A Mandaluyong court cleared activists Lady Ann “Icy” Salem and Rodrigo Esparago of charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives, ruling that the search warrant used to arrest them was void.
Mandaluyong Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 209 Judge Monique Quisumbing-Ignacio dismissed the cases against the two in a ruling on Friday, February 5.
Judge Ignacio said the search warrant issued by Quezon City Judge Cecilyn Burgos Villavert was null and void, therefore the firearms and explosives allegedly seized from the condo unit of the suspects were inadmissible evidence.
Salem, editor of red-tagged alternative publication Manila Today, and Esparago, a trade unionist, were among the 7 people arrested on Human Rights Day on December 10, 2020.
Judge Villavert of Quezon City is notorious among activists for issuing search warrants that have led to the arrests of many among their ranks since November 2019.
Among those arrested in a warrant issued by Villavert was Reina Mae Nasino, the young mother of baby River Nasino. The infant’s death highlighted the gaps in the country’s justice system.
In her ruling, Judge Ignacio of Mandaluyong said the search warrant was vague and allowed the raiding teams to grab whatever they wanted, resulting in a “fishing expedition.”
The constitutional right against illegal searches and seizures requires that search warrants be as specific as possible.
Judge Ignacio also found glaring inconsistencies in the sworn affidavits and testimonies of the informants, upon whom the application for the search warrant was based.
For example, the informants claimed that they saw Salem and Esparago taking photos of their guns to encode them on the laptops of the suspects. However, there were discrepancies in the details of the testimony as the hearings progressed.
“All told, there being numerous inconsistencies and contradictions, the testimonies of the foregoing witnesses cannot be given full faith and credence,” said Judge Ignacio in her ruling.
“And since the sole basis of the issuance of the search warrants were their sworn statements and testimonies, the Court finds that probable cause was not sufficiently established,” the judge said.
Supreme Court rules allow the top judges of Manila and Quezon City to issue search warrants outside of their jurisdictions, which the police preferred in their crackdown that led to the arrest of around 58 activists in Manila and Bacolod in 2019.The search warrants in the 2019 crackdown all came from Villavert. Once the main cases against activists were lodged in their proper jurisdictions, those judges had the chance to review all facts, including the validity of the search and the search warrant.
This did not happen for Nasino, because her first judge in Manila, Judge Marivic Balisi-Umali refused to subpoena the search application records from Villavert. Nasino is still on trial.
Salem and Esparago are expected to be released soon. The lawyers received the ruling late Friday.
The Public Interest Law Center (PILC), Salem and Esparago’s lawyers, said that “the dismissal of charges clearly demolishes the Duterte Government’s vilification and red-tagging campaign against the Human Rights Day 7.”
“It is a severe blow to the NTF-ELCAC, which claimed the arrests as a victory in the anti-insurgency campaign. The nail in the coffin is the dismissal of the cases, exposing not just faulty police work but vicious political persecution,” said the PILC.
This article first appeared on the Filipino website Rappler. Reproduced with permission
Why ‘Keep Our NHS Public’ is launching a People’s Covid Inquiry
The Covid pandemic is ongoing and has already been a disaster that will have major long lasting adverse consequences
Across the political divide there are few people who would even attempt to argue that the pandemic the UK has been handled well, other than a misguided and ignorant minority of lockdown sceptics. With nearly 120,000 deaths including 29,000 in care homes, almost 900 health and care staff, and many other frontline key workers, the UK stands near the top of the world league table for deaths in relation to population. It is worse than even the United States.
In addition, there has been a huge adverse impact on the psychological health of millions. This includes children, many of whom will see their life chances reduced by the chaos around education. An enormous burden of ill health has also been neglected by an overwhelmed NHS, that is forced to redeploy personnel and to suspend many non-covid related services.
The problems of ‘long Covid’ in survivors are likely to be considerable and require major investment in services to support these patients. Inequalities in society have been strikingly highlighted, with people from the Black, Asian, Minority and Ethnic (BAME) communities suffering disproportionately, together with those living in poverty or unable to work from home. The health and care workforce has made heroic efforts but will bear the mental scars for years to come.
