Wednesday, August 26, 2020
US stages military buildup to enforce deal to steal Syria’s oil
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/syri-a25.html
By Bill Van Auken
25 August 2020
The US military over the past week has been sending convoys across the border from Iraq into Syria in what appears to be a significant escalation of the US military intervention in the war-ravaged country.
According to sources in Syria, the convoys have come across at the al-Tanf crossing, where the US military maintains a garrison near the triple frontier between Iraq, Syria and Jordan. They have then traveled to US bases in the northeastern Syrian governorates of Deir ez-Zor and Al-Hasakah. Witnesses said that the convoys included tanks, armored vehicles, oil tankers and trucks bearing weapons and logistical equipment.
The buildup of the US forces east of the Euphrates River follows the revelation that Washington has concocted a deal with a newly minted American oil company, Delta Crescent Energy LLC, which has been signed by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, the proxy ground troops employed by Washington in Syria, which consist mainly of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.
Among the equipment being trucked in by the US military are believed to be components for two modular refineries to assist the company in exploiting and marketing Syrian oil.
This agreement constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, which bar the exploitation of the natural resources of an occupied country for the benefit of the occupier. In the case of the US occupation of Syria, this constitutes an even more blatant act of international piracy, as the US military presence in the country has been authorized neither by the Syrian government nor the United Nations.
The existence of the deal brokered by Washington between Delta Crescent Energy and the Pentagon’s Kurdish proxies was first revealed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham during a July 30 Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Graham told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he had been informed by the commander of the Syrian Kurdish forces, known as Mazlum Kobani, of the deal to “modernize the oil fields in northeastern Syria”, and asked whether the Trump administration was supporting it.
“We are,” Pompeo replied. “The deal took a little longer than we had hoped, and now we're in implementation; it could be very powerful.”
It has since emerged that the principals in Delta Crescent Energy include James Cain, a North Carolina Republican Party official and former US ambassador to Denmark who gained brief notoriety by calling for the execution of Chelsea Manning, the courageous US soldier who was imprisoned for her role in exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq by leaking to WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of military war logs and diplomatic cables. Also on the company’s board is James Reese, a former Delta Force officer who became a private security consultant and Fox News contributor after retiring from the military.
There is every reason to suspect that the company was formed as an act of political cronyism. The deal was reportedly “negotiated” under the auspices of the chief of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, while US military is facilitating its implementation.
As for Pompeo’s claim that this agreement could prove “powerful,” it certainly is not a matter of its global economic significance, given that Syria accounts for just 0.1 percent of the world's oil reserves. Rather, the deal serves as a means of starving the Syrian government and people of resources that are desperately needed for reconstruction after nearly a decade of war, while simultaneously providing a pretext for the continued US military occupation and dismemberment of the country.
The deal is the outcome of the shift in US tactics initiated by Trump in October of last year, when he provided a green light for a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria for the purpose of driving Washington’s erstwhile Kurdish allies from the border. At the time, Trump spouted a great deal of demagogy about ending Washington’s “forever wars” and pulling all US troops out of Syria.
Facing a firestorm of criticism from within the US military and intelligence apparatus, Trump backed down, announcing that he would retain a US force in Syria to “keep the oil.”
At the time he stated, “We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow. Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
The announcement of the oil deal provoked bitter criticism from the Syrian government. Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja’afari spoke before the Security Council last week, denouncing Washington for “stealing Syrian oil and depriving the Syrian state and Syrian people of the basic revenues necessary to improve the humanitarian situation, provide for livelihood needs and reconstruction.” He also charged both the US and the European Union with enforcing a sanctions regime that serves to “prevent the Syrians from obtaining their basic needs of food, medicine and medical equipment, especially in light of the spread of the corona pandemic and its dire effects.”
The principal allies of the Damascus government of President Bashar al-Assad, Iran and Russia, also denounced the US oil deal as a violation of Syria’s national sovereignty. Also condemning the agreement was the government of Turkey, which is continuing its own occupation and de facto annexation of Syrian territory.
