett ‘the Judge.’ Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s
birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a
judge at the court of appeal.”
Duncan was “the key official in
the U.K. government[’s] campaign to force Assange from the embassy,”
according to Declassified U.K. Through a feed in an “operations room” in
the U.K. Foreign Office, he watched the British police drag Assange
from the embassy to a van. He could barely keep a smirk off his face and
later traveled to Ecuador to personally thank President Lenín Moreno
for expelling Assange.
Burnett was not present for the
announcement of the decision. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced
the decision during proceedings that lasted a little more than ten
minutes.
The maintenance of the elimination strategy in China provides the
most critical lessons for the international working class on how to stop
the pandemic. Widespread lockdowns from January-March 2020 effectively
ended all community transmission of COVID-19 within China, with some
regions lifting restrictions in April 2020. This allowed the country to
reopen internally while setting up a strict two-week quarantining
program for all international travelers to prevent the importation of
new cases. Through a massive testing and contact tracing program,
whenever outbreaks occur they are quickly stamped out. This policy,
combined with mass vaccination, has wide support in the Chinese working
class.
China’s
effective response, which was mirrored in many other countries,
demonstrates that COVID-19 can be eliminated. In a country of over 1.4
billion people, only two people have died from the virus since May 16,
2020, compared to 701,170 Americans and roughly 5 million people
globally. The Socialist Equality Party completely rejects the claim that
the scientific measures taken in China, which are necessary to save
lives, represent a violation of democratic rights.
On Thursday, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist
Equality Party, SGP) challenged in a German court the decision by the
German secret service (Verfassungsschutz) to classify the SGP as a
“left-wing extremist” organization.
The court then issued
a ruling based explicitly on the assertion that the SGP’s call “for an
egalitarian, democratic and socialist society” violates the German
constitution. The court further stated that the party’s opposition to
the existing state and criticism of the capitalist system was also
unconstitutional and justified its designation as an extremist
organization and close surveillance. The court denounced as
anti-constitutional the Marxist class analysis of society as well as
opposition to capitalist ownership of the means of production.
The
far-reaching decision lays the basis for declaring unconstitutional the
selling, distribution and reading of Marxist and socialist literature.
In the document submitted by the Verfassungsschutz, the German secret
police cited as proof of the SGP’s “extremism” its distribution of
Marxist literature, including the writings of David North, chairman of
the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site.
Christoph
Vandreier, the deputy chairman of the SGP, delivered the following
statement before the hearing. Vandreier warned that the ruling classes,
not only in Germany but throughout the world, are turning to dictatorial
measures in the face of a growing upsurge of the working class and the
mounting popularity of socialism.
The court’s ruling
confirmed Vandreier’s warning. The court fully backed the Interior
Ministry’s anti-democratic argument. It dismissed the SGP's lawsuit and
ordered the party to pay court costs.
The SGP will appeal
this decision and mobilize opposition to the far-right danger and the
attack on socialism. This important statement must be carefully read and
widely distributed.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to briefly explain why we have filed this
complaint and why we think it is of the utmost importance. Seventy-six
years after the end of the Nazi dictatorship, the Federal Ministry of
the Interior is trying to declare socialist ideas and left-wing
positions anti-constitutional.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei
(Socialist Equality Party), in the tradition of revolutionary Marxism,
fights to win the majority of the population over to the socialist
transformation of society. We defend basic democratic rights and
advocate bringing them into full effect by abolishing private ownership
of the means of production and democratizing the economy.
It is
precisely the excesses of capitalism, the massive social inequality, the
growing militarism and the brutal “profits before lives” policies in
the pandemic that are strengthening authoritarian and far-right forces
all over the world.
Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6,
Jair Bolsonaro’s coup preparations in Brazil, and the right-wing
conspiracy in the Spanish military show that ruling classes everywhere
are relying on authoritarian methods to impose these policies in the
face of growing opposition.
This development is far advanced here
in Germany, the country responsible for the greatest crimes in human
history. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been fully
integrated into the state apparatus. Its program of mass deportations of
refugees, the deliberate mass infection of the population and the
arming of the state apparatus has been put into practice to a large
extent by all parties.
Far-right terrorist networks are active in
the police, intelligence services and army, stockpiling weapons,
compiling lists of enemies, and working to massacre thousands of
political opponents on “Day X.” The terrorist attacks in Halle and Hanau
and the murder of Walter Lübcke are very serious warnings.
In this situation, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz,
secret service) is taking action against those who fight against the
right-wing danger and defend basic democratic rights. The federal
government justifies surveillance by the secret service and the
defamation of our party by summarily declaring left-wing and socialist
positions to be anti-constitutional.
Ideas
that are to be proscribed already include, as you can see from the
brief of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, “arguing for an
egalitarian, democratic and socialist society,” positive references to
Marx and Engels, criticism of militarism and nationalism, and the
rejection of the European Union. On this basis, bookstores could be
criminalized, along with critical social scientists or striking workers.
In
fact, however, none of this violates the basic democratic order. On the
contrary, basic democratic rights in this country were fought for
almost exclusively by the revolutionary workers’ movement, which
followed these principles. It was the Marxist Social Democracy that
stood up against the Prussian three-class suffrage, and it was only the
revolutionary uprising of workers and soldiers in 1918 that finally won
free and equal elections in Germany.
When all bourgeois parties
supported Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor and his empowerment
as dictator because they expected him to crush organized labour, only
the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD) opposed it.
And it was Leon Trotsky who vehemently advocated for a united front of
the two workers’ parties to stop fascism.
It is, rather, the
Federal Ministry of the Interior that is attacking basic democratic
rights and arguing entirely in the spirit of the authoritarian state,
which has always cracked down on socialists.
The ministry
acknowledges that the SGP advances its positions exclusively by legal
and democratic means and does not call for violence. It bases the secret
service surveillance of our party and its defamation as “left-wing
extremist” exclusively on the socialist ideas we put forward.
This kind of Gesinnungsjustiz
(prosecution for ideas or beliefs) was already applied in the Cologne
Communist Trial of 1852, in which the defendants were sentenced solely
for their political convictions and not for crimes actually committed.
The two socialist workers’ leaders, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht,
were also sentenced to two years in prison in a fortress shortly after
the founding of the German Reich in March 1872 because of their
journalistic activities against German militarism.