Whether they will even be allowed time for respite once spread of infection is brought under control remains in doubt, and many are already considering finding alternative employment or taking early retirement. Huge numbers of people have lost jobs or seen their income fall dramatically. Families have been separated from their loved ones, barred from seeing them in hospital or care homes, prevented from being with them at the time of death or mourning them properly with a funeral.
There is no evidence so far of lessons have been learnt
We might have expected lessons to have been learnt during what is now called ‘the first wave’, during last spring. In fact, this has not been the case, with deaths during the second wave even now exceeding those in the first. Although an effective ‘test and trace’ system was initially set as a precondition for relaxing the first lockdown, this requirement was abandoned on the basis of a false dichotomy between health and the economy.
At the present time, a policy of virus suppression continues to be pursued in England despite evidence from countries such as New Zealand suggesting far better health and economic outcomes from a ,Covid elimination approach. Large amounts of public money are being wasted on an ineffective privatised test and trace system; mass testing despite a lack of evidence to suggest this is effective; and finally – contracting out to private companies that have failed to deliver, for example on Personal Protective Equipment.
While it became clear that crowding indoors, close proximity and poor ventilation all contributed towards spread of infection, ‘eat out to help out’, going to the pub, and mixing over Christmas were all encouraged with predictable and dire results.
Even now staff are being put at risk because PPE guidance has not been updated in the light of new insights into viral spread, to say nothing of needed workplace restrictions. The latter given outbreaks such as in the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency office with over 500 cases including one death.
Is there even an appetite to learn lessons?
Looking at the above, it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that there is an unwillingness to learn lessons in case this is taken as an admission of guilt. Just as the Prime Minister talked of health staff having to make impossible decisions about which patients should or should not receive intensive care when demand outstrips resources, and yet he rejected the notion of helping formulate ethical guidelines and providing legal protection for those put in this situation.
To have done this, while it was entirely the right course of action, would have been seen as an acknowledgement that government strategy had failed and that the NHS has been neither protected nor had coped. Notwithstanding, under pressure from many different sources the government has at least accepted that there is need for an inquiry. But at the same time it maintains the fiction that it has done all the right things at the right time.
In July, Johnson stated that ‘now was not the right time for an investigation but there would “certainly” be one “in the future” so lessons could be learned’. This was in direct response to pleas from the ‘Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice’ group, who presciently remarked: “We also believe that a part of any inquiry must begin now to take fast action in order to prevent further unnecessary deaths should we encounter a second wave”.
The Prime Minister went on to make it clear that there would be no inquiry until the pandemic was beaten, despite both MPs and scientists pleading for immediate action so the mistakes from the first wave were not repeated. In January 2021, after passing the official 100,000 deaths mark, he again reiterated that with NHS hospitals facing immense pressures, it would not be “sensible” to divert government resources away from the fight against Covid-19. The fact that an inquiry might assist that fight seems not to have been considered, perhaps because he has been transferring his failures onto the public at large.
Why further prevarication is dangerous
It is clear that the government aims to avoid scrutiny and the inevitable criticism that will come its way for the management of the pandemic. Ministers therefore wish to delay any inquiry until such time in the distant future, when this will have become both a largely academic exercise and pose no threat to them.
There are, however, powerful reasons why an inquiry should be a matter of urgency. Firstly, huge numbers of preventable deaths have already been shown to result from failing to learn lessons and change course. The pandemic is still raging, and who knows when it will end?
Meanwhile, the death toll increases. The success of vaccination is by no means guaranteed and requires sufficient numbers of the population to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity. Particular attention needs to be focused on vulnerable groups that show more evidence of vaccine hesitancy, yet currently there is not an inclusive approach that puts health inequalities at its heart.
A possible scenario remains of infection being controlled in much of the country while remaining endemic in poor Northern towns. How long vaccination will confer protection is unknown, and the threat of further viral mutations brings at least the possibility of a variant against which available vaccines will not be protective. All this dictates that a raft of measures to eliminate community transmission of infection (social distancing; find test, trace, isolate, support; work place safety, etc.) should be a main focus for government in addition to vaccine roll out.