The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a statement hypocritically denouncing Washington for “disregarding international law, violating territorial integrity, unity and sovereignty of Syria,” while going on to charge that the oil deal amounted to “financing terrorism.” Ankara regards the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) Kurdish separatist movement inside Turkey, which is designated by both the US and Turkey as a “terrorist” organization. The Erdogan government regards the consolidation of any Kurdish-controlled entity near its border with Syria as a threat to Turkish national security.
The oil deal has ratcheted up dangerous tensions in northeastern Syria, where US, Russian, Turkish, Syrian government and Kurdish YPG forces, along with remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) militia, are all operating in close proximity.
Last week, on the same day, August 18, a US base near Syria’s Conoco oil field in Deir ez-Zor—now under the control of the American military and its Kurdish proxies—came under rocket attack for the first time, and a Russian major general was killed by an improvised explosive device.
The Pentagon blamed the rocket attack on Iran and Iranian-aligned militias, while the killing of the senior Russian officer was initially blamed on ISIS. There is no proof that either is the case, and there is reportedly substantial speculation that the killing of the Russian general may have been the work of Washington and its Kurdish proxies.
A day earlier, on August 17, a US convoy engaged in a firefight with Syrian government forces at a checkpoint in al-Hasakah, leaving one Syrian soldier dead and two others wounded. US and Syrian accounts of the incident were at odds, with the Pentagon claiming that the convoy came under attack from unknown elements after passing through the checkpoint, and the Syrian government reporting that the shooting began when the Syrians tried to stop the convoy. Apache helicopters were escorting the US armored vehicles.
US military officials have reported that encounters between US and Russian soldiers are virtually a daily occurrence. For its part, Russia has built up its forces in the region, strengthening its base at the Qamishli airport on the Turkish border and bringing in attack helicopters. Meanwhile, Russia has deployed some two dozen tanks and armored vehicles to the village of Mazloum, little more than a mile from a US base.
US imperialism has been at war in Syria since launching a regime change operation in 2011, using CIA-backed Islamist militias as its proxies in a bid to topple the Assad government and impose a US puppet government in Damascus. It subsequently launched a direct military intervention in Syria as well as Iraq on the pretext of combating ISIS, an offshoot of the very Islamist militias that it had previously armed and funded. The toll of these interventions numbers in the hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced.
Now the US remains in Syria for the purpose of controlling and exploiting the country’s oil, as part of a broader military campaign to impose a neo-colonial US hegemony in the Middle East at the expense of Iran, and the countries the Pentagon defines as “great power” rivals, China and Russia.
These aims, combined with the profound political instability driven by the economic and social crisis within the United States itself, pose a growing danger that the heightened military frictions in Syria can metastasize into a broader war, drawing in regional and major powers alike.
Victims of herd immunity: further evidence that UK care home residents were denied medical treatment
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/care-a25.html
By Margot Miller
25 August 2020
A report, “The Experience of Care Home Staff During Covid-19,” published Monday by the Queen’s Nursing Institute, reveals that during the peak of the pandemic in the UK, the elderly and disabled were in many cases denied medical treatment.
Founded in 1887 to organise the supply and training of District Nurses, the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) is the UK’s oldest charity. Alongside QNI Scotland, its mission is to improve the nursing care of people in the community.
In May and June, given grave concerns about the impact of the pandemic on nursing and residential homes, the institute launched a survey of the QNI’s Nurses’ network. Those surveyed included 114 registered nurses and 46 managers. Most respondents cared for the elderly, while a third worked with residents of mixed ages and needs.
The report reveals that hospitals were instructed by the authorities to empty wards of geriatric patients, who were then sent untested for COVID-19 into care homes.
Simultaneously, care homes were told there was a blanket ban on hospital admissions. National Health Service (NHS) managers instructed care homes that residents who became sick were to be covered with DNAR (do not attempt to resuscitate) orders.
Asked if this policy changed during the period sampled, 16 respondents (1 in 10 in the survey) reported the QNI had “serious ethical and professional concerns.” For example, one respondent said, “GPs, Clinical Commissioning Groups and hospital trusts [were] making resuscitation decisions without first speaking to residents, families and care home staff or trying to enact ‘blanket’ ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions for whole groups of people.”
Such a practice, amounting to involuntary euthanasia, which is illegal, was in many instances ignored by staff.