The Nazis took this legal tradition of Gesinnungsjustiz
to the extreme as part of their state terror against communists. In
order to be able to eliminate, imprison and kill every political
opponent, criminal liability was increasingly separated from concrete
actions. As early as the 1930s, the newly created People’s Court
interpreted Paragraph 83 on the preparation of high treason in such a
way that communists could be punished by death entirely on the basis of
their convictions.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior’s claim
that a Marxist class analysis contradicts human dignity is also borrowed
from the tradition of these authoritarian regimes. According to this
position, it is not child poverty, homelessness or mass death in the
coronavirus pandemic that violate “human dignity,” but rather opposition
to social inequality. Anyone who does not believe that class
antagonisms are diminishing under capitalism is an enemy of the
constitution, they proclaim.
These are precisely the arguments
Bismarck used to justify his Anti-Socialist Laws, which were directed
against any organization in which “social-democratic, socialist or
communist aspirations aimed at the overthrow of the existing state or
social order come to light in a way that endangers public peace,
especially the harmony of the classes of the population.”
This state-imposed class harmony was also at the heart of the Nazis’ Volksgemeinschaft
(community of the people). At the time of the book burnings in May
1933, one of the “fire slogans” read: 'Against class struggle and
materialism, for Volksgemeinschaft and idealistic attitudes to life! I hand over to the flame the writings of Marx and Kautsky.”
The
Federal Ministry of the Interior expresses the reactionary logic of its
arguments when it declares that a socialist revolution “cannot be an
expression of the will of the people, because at most, parts of the
people assert their ideas, whereas the constitutional rights of the
other parts of the people are suppressed.” This applies “regardless of
whether violence is used in the course of the socialist revolution.”
Here,
the right to private ownership of the means of production by a narrow
elite is declared to be a super-fundamental right to which the majority
must submit. Dictators like Hitler, Franco and Pinochet drew the
ultimate conclusions from this line of argument: If the majority
inclines to socialist ideas, even the most brutal methods of repression
are justified in order to defend capitalism.
How close the Federal
Ministry of the Interior is to these conceptions is also revealed in
the reproach to our party that we stand behind the founding program of
the Fourth International of 1938, which calls for the arming of the
proletariat in the struggle against fascism.
Forgive me, but the
armed uprising of the working class would indeed have been the only way
to prevent the greatest crimes in human history, the German war of
extermination in the East and the Holocaust.
No
one saw this as clearly as Leon Trotsky. Like no other, he warned of
the consequences of the Nazi seizure of power. He foresaw the
destruction of the workers organizations as well as World War II and
even the physical extermination of the European Jews. In numerous
articles and writings, Trotsky argued for a united front of the Social
Democratic and Communist parties to stop fascism.
The Trotskyists
were therefore brutally persecuted by the Gestapo. In 1937, a court in
Danzig sentenced ten Trotskyists to long prison terms. Among the
Trotskyist victims of the Nazis was Abraham Léon, the author of a
Marxist study On the Jewish Question, who carried out illegal
socialist work in occupied Belgium and France and was murdered in the
gas chambers of Auschwitz. That the Trotskyist movement is now being
persecuted again underscores the dangerous shift to the right in
official politics.
Finally, what is particularly dishonest is the
attempt by the Interior Ministry to revive the KPD ban verdict and use
it against the SGP. This is the case not only because the original
ruling was pushed by the old Nazi elites and itself came about
unconstitutionally, but also because it targeted the Stalinist KPD. The
Federal Ministry of the Interior even explicitly equates Stalinism and
Trotskyism when it describes Trotskyism as a modification of
“Marxism-Leninism”—by which is meant Stalinism.
In reality,
Trotsky and the Left Opposition defended the Marxist principles embodied
in the October Revolution against Stalinist counter-revolution. From
the outset, these principles included democracy in the Soviet Union and
an orientation toward international socialist revolution.
The
unbridgeable chasm between Stalinist tyranny and genuine socialist
principles was revealed in the Great Purges of the 1930s, during which
hundreds of thousands of communists were murdered on charges of
Trotskyism. In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany),
Trotskyists like Oskar Hippe, who fought against the Stalinists for
democracy and socialism, were sentenced to long prison terms.
Now,
the federal government declares that Trotskyists, the first victims of
Stalinist repression, are responsible for it and its pseudo-Marxist
justifications! The Interior Ministry bases much of its arguments on the
Stalinist caricature of Marxism and seriously thinks it can use it to
argue against the authentic voice of Marxism!
The Federal Ministry
of the Interior’s brief is an expression of the same radical right-wing
sentiments that the former head of the Federal Office for the
Protection of the Constitution, Hans Georg Maassen, espouses on a daily
basis. Maassen is responsible for the SGP’s inclusion in the 2017 Verfassungsschutz
report that is the subject of the dispute. In November 2018, Maassen
was forced to retire after denying that there had been radical
right-wing riots in Chemnitz and after ranting about “radical left-wing
forces within the SPD.” Since then, hardly a day goes by without new
radical right-wing tirades coming from the former head of the
intelligence agency.
The Verfassungsschutz is itself
closely interwoven with right-wing extremist terrorist networks, which
it finances and controls in part through informers. While the leaders of
these networks are for the most part at large and their structures
intact, the secret service is taking action against left-wing and
socialist groups.
Mr. Chairman, high court, if you rule in favour
of this agency and in favour of this anti-democratic argument, it will
have far-reaching consequences. Seventy-six years after the end of the
Nazi regime, socialist ideas would again be declared unconstitutional.
It would lay the groundwork for intelligence surveillance and outlawing
of bookstores selling Marxist literature, critical scholars and striking
workers. It would be a step toward a police state.
This is also the reason why a petition
we published in defence of the SGP on the well-known platform
Change.org has received 5,240 signatures from German-speaking countries
within a short time and additionally many hundreds of signatures from
other countries.
“The SGP is the only party that has supported us
airport workers in our struggle against the WISAG group,” declared
Cemaleddin Benli, an airport ground worker who was laid off by WISAG and
organised months of protests together with his colleagues. “An attack
on the SGP is an attack on all workers who fight against exploitation,
layoffs, wage theft and the coronavirus pandemic.”
Claudia, a
member of the Action Committees for Safe Education, wrote: “It is
absolutely unthinkable that a party be controlled by the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution that is committed to the safety and
protection of our children from infection. The SGP is the only party
that has stood together with parents, children and teachers and fought
with #shadowfamilies so they don’t get lost in the pandemic!”
We
present to you the 5,457 signatures and the countless comments of
workers, young people and intellectuals who attach the greatest
importance to this case and protest in the strongest terms against the
anti-democratic argumentation of the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
Nearly three years ago, as US-led coalition forces trapped a remnant
of the Islamic State (IS) in a small enclave near the Syrian town of
Baghuz, the US military committed a horrific atrocity. As Air Force
officers watched the scene via drone cameras in real time, US warplanes
murdered at least 80 unarmed women and children with 500- and
2,000-pound bombs. The officers who saw the attack urged that a war
crimes investigation begin immediately.