Finally, more pandemics will come. The 21st century had already seen SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola and Zika virus before SARS-CoV-2 caused Covid-19. It is urgent that we plan for the next pandemic while getting out of this one. We must think out how we develop our health and care services in order to repair the damage, make them resilient in the future, and provide the care and protection to the population that is the first duty of government.
A People’s Covid Inquiry
‘Keep Our NHS Public’ is convinced that it is in the public interest to learn lessons now so that any necessary actions can be taken sooner rather than at some unspecified point in the future. This we believe will save lives. We stand together with bereaved families calling for justice; the Patients Association who insist on knowing the extent of damage caused to non-covid care, health and care workers; trade unions and other campaigning organisations demanding that government faces up to its responsibilities.
We also aim to give a voice to representatives from BAME communities, key workers and all those who have suffered and are calling for this to be recognised. To this end we are launching the People’s Covid Inquiry – to answer the questions the government lacks courage even to ask.
More information about the People’s Covid Inquiry:
Constellation of Liberation (Co-Liberation) is a Berlin-based, Polish-speaking, queer-feminist collective, founded in January 2021.
We believe in a feminism that is queer, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist, and a feminism that is based around notions of radical care.
We invest our energy into the fight for reproductive justice. We stand for free, safe, legal and accessible abortion. We believe birth control should be free and available and that sex education should be taught in schools and through public information campaigns. We demand unrestricted physical, sexual and reproductive autonomy for everyone, especially women, non-binary and trans* people.
CoLiberation is an actor in the resistance against the rise of right-wing and fundamentalist powers, with a focus on Poland, where the right-wing has been leading a systematic rollback of the rights of women and LGBTQIA people. By pushing against the populist, right-wing web of political structures underlying contemporary power struggles, we are working towards transnational feminist solidarity. We recognise that our context is Poland, but we strive to connect with global anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggles.
In our work we encourage each other to be brave and to push boundaries, to be transparent, responsible and to listen actively; we like to be creative and to use art in our actions.
CoLiberation might be a new collective, but we are not new activists – you would have seen us in the streets of Berlin over the last several months and years. All of our members have been prominently active in the fight for abortion rights in Poland and abortion rights in Germany, and in the fight for the rights of queer people in Poland.
Let’s liberate each other.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and our Telegram channel, where we are @CoLiberationBLN.
Our next action is on Saturday, 13 February, when we will be collecting donations of either the Morning After Pill (Die Pille Danach) or donations towards buying these pills, which we will then take directly to the Polish pro-choice organisation, Abortion Dream Team; they will distribute it to areas which need it most in Poland.
The GameStop saga is no class war
How did an ailing strip mall video game retailer become headline news around the world? And what does this tell us about how capitalism works?
Only a week after the stock price of US video game retailer GameStop (GME) skyrocketed to nearly $350 per share — up from roughly $40 the week before — its price settled back down to a more modest $60 as of midday Friday. GME’s wild ride over the past few weeks has earned a wide spectrum of labels, ranging from a “populist revolt” against Wall Street, an outrageous act of interference into financial markets, to a grim reminder of the financialization of all aspects of society.
While there may be an element of truth in each of these accounts, the reality is more mundane. In an era of increased atomization, the GameStop saga is just another stochastic outburst against a political and economic system that serves only a small sliver of the population. Changing it will require more than just the “democratization” of the tools of the already-powerful and wealthy.
How did an ailing strip mall video game retailer become headline news? Initially, users on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets, a group of small-time investors fond of risky options trading, became aware that a number of large hedge funds had an extremely high short exposure on GameStop. A short position is when an investor borrows a stock in order to sell it on immediately, betting that the price of that stock will fall. The investor then plans to buy it back at a lower price and return it to the borrower, cashing in on the difference between the old and new (theoretically) lower price in the process. However, if the price rises, short-sellers face potentially unlimited losses because a share’s value can theoretically rise infinitely. In this case, hedge funds and other investors had taken shorts positions equating to 138% of the total amount of GameStop stocks that actually exists. This was a huge bet that the price of the company’s stock would continue to fall in the context of store closures and the on-going effects of the pandemic.