One nurse in the survey said, “We were asked to change the status of all our residents to do not resuscitate and not for escalation to hospital. We refused.”
Another said, “All residents with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 were automatically made DNAR and given emergency health-care plans to stay in the home.”
Thirty-nine of those surveyed reported COVID-19 stimulated change of practice, such as involving residents and/or families in discussions about dying and residents’ wishes should they catch the virus.
Other failures included “lack of guidance on issues like personal protection and issues of poor access to pay if they [staff] became ill.” The report states, “Only 62 respondents stated that they could take time off with full pay, while some felt pressure not to take time off at all.”
Seventy or 43 percent of the 163 homes surveyed reported that in March or April they had admitted patients who had been turfed out of hospital without a coronavirus test. “The acute sector pushed us to take untested admissions,” said a nurse.
A fifth of homes had admitted a COVID-19 patient discharged from hospital.
A cross-party parliamentary committee found that a total of 25,000 patients were discharged into care homes in England between mid-March and mid-April; 6,435 geriatric patients were discharged from hospital between March 19 and April 15–of whom only 2,225 were tested. The 623 who tested positive were sent into a care homes, nevertheless.
Twenty-five percent of respondents said it was difficult or very difficult to get hospital treatment for residents, 32 and 33 percent, respectively, reported difficulty accessing general practitioners and district nurses to attend their facilities. Twelve percent of respondents reported difficulty or great difficulty accessing end-of-life care or medication for those in their care.
Releasing untested patients into the care system ensured the spread of the pandemic into the community, as care home staff faced a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), which the government had failed to stockpile. Care staff, who were also untested at this point, becoming ill, took the virus home to their families.
The Tory government’s herd immunity policy made it inevitable the elderly would die disproportionately. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, 19,394 care home residents died between March 2 and June 12 of COVID-related illnesses—approximately a third of all deaths in care homes in that period.
In Scotland, the picture is even more horrific, with about a half of COVID-19 deaths in the country involving the elderly in care homes.
One of the study’s authors, Professor Alison Leary, said, “It is clear from this survey that the care home workforce has faced very challenging issues. Many have felt unsupported and their wellbeing has suffered.”
QNI Chief Executive Crystal Oldman said the survey’s findings epitomised government neglect of the care home system. Emphasising the crucial though undervalued work performed in the care sector, she said, “The care being delivered in a home can at times be as intensive as in a hospital—in particular for end of life care—and it is hugely skilled work.”
Care for the elderly was largely privatised beginning in the 1980s, and care workers are notoriously low-paid, with many employed on a temporary basis.
Oldman expressed concern that homes had struggled to access district nursing, GP and hospital services. “We were really surprised to see this,” she continued. “These are universal health services. It is completely opposite to the protective ring around care homes that was being talked about at the time [by the government].”
Fifty-six percent of nurses and managers surveyed said their physical and mental health had suffered.
Anita Astle, managing director at the Wren Hall nursing home in Nottingham, and a nurse with 30 years’ experience, told the Independent newspaper her staff were in “despair.” Almost two dozen of the residents in the home died from the virus, causing lasting “emotional and physical strain. We were losing people we cared about, people who were part of our family. They were dying and there was nothing we could do about it.” she continued, “I was broken at the lowest point.”
Astle explained how a COVID-19 patient with a tracheostomy was discharged from hospital to the home at the beginning of May, even though the home said they lacked the protective equipment to give him appropriate care. It was seven weeks later before staff had their masks and were being tested for safety.
Another respondent declared, “The two weeks of daily deaths during an outbreak were possibly the two worst weeks of my 35-year nursing career.”
Care workers are still not adequately provided with PPE, and testing is inconsistent.
NHS Providers, on behalf of more than 200 NHS trusts in England, recently boasted that in April the NHS had freed up 33,000 beds in “record time.” The situation in Scotland was similar. A recently leaked letter revealed Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman congratulated health boards in April for discharging the elderly from hospital to care homes in “record time.”
The report’s findings are a devastating indictment of the Johnson government’s homicidal policies putting business profits above workers’ lives, which are continuing in the unfolding pandemic.