This act of mass murder
is a war crime, the kind of offense for which Nazi officers were tried
and convicted at Nuremberg. For three years, however, it was covered up
by the US and its NATO allies until a devastating, 4,600-word article
appeared on Saturday, based on US officers’ testimony, in the New York Times.
Smoke rises from a strike on Baghouz, Syria, March 22, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
The atrocity in Syria inescapably recalls the “Collateral Murder
” video, revealed by whistleblower Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks
publisher Julian Assange, of US Apache helicopters slaughtering over a
dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. It also recalls the massacre of patients and hospital workers in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015 and the bombing of wedding parties that killed hundreds.
These
murderous acts are not isolated events, however. They are the product
of the criminal operations of American imperialism as it has sought to
subjugate and conquer the Middle East and Central Asia in three decades
of unending war.
The revelations of the act of mass murder in
Syria come from Air Force officers at Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, who
were monitoring a high-resolution surveillance drone flying over Baghuz.
That day, the Times
writes, the “US military drone circled high overhead, hunting for
military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children
huddled against a river bank. Without warning, an American F-15E attack
jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and
dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering
blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of
cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then
another, killing most of the survivors.”
“We just dropped on 50 women and children,” said one officer monitoring the drone, though the US Central Command told the Times that 80 were killed, and the Times wrote that Air Force officers later saw a “shockingly high” death toll in another classified report.
The
strike had been called in by a US Special Forces unit, Task Force 9.
This unit, which bypasses the chain of command and was not coordinating
with Air Force officers in Qatar, was advising the majority-Kurdish
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia attacking Baghuz.
It is not credible to attribute this atrocity to error. Lightly armed
IS fighters or civilians at Baghuz were defenseless before drones and
fighters that could film and bomb them at will. The Times
admits: “Coalition drones had scoured the camp 24 hours a day for weeks
and knew nearly every inch, officers said, including the daily movements
of groups of women and children who gathered to eat, pray and sleep
near a steep river bank that provided cover.”
US wars in the
Middle East and Central Asia have been sold to the population as a “war
on terror.” However, the murder in Baghuz is itself an act of terrorism,
aimed at demonstrating that American imperialism will stop at nothing
to subjugate the population.
A military lawyer, Lt. Colonel Dean
Korsak, ordered drone operators and fighter aircrews to conserve footage
of the atrocity for investigations. He then “reported the strike to his
chain of command, saying it was a possible violation of the law of
armed conflict—a war crime—and regulations required a thorough,
independent investigation,” the Times reports. Korsak’s concerns were bolstered by reports from CIA officials “alarmed” about Task Force 9’s operations in Syria.
What
they encountered, however, was a cover-up orchestrated at top levels of
the state, under both the Republican Trump and the Democratic Biden
administrations.
Coalition forces in Baghuz oversaw the hiding of
the bodies. “Satellite images from four days later show the sheltered
bank and area around it, which were in the control of the coalition,
appeared to have been bulldozed,” the Times writes. It cites a
former US Army Special Forces soldier, David Eubank, who arrived a week
after the attack: “The place had been pulverized by airstrikes … There
was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath,
a lot of bodies.”
The US Air Force’s Office of Special
Investigations contemptuously ignored Korsak’s material. One of its
officials bluntly wrote to Korsak that it would likely ignore his
report, as it investigates civilian casualties only if there is
“potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local
community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
Korsak
then contacted the US Defense Department’s Independent Inspector
General’s office. Gene Tate, a former Navy officer working as an
evaluator at the Inspector General’s office, pressed for Korsak’s
materials to be investigated. A team at Tate’s office even ruled that
war crimes allegations were “extremely credible.” Ultimately, however,
Tate was fired and thrown out of his office by security in October 2020.
After Korsak sent the US Senate Armed Services Committee his material, several months ago, the New York Times began investigating.
“I’m
putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this. …
Senior ranking US military officials intentionally and systematically
circumvented the deliberate strike process,” Korsak wrote in an email to
the committee.
The
bipartisan cover-up of the crimes of US imperialism in Syria is
continuing, however. The Senate committee has not responded to either
Korsak or Tate. The office of Senator Jack Reed, the committee’s
Democratic chairman, refused to discuss the Baghuz atrocity with the Times.
As for the Times
itself, after initially posting the article on the top of its site late
Saturday evening, it had already begun to bury it by Sunday afternoon.
The rest of the media has barely covered the revelations.
It is
not hard to imagine what would happen if the US media could pin blame
for this atrocity on the governments of Syria, Iran, Russia, China or
another country in the Pentagon’s gunsights. There would be morally
outraged calls for UN Security Council meetings, sanctions, war threats
or US missile strikes in Damascus. When responsibility indisputably lies
with the Pentagon, however, it is simply covered up by the US and
Western European governments.
The atrocity in Syria again exposes
the interests behind the jailing of Assange—who is detained in Britain
and facing extradition and death in the United States—and of Manning.
Over the 30 years since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union
gave them a military opening to wage war across the Middle East,
Washington and its allies have laid waste to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria
and beyond. Millions died in events that were covered up by the mass
media but were witnessed by many people who can expose officials who
carried out or are complicit in mass murder and war crimes.
The
Baghuz atrocity points to a broad official falsification of death tolls
in Syria. From 2014 to 2019, as the US, Britain, France and other
countries destroyed the IS enclave in Syria and Iraq, they called down
35,000 airstrikes. “Nearly 1,000 strikes hit targets in Syria and Iraq
in 2019, using 4,729 bombs and missiles,” the Times notes.
However, “The official military tally of civilian dead for that entire
year is only 22, and the strikes from March 18 are nowhere on the list.”
While
Washington claimed it was killing only a handful of people in Syria, it
was hiding reports on masses of people it had killed. The Pentagon was,
the Times writes, “overwhelmed by the volume of civilian
casualty claims reported by locals, humanitarian groups and the news
media, and a backlog of civilian casualty assessment reports sat
unexamined for months.”
The vindictive prosecution of Assange and
Manning—and threats one can presume are now being made against Korsak
and Tate—aim to ensure that war crimes committed as the product of the
criminal wars supported by Democratic and Republican administrations
alike will go unpunished.
The international working class must
demand an end to the horrific persecution of Assange, who faces
extradition to the US for revealing crimes such as those exposed by the Times
article. Those responsible for the mass murder in Baghuz and its
cover-up, along with the unending string of atrocities throughout the
region, must be prosecuted.