Realizing this vulnerability, and determined to make both a profit and inflict pain on the Wall Street giants, retail investors (individual non-professional investors using mostly their own money) piled into GME, sending the price sharply upward. The goal was to force the funds into a “short squeeze,” a scenario where short-sellers are forced to buy back the shares they’ve borrowed at a higher value, incurring a huge loss for the shorter and further adding upward pressure to the share price. This tactic is not new, but is typically only used by larger investors. Yet, by coordinating online this group of individual investors managed to pull off the biggest of short squeezes. Last week, one of the most exposed hedge fund Melvin Capital was forced to close out of its short position, contributing to a multi-billion dollar monthly loss equal to 53% of the fund’s total value.
Initially, this saga seemed to lend itself to a typical “David and Goliath” story: plucky underdog investors against the Wall Street titans, a populist tale for the 21st century. While we have every right to cheer when large hedge funds lose immense sums of money (as some of them did, up to $3.3 billion in total), the battle lines cannot be drawn so easily. Both sides of the GameStop saga represent different sides of a flawed system.
It should go without saying, but trading equities is not an effective way to battle Wall Street. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is one of the largest shareholders in GameStop, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the price spike. The trading app used by many of the Redditors, Robinhood, is backed by several large Wall Street firms and was able to raise over $1 billion in new funding in the aftermath of the crisis. Meanwhile Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm, was able to cash out its holdings in theatre-chain AMC Entertainment after Redditors helped drive its shares up tenfold.
While the Redditors underlying analysis — that Wall Street is corrupt, self-serving, and rigged against the “little guy” — is essentially correct, some of their outrage has been misplaced. For example, Robinhood’s reason for temporarily suspending trading of GME at the high of the bubble was likely more banal than initial accounts suggested. After an initial uproar, it was later revealed that the trading platform chose to suspend trading and close positions as a result of a potential liquidity crisis. Because most Robinhood users use margin accounts — owning a claim to a share, rather than the share itself — the platform itself assumes some of the risk of users’ positions. Pausing selling, and later raising additional capital, stemmed more from this arrangement than from a nefarious backroom conspiracy.
What does this bizarre episode tell us about our current political economy, and the role of financial markets within it? Certainly, it is another chink in the ideological armor of capitalism. While the divergence between asset values and the real economy has been a long-term trend — exacerbated by large-scale central bank asset purchases over the past decade — the GameStop episode put a finer point on that reality.
Based on typical “fundamentals,” Gamestop is clearly not worth hundreds of dollars per share. Still, people kept investing, hoping to get rich speculating on an asset with a price almost totally divorced from the firm’s physical business. This is certainly not a new phenomenon, but the scale of the divergence, as well as the people driving it, was unusual. To update Keynes’ famous beauty contest analogy, perhaps the best stocks to invest in won’t be the ones that seem memeable to the investor, but the ones investors think that other market players will find most memeable.
Wall Street will not be successfully challenged by using its own tools against it. Rather than an uprising against capitalism, GameStop’s rise and fall is a sign of the hegemony of our current system. For the most part, the Redditors did not seek to upend our financial structures, just to use newly distributed tools to make room for themselves within it.
The class backgrounds of the majority of those involved are relevant to help understand their motives. While hardly elite, the fact the Redditors had both enough capital and time to engage in the stock market indicates their relatively fortunate economic position. For all the talk of #eattherich and the mutual desire to give Wall Street a bloody-nose, many more hoped to become wealthy themselves. Ultimately, they lacked a coherent political agenda or plan beyond the immediate moment. As a result, this will be a flash in the pan rather than a long-term threat to our economic system.
True opposition to financialized capitalism won’t come from within it. A real alternative will only arise from the less immediate, but ultimately much more enduring and significant work of organizing in workplaces and on the streets. The only way out of our current mess is to dismantle the tools of Wall Street, not democratize them.