Medical treatment was withheld from the oldest and most vulnerable in society per government order, as part of a herd immunity policy in which the virus was allowed to rip through care homes. The predicable result was thousands of older people dying before their time, some losing many years of life, and families losing cherished loved ones to a highly contagious disease.
Coronavirus reproduction rate rises above 1 in UK, as infection cases surge
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/rval-a25.html
By Robert Stevens
25 August 2020
Coronavirus in Britain is spreading exponentially due to the reckless, homicidal reopening of the economy and schools by the Johnson government.
The R or R0 value (Reproduction rate) of COVID-19 is now at 1 or above nationally, meaning that every one person infected is infecting at least one other person.
Last Friday, the government’s scientific advisory group (SAGE) announced that R had risen to between 0.9 and 1.1 in the UK as a whole for the first time since weekly reporting of data began in May. This was an increase on an estimated range of 0.8-1.0 last week and a rate of 0.8-0.9 documented by SAGE two weeks ago.
Because the information used to calculate the R and growth rate includes epidemiological data such as hospital admissions, ICU admissions and deaths, SAGE’s estimates reflect the situation as it was up to three weeks ago. Subsequent changes in transmission levels—set to rocket with millions of children being back to school, along with hundreds of thousands of teachers and other education staff—are not yet fully reflected in the estimates.
Of the UK’s most populated area, SAGE announced it “does not have confidence that R is currently below 1 in England.” In London, SAGE calculates the R rate at 0.9-1.1. The rate is even higher in some parts of the UK, with Northern Ireland’s (population over 1.8 million) estimated to be as high as 1.6.
Between July 4 and August 15, virtually all remaining lockdown measures were ended nationally.
This criminal policy was enacted under conditions in which a large swathe of northern England was forced to go into a “local lockdown” at the end of July—impacting around 5 million people. This was after the entire city of Leicester had already been placed in lockdown for weeks.
Due to the rapid growth in infection rates over the weekend, the government was forced to impose further lockdown measures in Oldham and parts of Blackburn and Pendle in the north west of England. Last Friday, the east Midlands town of Northampton was named an “area of intervention” as a major sandwich producer, Greencore, was forced to close its factory in the town with nearly 300 workers infected. Northampton is one of 19 such areas of intervention, including major population centres like Leicester, Bradford and Manchester.
Even more significantly, Birmingham—the second largest city in the UK with a population of more than 1 million—was last Friday added to the government’s “watch list.” Its weekly rate of infections shot up by 27 percent, meaning it could be placed under lockdown imminently. The city’s infection rate is now at 30 cases per 100,000, the highest level since mid-June. This was up from up from 22.4 the week before and a substantial increase on the 12 per 100,000 recorded at the start of August.
Birmingham is now classified as requiring “enhanced support,” as is Luton (population over 211,000). Another seven towns and cities are listed as “areas of concern.”
Saturday’s 1,288 infections recorded nationally was the highest daily number in two months. In the last week to Monday, 4,364 new infections were recorded nationally, with the official death toll at 41,433.
In Scotland, Saturday’s 123 new cases were the highest daily total in three months. Nearly 80 were recorded in Tayside. Many of Tayside’s cases are centred on the Coupar Angus chicken processing plant, where at least 68 infections have been recorded (59 employees and 9 of their contacts).
Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party government reopened all schools on August 11, and its devastating impact is already manifest, with infections in nearly 30 schools. On Monday, it emerged that 21 staff and 2 pupils at Kingspark special school in Dundee—also in Tayside—have contracted COVID-19. Four of their contacts in the community were infected. The school was forced to close last Wednesday, just eight days after reopening.
Nothing is being allowed to intrude on the ruling elite’s maniacal rush to enforce its back to work agenda, with the damning R value data issued by SAGE totally ignored by the government. This is despite Johnson and his key scientific and medical advisors repeatedly claiming, for months, that its actions would be determined by the R value—which it insisted had to be kept below 1 at all costs.
At the start of lockdown, the R rate was between 2.4—as estimated by Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team—and 4, according to other research.
The lockdown imposed on March 23 reduced R significantly within days and by at least two thirds in a matter of weeks.
Speaking at a Downing Street conference on March 30, just seven days after lockdown, Johnson’s Chief Scientific Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said, “Britain’s lockdown is having a very big effect on the R0, bringing it down to below one.”