Defending the refugees is the task of the working class. It is the
only social force that can counter capitalist reaction and defend
democratic rights. This struggle is of vital importance for the workers.
A
fascistic stench rises from the NATO powers’ assault on refugees in
Belarus. The brutal security forces and fascist gangs whose illegal
violence is turned against refugees today will serve tomorrow to
suppress the resistance and opposition of the working class and youth.
As
the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) fights to unite the
working class based on a socialist program across all national borders
in the struggle against social inequality, militarism and fascism. The
building of the SGP and of sections of the ICFI in countries across
Europe is an urgent task that must be taken up by the working class
across the continent.
More is involved, however, than just the financial considerations.
There is a broader brutalization of American society, promoted in the
media and the entire political establishment, within which the Houston
concert took place. It is worth noting that Texas leads the United
States in executions, with more than 830 people killed since 1930,
nearly twice as many as the next state.
This finds its reflection
in what passes for the “cultural life” of the country. For decades, the
ruling class has promoted a toxic combination of individualism and
selfishness, the cultural corollary to its own massive enrichment at the
expense of society as a whole, and the working class in particular.
The
content of the concert reflects a general backwardness that is
systematically promoted. Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “there is
no society” could describe much of contemporary rap music, with this
single-minded focus on personal advancement, greed, hedonism and the
glorification of violence.
Scott’s music is themed around making
as much money as possible while “living in the moment,” topics that
pervade much of commercial hip-hop music. Days before the deadly
concert, Scott released a song titled, ironically, “Escape Plan,” in
which he raps about one day having a fortune of “12 figures.” That would
put him on par with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who each control over
$100 billion. The music video features Scott posing in front of a
succession of hypercars, yachts and luxury mansions.
High culture,
meanwhile, is starving. Classical musicians have had their pay slashed
year after year, and budgets for cultural education in schools are
withering. There is a systematic and ongoing attack, orchestrated by the
media and political establishment, on the legacy of the American
Revolution and Civil War. The level of cultural degradation has reached a
point where a professor, Bright Sheng at the University of Michigan,
can be targeted and ostracized for showing a film version of one of
Shakespeare’s great plays, Othello.
It is this toxic mix
of social inequality, greed, political reaction and backwardness that
created the shocking indifference to human life on display in Houston.
Although
rarely engaging in the fetishization of homicide and brutality that
pervades much of hip-hop, Scott’s lyrics are drenched with the worship
of hedonism, risk-taking, and living for the moment. The concert’s
iconography borrows heavily from horror movies, including a giant,
skull-like sculpture of the artist’s head.
One attendee posted on
Redditt: “Everything seemed normal for a Travis Scott show. I’ve seen
countless people pass out at almost every GA standing room only concert.
I didn’t know the people I saw being carried away were lifeless
corpses, I thought people were just passing out. Was it overcrowded? Yes
but that’s normal. Was it understaffed? Yes but that’s normal. Was it
chaotic? Yes but that’s normal. I feel like the crowd became so
desensitized and normalized to nothing but rage that it finally caught
up to him and everyone involved.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, the World Health Network (WHN) hosted its
second online “Global Summit to End Pandemics,” which featured over 20
distinguished scientists who have advocated for the global elimination
of COVID-19. The summit provided further substantiation of the case for
global elimination presented at the October 24 webinar, “How to End the Pandemic,” which was hosted by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
The
WHN summit featured 22 different sessions spanning roughly 25 hours and
covering the most essential scientific aspects of the COVID-19
pandemic. Dr. Michael Baker of the University of Otago in New Zealand
and Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz of the University of Calgary in Canada
each gave similar presentations to those delivered at the WSWS webinar,
outlining the measures necessary to stop the pandemic.
Dr. Baker,
who successfully advised the New Zealand government on how to eliminate
COVID-19 early in the pandemic, made clear that the government’s recent
shift in policy had come over the objection of scientists, including
himself. He stated, “At a certain point the [New Zealand] government
decided that we needed to basically rejoin the rest of the world, and so
switched to what we call a ‘tight suppression’ approach. Many
scientists in New Zealand objected to this change, but the government
felt for various reasons that it had no choice.”
Other scientists
provided comprehensive reports on airborne transmission, the importance
of using high quality face masks, inequities in global vaccine
distribution, the effects of Long COVID, the development of new variants
of SARS-CoV-2 and other topics. There were also reports on the
experience of the pandemic in specific countries and regions of the
world, including Norway, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, Canada, the United
States, Taiwan, Qatar, Australia and other countries.
The summit
was held at a critical point. Global daily new COVID-19 cases are once
again surging, with nearly one million people officially infected over
the two days of the summit.
Izhaar
Hussain Shaikh, left, an ambulance driver who works for HelpNow, and
others pick up a COVID-19 patient from his home in Mumbai, India May 28,
2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool]
Last
week, the official death toll from COVID-19 surpassed five million,
while estimates of excess deaths place the real figure at roughly 17
million. On Friday, a study was published in the BMJ
which found that life expectancy has declined drastically in countries
that have rejected the elimination strategy, with American men losing
2.27 years of life on average in 2020, while “more than 28 million
excess years of life were lost in 2020 in 31 countries.” Despite the
catastrophic situation globally, governments throughout the world are
lifting mask mandates and all mitigation measures.
Dr. Anthony
Leonardi, a T-cell immunologist at Johns Hopkins University in the US,
spoke on the latest research into Long COVID, a condition where symptoms
persist for weeks or months after initial infection. He cited multiple studies
on Long COVID and stressed the uniquely harmful character of the virus,
noting that Long COVID includes over 50 reported symptoms that “can
span physiological systems,” with the most alarming research showing that COVID-19 can cause encephalitis, long-term neurological damage and the development of autoimmune disorders.
Dr. Leonardi has opposed unsafe school reopenings and authored a widely
circulated letter outlining the neurological dangers posed to children
by COVID-19. Asked about the potential long-term implications of unsafe
schools reopenings, Dr. Leonardi responded, “There’s a publication that
lists a lowered productive lifespan in kids, and it’s more of an
attenuation in kids than adults. So it’s a bad idea, we’re setting kids
up to have chronic illness.”
Asked to comment on the need to fight for a global elimination strategy, Dr. Leonardi cited a study
conducted on rhesus monkeys which showed that every test subject
infected with COVID-19 formed Lewy bodies in its brain. Lewy bodies are
associated with Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
Drawing
out the implications of this finding, Dr. Leonardi presented a horrific
scenario, asking: “If that happens in humans, if we start getting
neurodegeneration down the line, who is going to take care of all those
people that are afflicted by it? Do we really want to risk almost
everybody in the populace and have a very small amount of people able to
take care of these other people?