For the time being, Berlin will probably not have a migrant quota for the civil service and state-owned companies. The amendment to the Participation and Integration Act drafted by Integration Senator Elke Breitenbach (die LINKE) originally envisaged a quota of 35 per cent for people with a migration background. Christine Lang (Max Planck Institute) considers a quota to be a “delicate matter” and a last resort, but she believes it is a suitable means of exerting pressure on the administration. “Any kind of diversity is good for the administration because it is very white,” Lang told “nd”. Source: nd
Protestant foundation sells real estate in Neukölln
Shortly before Christmas, a building at Anzengruberstraße 24 was sold by the Evangelisches Johannesstift Foundation to an as yet unknown new owner. The social charter agreed with the buyer “aims to protect the existing tenants for many years (…).” According to the tenants, the average rent is five euros per square metre. About half of the residents are pensioners, any many live on basic benefits. They criticise the agreement for only protecting existing tenants, “New neighbours would be second-class tenants.” “The charter only offers de facto legal protection against rent increases and modernisation – it is completely worthless here,” the tenants say. Source: nd
NEWS FROM GERMANY
Die LINKE in Saxony-Anhalt selects its candidates for the local elections
When Eva von Angern received the good news, she rose briefly from her seat. At the representatives’ meeting of the Left (die LINKE) in Saxony-Anhalt, it was noticeable the personnel did not change too much compared to the last election – despite the new top candidate. Meanwhile, there was frustration among the Left Youth. Although its candidates could still directly enter the state parliament, this is likely to be difficult. Source: nd
Labour market in shutdown
The head of the Federal Employment Agency (BA), Detlef Scheele (SPD), said thet the labour market is “still in robust shape. But the measures taken to contain the corona pandemic are leaving their mark.” There has been a significant increase in unemployment and so-called underemployment, a high number of short-time workers, and fewer vacancies and training places. According to the BA, there were 2.9 million unemployed in January, almost 200,000 more than a month earlier. The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) forecast a three per cent drop in gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2021. Source: jW
More armed right-wing extremists
The number of right-wing extremists with gun permits known to the authorities has risen significantly in 2020. According to a response by the federal government, security authorities counted around 1,200 actual or suspected right-wing extremists legally in possession of weapons at the end of last year. There are two types of weapons permits: for hunters and sports shooters. The new weapons law has been in force for about a year – now, a check is made on people applying for a permit and every three years thereafter, to see that they have the necessary “reliability and personal suitability”. Source: taz
Lübcke case´s appeals
The right-wing extremist Stephan E. from Kassel was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Walter Lübcke. The co-defendant Markus H., however, was acquitted. Lübcke’s family declared that the acquittal was “incomprehensible and difficult to cope with”. Now the relatives are appealing against the verdict. They are not alone. All other parties to the trial are also contesting the sentences: the federal prosecution; Markus H.; the main defendant, Stephan E.; and Ahmed I., who was stabbed with a knife in front of his asylum accommodation in Kassel on 6 January 2016. Stephan E. was also charged with this crime. Source: taz
German TV show and Racism
German TV personalities apologised for taking part in a controversial show, which discussed racism. All of the participants were white. The discussion on WDR’s “The Last Resort” featured guests dismissing calls to rename “Zigeunersoße,” or “gypsy sauce.” Germany’s Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency condemned the “unspeakable statements,” while Saskia Esken (SPD) tweeted that she was “lost for words.” In response to the controversy, German broadcaster WDR issued a statement saying the criticism was warranted, and that the panel should have included people who were directly affected by racism. Source: vice
Too black and too gay
In November 2020, a 51-year-old doctor started a petition on the anti-discrimination platform “allout” because his application to succeed the retired senior medical officer Andreas von Welczeck has been repeatedly rejected. He accuses the responsible city health councillor Bernd Geschanowski (AfD) of having prevented his appointment because he was “too gay” and “too black.”. “You don’t fit here,” Geschanowski is said to have said to him. “While saying this, Mr Geschanowski pointed to his skin. The Cuban-born doctor mentions his experience and qualification. In his petition, he writes he worked many years at the Bremen Health Department, as well with the organization „Doctors Without Borders.“ Source: nd
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