On April 16, the government introduced five tests that had to be met before the national lockdown could be ended. The third test was centred on lowering the R value, with Downing Street insisting it would count on “Reliable data [the R value] showing the rate of infection was decreasing to ‘manageable levels.’”
At the April 30 press conference, asked what the R rate should be, Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Chris Whitty said, “There isn’t a perfect answer to what should the R be [to lift the lockdown] but we’re absolutely confident that the wrong answer is anything over one.
“Because as soon as R goes over one, then you restart exponential growth— it may be slow if it is just over one, it may be a lot faster if it goes a lot above one—but exponential growth restarts and, sooner or later—and the higher it is, the sooner it is—the NHS [National Health Service] will go back to the risk of being overwhelmed and the number of cases will go up.”
At the same event, Johnson—in his first public event since almost dying after being struck down with COVID-19—stated, “the government will be monitoring R very carefully. It will be a key factor in how social distancing measures will be used in the future,” adding, “Let me just emphasise that keeping the R down is going to be absolutely vital to our recovery, keeping the reproduction rate of the disease down. …”
On May 11, Johnson announced that “in order to monitor our progress, we are establishing a new COVID Alert Level System. The COVID Alert Level has five levels, each relating to the level of threat posed by the virus.” Yet again the R rate was cited as all-important. “The [Alert] level will be primarily determined by the R value and the number of coronavirus cases.”
On May 28, as a result of lockdown, the R rate was estimated to be between 0.7 and 0.9. Vallance told a press conference in Number 10, “We need to keep concentrating on R below one, that means making sure that the measures that are in place are adhered to and that we all stick to them to make sure that the right thing is done and that we end up in a position where we can get the numbers down and the R down a bit. But we are at a fragile state.”
But the over-riding goal of the government, while cynically citing the importance of lowering the rate of infection, was always to reopen the economy and force millions back to work—in order to restart the production of profits for the corporations and super-rich. Johnson said at the May 28 event, “When we are sure that this first phase is over and that we are meeting our five tests…then that will be the time to move on to the second phase in which we continue to suppress the disease and keep the reproduction rate—the R rate—down, but begin gradually to refine the economic and social restrictions and one-by-one to fire up the engines of this vast UK economy.”
As is now clear in the resurgence of coronavirus everywhere, preventing its spread is incompatible with the murderous agenda of flinging open the economy and reopening schools.
At the April 30 press conference, asked what would be a manageable R rate to control the spread of the pandemic, Johnson replied, “The crucial thing is to stop the overall national R from going over 1 again because as Chris [Whitty] and Patrick [Vallance] have explained, that’s the moment that you get the risk of another exponential curve upwards.” (emphasis added)
With R above 1, this point has already been reached even as the health and safety of the population are set to be further imperilled—with schools throughout Northern Ireland reopening yesterday and set to reopen in England from September.
That the R rate is not significantly higher is only due to the fact that millions are ignoring the government’s advice to carry on as normal, with millions refusing to use public transport and many still shopping online, refusing to go to pubs and bars, and working from home rather than going to unsafe workplaces.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for rank-and-file safety committees to be organised in workplaces to demand and implement measures to protect workers’ lives. These measures must be based upon a scientific understanding of the nature of the disease. The SEP will provide all the assistance we can to workers in establishing rank-and-file safety committees.
Despite COVID-19, French billionaires have tripled their wealth since 2010
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/fran-a25.html
By Kumaran Ira
25 August 2020
While the COVID-19 pandemic threatens millions of lives worldwide, the super-rich are profiting from the pandemic to boost their fortunes, as governments shower the corporate and financial elite with billions of euros in bailouts. This is the case not only in the United States, but internationally.
French financial magazine Challenges has published its yearly ranking of the 500 largest fortunes in France. According to the 2020 edition, the collective wealth of France’s 500 wealthiest families has exploded despite the pandemic: “Despite the economic crisis caused by the confinement, the 500 greatest fortunes has not collapsed.”