“I think there’s a risk we might
see institutionalized end-of-life, where people aren’t taken care of,
they’re just given a drug and pass away.” He added, “I think we run a
big risk of something like that, just a massive amount of people with
neurodegeneration and problems. So, it would be very wise to have a
strategy of elimination.”
Multiple sessions at the summit
highlighted the science of the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, with
speakers emphasizing the need to educate the population on this
science, require the universal use of high-quality masks, improve
ventilation in all schools and workplaces, and implement other measures.
At
one session on aerosols, Dr. Chia Wang of the National Sun Yat-sen
University in Taiwan commented, “It is really time for us to upgrade the
current paradigm of disease control by including aerosol precautions,
and we must pay more attention to the air we breathe.”
At another
session, Julia Raifman, ScD, SM of the Boston University School of
Public Health, spoke on the impact of the May 13, 2021 change in masking
guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC). She referred to the CDC decision as “an historic policy error
that will likely have ramifications potentially for decades.”
She
noted that in 2020 there were 43 states with masking policies but that
only Hawaii kept theirs in place after May 2021, while only seven states
and the District of Columbia have since reinstated masking policies
during the ongoing Delta surge.
In the same session, scientist
Nicolas Smit noted that the CDC’s change in masking recommendations
“came six days after the CDC finally admitted that airborne transmission
was happening.”
In a session titled “Big Pharma and ‘Vaccine
Apartheid,’” Dr. Anthony Staines of Dublin City University in Ireland
denounced the for-profit pharmaceutical monopolies for creating global
vaccine inequities. He commented, “We’ve ended up with a monstrously
inefficient, very expensive and very unfair way of distributing
resources around the world, and a way which puts us at unquantifiable
risk. No one knows whether there will be another new variant, and no one
knows if that new variant could be worse than the ones we have at the
moment.”
The reports at the summit collectively provide a clear
understanding of COVID-19, the dire character of the present situation,
and what measures must be taken to eliminate the virus worldwide. The
event should have been widely attended and viewed by millions. However,
it has been blacked out and ignored by the mainstream media, with no
reports in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or any other corporate news outlet, underscoring once again their role in allowing the pandemic to continue.
Outside of this WSWS article, there has been no reporting whatsoever on the event.
Listening
to the summit, one could not help but be struck by the disturbing chasm
between the enormous significance of the content presented and the
total absence of publicity in the media, which caused a low attendance
at each session. At its highest point, only 80 people attended the
opening session, and each breakout session only had roughly 10–30
attendees.
From a purely scientific standpoint, the participants
are to be congratulated, and their work deserves widespread
appreciation. Clearly, they were motivated by a desire for action to be
taken and dedicated a great deal of time to preparing their reports.
However,
there was a clear contrast between the science and the political
perspective advanced at the summit. Deprived of a mass audience by the
media, which feeds the public pablum and lies on the pandemic, the
scientists themselves framed much of their conclusions as appeals to the
powers that be to listen and change government policy.
The
argument was advanced that one can convince governments to eliminate
COVID-19 because it would save them money. From a humanitarian
standpoint, this should be irrelevant, and there is something profoundly
wrong with a society where the saving of human lives has to be shown to
be cost-effective.
But this argument is itself meaningless to the
ruthless financial elites that have amassed trillions of dollars during
the pandemic through the funneling of state funds into the stock
market. In the US alone, the billionaires increased their wealth by $1.8
trillion, or 62 percent, in just the first 18 months of the pandemic.
While the international working class has suffered unfathomable losses,
the stock markets continue to reach record highs globally.
The
scientists are not political strategists. Not knowing how to reach broad
masses of people and cut off by the media, they remain something of a
shut-in community. In this context, the WSWS’s October 24 webinar
acquires all the more significance. That event, which has been viewed by
over 10,000 people from over 100 countries, established a living link
between science and the working class. It presented three-and-a-half
hours’ worth of scientific reports, as well as a clear political
perspective, stressing that the working class is the only social force
capable of ending the pandemic.
One of the central lessons of the
October 24 webinar was that the fight to end the pandemic requires close
collaboration between the international working class and the
scientific community. Many workers who attended the webinar have told
the WSWS how profoundly educated they were by the scientists, saying
they now have a clear sense of what measures must be taken to save
lives.
Taken as a whole, the reports at the World Health Network
summit provide overwhelming proof that the only correct pandemic policy
is one aimed at the global elimination of SARS-CoV-2. For this to be
implemented requires the development of a mass movement of the
international working class armed with a scientific understanding of the
pandemic. As Karl Marx said so well, “Theory becomes a material force
as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
The WSWS will continue the
struggle to forge a fighting alliance between scientists and the working
class and help coordinate the global struggle necessary to put an end
to the pandemic and save millions of lives worldwide.
European officials continue to claim that vaccination is the sole
tool to halt the pandemic, even as they send unvaccinated children back
into schools, workers back to work, and infections and deaths skyrocket.
In France, where daily cases have just reached 10,000, Health Minister
Olivier Véran recently told Libération that because of vaccination, he is less concerned about the rise in COVID-19 cases.
He
said: “We are following this very closely, of course. This rise is
taking place across Europe, unsurprisingly, as we know climate
conditions favor the spread of respiratory viruses. However, we know
vaccination has strongly limited the correlation between the number of
infections and the number of serious cases and hospitalizations and
deaths. So today, what I look at carefully, beyond the spread of the
virus and incidence rates, it is mainly the pressure on hospitals, which
is the fundamental indicator.”
In Britain, where Prime Minister
Boris Johnson infamously declared, “No more f*cking lockdowns, let the
bodies pile high in their thousands,” the government claimed it would
take further measures only if COVID-19 deaths exceeded 1,000 weekly, or
52,000 per year. This figure has been reached, but the government is
still not proposing any significant new public health measures.
In
Germany, where daily infections have surged above 35,000, Health
Minister Jens Spahn recently announced that the government is canceling
the legal finding of an “epidemic situation of national scope,” ending
the legal basis for anti-COVID-19 health measures. In Spain, the
judicial system has repeatedly ruled that the lockdowns imposed last
year to halt the pandemic were illegal.
Elimination of the coronavirus is a realistic and feasible policy, as scientists have made clear in webinars hosted by the International Committee of the Fourth International. Averting truly monumental loss of life requires the mobilization of a
conscious, international movement in the European working class, opposed
to Europe’s capitalist governments, and consciously fighting for the
elimination of the virus and for socialism.