It continued, “In 2020, the collective wealth of the 500 top fortunes in the ranking was €731 billion, compared to €211 billion in 2010.” This is approximately 30 percent of France’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to 10 percent in 2010. While there has been a threefold increase in their wealth over the last decade, there has been a ten-fold increase since 1996. France has 95 billionaires today, compared to 40 a decade ago.
The disgusting self-enrichment of the financial aristocracy exposes the French government’s claims it has no money for social spending and to stop mass sackings being prepared amid the pandemic. The accumulation of such obscene fortunes is due to the policies of successive governments since the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the 2008 Wall Street crash. They are implementing austerity policies designed to destroy social rights established after the Liberation from the Nazi occupation, to further enrich the wealthy.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, French officials have refused to significantly boost health spending and even mocked COVID-19 as a “little flu.” The state thus not only endangered health workers, who were denied necessary supplies and even face masks. The pandemic has caused over 30,000 deaths in France and 810,000 worldwide. At the same time, European governments were pouring over €2 trillion in bailouts into the banks and major corporations, further enriching this corrupt financial aristocracy.
Among the billionaires, Bernard Arnault, the head of the LVMH luxury fashion conglomerate, is still the wealthiest individual in France and across Europe. For the first time, his wealth has gone above €100 billion (a 13 percent increase since 2019). He is the third-wealthiest man in the world after Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). From 2008 to 2019, Arnault increased his fortune from €18 billion to €100 billion.
The Arnault family, which initially ran a regional construction firm in northern France, built its fortune by manipulating state subsidies to restructure and shut down textile plants. It finally acquired LVMH in the 1980s, leaving in its wake a trail of shuttered factories and devastated cities. Northern France has since become an electoral base of the neo-fascist National Front.
The five largest fortunes in France are based primarily on luxury, fashion and cosmetics. After France’s wealthiest man, there are the Dumas family that owns the Hermès luxury group (€55 billion), the Wertheimer brothers who own the Chanel luxury group (€53 billion), and Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who owns much of L’Oréal (€51 billion). Fifth place goes to François Pinault and his family, which owns the Kering luxury conglomerate (€32 billion).
In sixth and seventh place, one finds big retail and defense contractors: Gérard Mulliez for the Auchan supermarket chain, and Laurent, Olivier, Marie-Hélène and Thierry Dassault of the Dassault military and aerospace empire (€23.5 billion).
These billionaires have profited massively from tax cuts and state subsidies handed to them over a period of decades. The fact that France’s five largest fortunes rely on luxury underscores how the ruling class builds its fortunes on social inequality and neglects industry and production.
Such concentration of wealth at the top of society is an unprecedented phenomenon, which the pandemic has not stopped. According to the Guardian, “more than three-quarters of the world’s wealthiest people have already reported a substantial increase in their family fortune this year.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his fortune skyrocket by $75 billion this year to reach the record figure of $189 billion.
Even before the drastic impact of COVID-19, a substantial proportion of the world’s population lived in poverty. In its report published last October, European statistics agency Eurostat wrote that “in 2018, 109.2 million people, that is 21.7 percent of the population in the European Union (EU) was living at risk of poverty or social exclusion.”
The French National Statistics Institute (INSEE) reported at that time that in France 14.7 percent of the population—that is over 9 million people—were living under the poverty line. In 2019, the number of beneficiaries of minimum welfare payments (RSA) increased, with 1.84 million households receiving this benefit. A couple has to live on €847 monthly with this benefit, and an individual €567 per month.
In October 2019, sociologist Louis Maurin told the daily Le Parisien: “We are in a sort of stagnation, with already very weak growth, which always leaves behind a portion of the population that is already economically weakened. Public policy is not directed towards the poorest individuals. By spending €7 billion, we would lift 5 million people out of poverty, whereas in reality we are giving €30 billion in tax handouts to the wealthy. Our employment policy is not coherent, either. Without accusing anyone of anything, our job-creation policy has no ambition.”
Now, the super-rich are seeing their fortunes subsidized by bailouts including a €1.25 trillion European Central Bank “quantitative easing” plan, and hundreds of billions spent in national and EU bailouts across Europe. This only further underscores the completely parasitic character of their wealth. Like the feudal aristocracy before the 1789 French revolution, they live by plundering the public purse and demanding with limitless arrogance that the state impoverish the people.
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