The arrogance of the company is based on four decades in which its
cost-cutting measures went unchallenged as it relied on the UAW to
suppress the resistance of the working class. Deere and the entire
ruling class, moreover, see the strike as not just a challenge from one
set of workers. Any retreat, they fear, will send a signal to other
workers and encourage the growing strike movement that is already
underway.
The ruling class is facing an extremely unstable
economic situation, which is exacerbated by the strike wave by workers
who are fighting to restore past concessions and secure wage increases
to counter the impact of rising food, fuel and other living expenses.
Deere—which
counts on its corporate board current and former top executives at
Royal Dutch Shell, Boeing, Cargill, Dupont, Verizon and the investment
firm that handles the personal fortunes of billionaires Bill and Melinda
Gates—speaks for the entire ruling class.
The revolt against the
corporatist unions and growing strike wave threaten to reverse, as one
financial analyst said, an “environment that has reigned” for nearly
half a century, which “caused revenues to flow away from workers toward
capital (i.e., investors).”
In a tweet earlier this week, former
US Treasury secretary and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers,
who engineered the halving of newly hired workers’ wages during the
Obama-Biden administration’s restructuring of the auto industry in 2009,
denounced the restoration of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) stolen
from Deere workers in 2015. “Those serene about inflation should ponder
the fact that the new John Deere contract has reinstated previously
dropped cost-of-living allowances,” he wrote.
***
Workers in the US and around the world are not just fighting individual employers, but the entire capitalist system. This means the growing strike movement of the working class must be fused with a socialist program aimed at transforming giant corporations like Deere into public utilities and restructuring global economic life on the basis of a scientific and democratic plan to meet human needs, not corporate profit.
War, whether with Iran or China, provides a means for directing the contradictions of US capitalism outward in an explosion of military violence, while serving as a justification for the forcible imposition of “national unity” at home.
But as he wrote those words, studies to supply such data were in the
works. Chief among them was an initiative to compare women who had
abortions with those who wanted them, but were turned away from clinics
for various reasons, including state restrictions or a lack of doctor
availability. Called the Turnaway Study, the effort followed about 1,000
women in the United States for five years after they sought abortions.
The women were similar in terms of physical, mental and economic
well-being initially, but diverged over time1.
In
more than 40 reports published in peer-reviewed scientific journals,
researchers analysed what happened to the women, adjusting for potential
confounding factors such as age. The overall finding was that, on
average, receiving an abortion didn’t harm women’s mental or physical
health, but being denied an abortion resulted in some negative financial
and health outcomes.
“The science clearly shows that abortion is
incredibly common, and it is important to women living full lives,” says
Diana Greene Foster, leader of the Turnaway Study and a
reproductive-health researcher at the University of California, San
Francisco. Recent years have seen the Turnaway and other studies
referenced in abortion court cases. For example, judges have cited a 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report
finding that abortion is safe. This and other reports find that
mortality rates are nearly 4 times as high for colonoscopies — and 14
times as high for childbirth2 — as for legal abortion procedures.
In the October 24 webinar, “How to Stop the Pandemic,” sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site
and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees
(IWA-RFC), a panel of leading scientists from around the world made a
powerful and overwhelming case for the global elimination of the virus
that causes COVID-19.
Along with an earlier webinar
organized by the WSWS two months ago, Sunday’s event was the only
effort to devote time to allow scientists and public health specialists
to explain to the public the nature of the pandemic and what must be
done. To the extent that there is any discussion of the science of
COVID-19, it is mainly confined to scientific journals with a very small
circulation, not public events to which working people have direct
access.
The webinar was also unique in its international scope.
The eight scientists and doctors spoke from five different countries:
New Zealand, the UK, the United States, Canada and Pakistan. During the
event and in the first 12 hours after it was broadcast, several thousand
people from more than 100 countries throughout the world listened in.
Among the countries with the highest number of viewers were the US,
Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Sri Lanka, Ireland,
France, India, Spain, Malaysia and Brazil.
The event was moderated
by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North and WSWS
writer and practicing physician Dr. Benjamin Mateus. In opening the webinar,
North drew attention to the colossal loss of life over the past two
years, with the official global death toll now approaching five million
people. Citing the Economist, North noted that the real number
of deaths is far higher, between 10 and 20 million people. “The world
has already paid a terrible price for the deliberate refusal of
governments to listen to scientists,” he said.
While originally
scheduled for two hours, the webinar lasted for three and a half. Many
of the scientists came prepared with detailed slides presenting factual
information on the impact of different measures to contain the virus,
the health consequences of the disease, and how it is transmitted.
Certain salient facts emerged from the reports that are vital for the public to understand.
Dr.
Malgorzata Gasperowicz,a developmental biologist and researcher at the
University of Calgary in Canada and cofounder of Zero COVID Canada,
presented a report on “The Case for SARS2 Elimination.” She documented
the extreme disparity in cases and deaths between provinces in Canada
that pursued an elimination strategy and those that pursued a
“mitigation” or containment strategy. She also presented mathematical
models showing that vaccines alone are not sufficient to stop the spread
of the virus.
Dr. Gasperowicz said that her models show that in
countries with a high vaccination rate, aggressive measures—including
the shutdown of nonessential production and aggressive testing, tracing
and isolation—could eliminate the virus within two to three months.
While there was some discussion on the length of time that would be
required, all the scientists agreed that such a strategy was both viable
and necessary.
“Some people claim it is too late, that it is not
possible to eliminate now because we have [the Delta variant], because
the virus is everywhere,” Dr. Gasperowicz said, but these claims are
false. “The math works the same. If we can bend the curve, if we can
bring the R value [transmission rate] to a low level, we can eliminate.”
Dr.
Michael Baker, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University
of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand, who served on the New Zealand
Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 Technical Advisory Group, delivered a
presentation, “Progressive elimination of Covid-19: Is it feasible and
desirable?”
Elimination strategies, he concluded, “definitely,
definitely do work.” He noted that the World Health Organization has
pursued an elimination strategy for many diseases, including polio.
China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Australia, where elimination strategies
have been pursued for much or all of the pandemic, have succeeded in
limiting deaths to between three and five individuals per million. This
compares to nearly 2,000 per million in the United States, which has led
to a drop in life expectancy at birth by one and a half years.
Asked
by David North whether the recent change in the policy of the New
Zealand government to “transition” from its previous approach, under
immense economic and political pressure, is very likely to lead to a
sharp rise in cases and deaths, Baker stated, “It is, very much so.”
Dr.
Jose-Luis Jimenez, professor of chemistry at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and an expert in aerosol physics, delivered a
presentation on “The modes of transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” Dr. Jimenez
presented slides that showed how SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes
Covid-19—is transported within minute aerosol particles from one person
to another. They are emitted whenever people speak or even in the
process of respiration. This accounts for the extremely infectious
character of the disease, particularly in poorly ventilated indoor
locations, such as schools.
Jimenez sharply criticized the World
Health Organization (WHO) for refusing to acknowledge the aerosolization
of the virus for more than a year after the start of the pandemic,
calling it “one of the biggest errors in the entire history of public
health.” He said that one of the reasons for the resistance in
recognizing aerosolization is that it is less “convenient” for
governments, as the denial of aerosolization transfers responsibility
from governments and businesses that do not implement adequate safety
measures to individuals.
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a public health
researcher at the Queen Mary University in London, delivered a report on
Long COVID, which she called “the hidden pandemic after the pandemic.”
The report reviewed the alarming data showing that Long COVID symptoms
lasting 12-15 weeks or more can affect between two and 14 percent of all
people who contract COVID-19. She explained that infected individuals
are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, lung
disease, and brain degeneration in regions associated with sense,
emotional processing and memory.
Governments, she said, do not
want to talk about Long COVID because “if they accept that it is real
and problematic, they would have to do a lot more to prevent
transmission.”
Replying to a question from Lisa Diaz, a UK parent
who has played the leading role in mobilizing opposition to the unsafe
reopening of schools, Dr. Gurdasani called the policy of the UK
government “frankly criminal.” One in 12 secondary school children and
one in 30 primary school children have been infected with COVID-19 in
the UK, she said. “In all respects, our government has completely failed
to protect children, and the impact of that has been not just mass
infection of children but very high rates of Long COVID.”
Dr.
Zayar, a medical doctor in Pakistan who worked with the WHO from 2009 to
2014 on the polio eradication initiative, reviewed the catastrophic
impact of the pandemic throughout South Asia. “There are millions of
more deaths on the subcontinent that are not reported,” he said, noting
that the governments in India and Pakistan have sought to cover up their
failure to protect the population. “Their first priority… was to open
the economy, [even at] the height of the pandemic.”
Dr. Eric
Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, health economist and Senior Fellow at the
Federation of American Scientists, delivered a powerful indictment of
the private control of vaccine production and distribution and the
broader policy of governments in response to the pandemic. “The moral
backbone of public health has been completely broken by politics,” he
said.
The days of petitions and op-eds in newspapers are over,
Feigl-Ding said, because “we clearly know that the political powers that
want to reopen, let it spread, let it rip, mass infection, ‘live with
the virus’—clearly they do not care about all the scientific rationale
whatsoever.”
In response to a question from David North about
where he saw the pandemic going in the next three to six months without a
dramatic change in policy, Fiegl-Ding responded: “On a world scale, we
will still be counting bodies in six months’ time. We are going to have a
very bad winter in the Northern hemisphere.” Other scientists on the
panel agreed with this prognosis.
Dr. Howard Ehrman—a retired
family medicine physician, assistant professor at the University of
Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and School of Public Health until
2020, and longtime social activist—delivered a scathing denunciation of
the reopening of schools promoted by the Biden administration. There
have been one million new cases among children in the last five weeks,
he noted, and 588 children have died from the pandemic since it began,
along with thousands of teachers and staff.
Dr.
Ehrman criticized those in the media “who have done everything under
Trump and Biden to make parents, teachers, staff, feel guilty, threaten
them, and now begin to punish them for keeping their kids at home.”
In
addition to the scientists, several workers on the panel discussed the
impact that the pandemic has already had on workers, parents and the
population as a whole. Lisa Diaz spoke on the catastrophic conditions
produced by the reopening of schools in the UK, which she called a
“scorched earth policy.”
David O’Sullivan, a London bus driver
fired for defending his colleagues’ right to a safe workplace, spoke
about the impact on bus drivers of the “herd immunity” policy of the
Johnson administration, describing it as “a war on the working class and
a war on science. The two go hand in hand.”
Donna, a teacher in
the US and member of the Tennessee Educators Rank-and-File Committee,
said that she and other teachers “felt abandoned by our leaders, our
administrators, and worst of all, our unions.” Workers and scientists,
she said, “must join forces against the profit interests of our
governments and business leaders if we are to end the pandemic.”
In
concluding the meeting, North explained: “The case for elimination, a
path that ultimately leads to the eradication of the virus, is so
overwhelming from a scientific standpoint, that it is hard to understand
that it could possibly be argued against.”
There are definite
social interests, however, that have determined policy from the
beginning and are working actively against science—the profit interests
of the ruling class. “We can’t get around the fact,” North said, “that
we live in a society which hails the mindless, ridiculous, useless,
extravagance of a ruling elite that can’t think of any better way to use
its money than to blast itself into space.”
It is for this reason
that the scientific information presented at the webinar has been
completely excluded from the capitalist media. Outside of the WSWS
forum, there has, since the start of the pandemic, been no systematic
effort to educate the population in the science of Long COVID,
aerosolization, the role of schools in the transmission of the virus, or
any of the critical information that workers must know.
There is
also a social force whose interests intersect with scientific truth: the
working class, the great mass of the population.
North noted
that since the last webinar held in August, there has been a significant
growth of class struggle in the US and throughout the world. “The
initiative taken by Lisa Diaz, the efforts made by workers in
rank-and-file committees to take control of their own struggles and also
take control of the fight against unsafe conditions in their factories
and their schools, are an indication of a profound change.”
Paraphrasing
Marx’s famous statement from his Theses on Feuerbach, North concluded:
“The scientists have explained the pandemic. They have shown how it is
transmitted, and how that transmission can be stopped. But the challenge
of the working class is to end it.”
The wealth of information
presented in the October 24 webinar must be studied by every worker in
every country. The scientific information and perspective presented at
this webinar must be brought into the working class. The fight against
the pandemic and the ruling class’s policy of mass death must be fused
with the growing struggles of workers throughout the world against
exploitation, inequality, dictatorship, war and the capitalist system.
On Sunday, workers at the agricultural and construction equipment
maker Deere & Co. voted by 90 percent to reject a tentative
agreement backed by the United Auto Workers (UAW).
A worker inside a Deere plant (John Deere)
The
vote was a stunning rebuke to the UAW, which tried to rush through a
six-year concessions contract for 10,100 workers without giving them
sufficient time to study it. At so-called informational meetings Sunday,
workers angrily confronted union officials trying the sell the deal.
“Deere and the UAW tried to pull a fast one, but the rank and file
fought back,” a worker at the Dubuque, Iowa plant told the WSWS.
Confronting
an incipient revolt, the UAW announced it was setting a strike deadline
for 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night. Behind the scenes, however, the UAW
executives are doing everything to block a strike or isolate and defeat a
walkout if it is forced to call one.
The vote at Deere, the
first defeat of a UAW-backed agreement at the company in 35 years, is
the latest in a series of overwhelming “no” votes by workers in the US
in response to union-supported contracts:
On April 9, 1,100 Warrior Met coal miners
in central Alabama voted 1,006 to 45 (96 percent) to reject the
contract pushed by the United Mine Workers of America, which failed to
recoup the $6 wage cut the UMWA accepted in 2016.
In the late spring and early summer, 3,500 Volvo Trucks
workers in Dublin, Virginia, voted down three consecutive UAW-backed
contracts, including the first two by 90 percent or more. The UAW was
only able to shut down a five-week strike by forcing a revote on the
third rejected deal, which it claimed passed by 17 votes.
In August and early September, 3,500 auto parts workers at Dana Inc.—a
top supplier for Deere—rejected a five-year contract proposed by the
UAW and United Steelworkers by more than 90 percent, with workers at the
Toledo, Ohio, plant voting unanimously against the deal. More than a
month after the defeat of the contract, the UAW and USW are blocking a
strike that would have an immediate impact on the auto industry, keeping
workers on the job and stockpiling parts with a day-by-day contract
extension.
Twelve thousand carpenters in western Washington state
rejected four consecutive agreements pushed by the Northwest Pacific
Carpenters Union (NWCU) by margins as high as 76 percent. The NWCU was
forced to call a strike on September 16, but it kept 10,000 of the
12,000 carpenters working and ultimately pushed through a
fifth contract.
Late last week, McLaren Health nurse aides and other service workers in Flint and other mid-Michigan cities
rejected by a three-to-one margin a deal reached by the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to block a
strike over dangerously high patient ratios and increased out-of-pocket
health costs.
That massive, nearly unanimous “no” votes are
now becoming the norm gives expression to an enormous anger and desire
to fight among workers. The union bureaucracy’s age-old methods of
ramming through pro-company contracts—lies about winning “substantial
gains” or “the best contract you are going to get” and the use of
threats and economic pressure to browbeat workers—are running up against
a wall of opposition.
This
is part of the emergence of the largest strike movement in the United
States in generations. The first five days of October saw the beginning
of 10 new strikes in the US, including 2,500 nurses at Mercy Hospital in
Buffalo, New York, and 1,400 Kellogg’s food-processing workers in
Michigan and other states. In addition, 60,000 Hollywood film and
television workers and 35,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers have
voted to strike.
“Thousands of workers have gone on strike across the country, showing their growing power in a tightening economy,” Time
magazine wrote last week. “The leverage US employees have over the
people signing their paychecks was amplified in Friday’s jobs report,
which showed that employers added workers at a much slower-than-expected
pace in September,” Time wrote, adding, “and wages are
continuing to tick up across industries as employers become more
desperate to hire and retain workers.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
pointed to a “new take-this-job-and-shove-it mentality,” noting that
“the upside-down condition of the job market has fed-up workers more
inclined to fight back and call their bosses on their threats…”
There are certain characteristics of this emerging movement that are particularly significant.
First,
the development of the class struggle is pitting workers in direct
opposition to the corporatist trade unions. The margin of the contract
rejections at Deere, Volvo, Dana and other companies expresses the real
relationship between the so-called “unions” and the working class.
These
organizations, which function as a labor police force for management
and are run by union executives with incomes in the top 5 percent of
income earners, if not higher, are completely disconnected from and
hostile to the needs and aspirations of the workers they falsely claim
to “represent.” Under conditions of explosive social anger, their
primary concern is to prove their usefulness to management and the state
by ramming through pro-company agreements one way or another.
The
Biden administration is aggressively promoting the unions as
instruments to suppress working-class resistance and divert social
opposition behind its plans for trade war and military confrontation
with China. Last week, a White House pro-union “task force” held its
second official meeting, with top military and economic cabinet
members—including Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo—discussing final preparations of a
report on steps the administration will take to promote the expansion of
the trade unions.
The
defenders of the authority of the unions among the pseudo-left,
themselves aligned with the Biden administration and the Democratic
Party, refer to the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site
as “sectarian” because of our call for the formation of rank-and-file
committees. Their principal concern, however, is that the campaign led
by the WSWS for the development of independent organizations of
working-class struggle is winning a mass response.
At Deere, WSWS
articles have been read by thousands of workers, who have distributed
them at the plants and shared them on social media. Like the Dana
workers and Volvo Trucks workers before them, the WSWS has been central
in encouraging and assisting Deere workers in developing their own
independent initiative through the formation of a rank-and-file
committee.
Second, the upsurge of working-class struggles in the
US is part of an international process. This includes the strikes by
150,000 metal workers in South Africa; 90,000 healthcare workers in Sri
Lanka; healthcare, train and airport workers in Germany; and the October
1 UK parents strike “global picket line” against the spread of
COVID-19. Global corporations like Deere, which has operations in 70
countries, can only be fought by unifying the working class across all
national borders.
Third, the growth of the class struggle is
inseparably connected to the struggle against the pandemic. The ruling
class is seeking to suppress wages in the face of rising prices for
food, fuel and other necessities. At the same time, it is imposing
ever-longer hours and relentless speedup in its scramble to offset the
global supply chain crisis, as well as labor shortages driven by
millions refusing to labor in COVID-infected workplaces.
Over the
last 20 months of the pandemic, millions of lives have been sacrificed
for corporate profit, while the world’s billionaires have seen their
wealth surge by $5.5 trillion. Far from making any concessions to the
“heroes” and “essential workers” who have endured sickness and death,
the corporate and financial oligarchy is determined to exploit the
pandemic to establish a “new normal” of unrelenting exploitation. But
this is provoking a growing strike wave in the US and internationally,
under conditions in which the efforts to force workers back into unsafe
workplaces by eliminating unemployment benefits and ending eviction
moratoriums has thus far failed to produce the intended results.
On
May 1, the International Committee of the Fourth International
initiated the call for the formation of the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to organize a global
response by the working class to save lives. Now the struggle to demand
policies to eradicate the pandemic, including the closure of
nonessential workplaces and schools, is intersecting with a growing
movement against capitalist exploitation.
We call on all
workers at Deere and all sections of the working class, in the US and
internationally, to register and attend the October 24 online webinar
with leading scientists, “How to end the pandemic: The case for eradication,” co-sponsored by the WSWS and the IWA-RFC.
