How the American oligarchy profited on death

Andre Damon

The United States set two milestones on Wednesday: 1,503 people died from COVID-19, the highest level in three months, and the S&P 500 stock index reached its highest mid-day level ever.

One hour after the markets closed on Wednesday, President Donald Trump, the architect of the American response to the pandemic that has left more than 170,000 people dead, devoted almost the entirety of his daily coronavirus “task force” briefing to boasting about the surge of the stock market. In his remarks, Trump outlined the theory governing the pandemic response of the White House, the cockpit of American capitalism.

Pointing to a group of slides prepared by Lawrence Kudlow, director of the United States National Economic Council, Trump related the surge in the stock market to the fact that the economic contraction due to lockdowns in the United States was lower than in other countries.

“The stock market is up almost 300 points again today,” Trump said. “Our economy is performing significantly better than Europe—which people have to understand very strongly; it’s performing better than any market anywhere in the world actually.”

Trump claimed that $9 trillion in financial wealth had been created since March, and that stock values were up by close to 50 percent. “That’s a number that nobody has ever heard of before,” he said, calling the figures “incredible.”

Moving to the next slide, Trump added, “You’ll see the virus-induced economic contraction in the United States has been far less severe than it was with our peers and peer nations.”

According to the figures Trump presented, real GDP fell in the United States by 10.6 percent in the first six months of the year, compared to 15 percent in the Euro area. What Trump left out was the fact that, despite the weaker economic contraction, unemployment surged in the US at a vastly higher level than in Europe.

The statistics Trump fumbled to present were consistent with the observations of epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who explained the fact that the United States is the world’s epicenter of COVID-19 because the country lifted lockdowns much earlier than countries that had more effectively contained the disease.

Osterholm noted:

Simply, we [the United States] gave up on our lockdown efforts to control virus transmission well before the virus was under control. Many other countries didn’t let up until the number of cases was greatly reduced, even in places that had extensive outbreaks in March and April…

The United States recorded its lowest seven-day average since March 31 on May 28, when it was 21,000 cases, or 6.4 new cases per 100,000 people per day. This rate was seven to 10 times higher than the rates in countries that successfully contained their new infections.

As a result, the United States has suffered five times as many COVID-19 cases as the European Union.

In other words, Trump was describing a policy of deliberately allowing over 170,000 people to die in order to ensure the stock market kept rising. As one group of public health experts recently noted, “We could have prevented 99% of those COVID-19 deaths. But we didn’t.”

Trump’s remarks Wednesday give chilling immediacy to his declaration last week, when confronted with the reality that 1,000 people are dying every day, that “They are dying, that’s true, and it is what it is.”

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the US ruling class’s response to the pandemic was driven not by the effort to preserve the lives of the population, but rather by the single-minded aim of defending and expanding the wealth of its financial oligarchy. To the extent that the pandemic played any role in social policy, it was as a pretext to transfer some $6 trillion to Wall Street and the major corporations—endorsed nearly unanimously by Democrats and Republicans.

Trump’s responsibility for these deaths is chilling to contemplate. But he could never have committed this crime without accomplices. While cheerleading the premature reopening of the country, the White House left the decision on reopening to the governors, all of whom, Democrat and Republican alike, reopened businesses in their states before the pandemic was contained. Many Democratic governors, including those of Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Colorado, actually reopened businesses in defiance of the White House’s own guidelines.

Now, the campaign to get teachers back on the job is being led by Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who declared last week that all the state’s schools could reopen, setting the stage for a new surge in the pandemic. For the ruling class, children must go back to school so that their parents can go back to work and pump out profits to pay for the bailout of Wall Street.

The “economic success” proclaimed by Trump is solely the success of the rich. For the great majority of American society, the first six months of this year have been a disaster. The death toll is quickly approaching 200,000. Some 30 million people are unemployed. Following the expiration of federal unemployment benefits, tens of millions are facing poverty and eviction.

Yet nine out of the ten richest US billionaires are wealthier now than they were a year ago, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. These ten individuals have collectively received $200 billion over the course of the past year. Their combined wealth has hit $906 billion, up 22 percent from the year before.

Leading the pack was Jeff Bezos, who, with his fortune of $187 billion, made $71 billion over the past year. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates made $8 billion, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg $20 billion, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk $48 billion.

The surge in the markets has paralleled the surge in deaths. On March 23, the day the stock market reached its low point, just 693 people had died from COVID-19 in the United States. Since then, nearly 170,000 more people have died.

For workers, it is vital to draw the lessons of recent months as the pandemic spirals out of control in the United States. Over the next month, millions of children and teachers will be herded into schools, fueling a massive resurgence of the pandemic that can make even the estimates of 300,000 deaths by the end of the year look optimistic.

The ruling class is perfectly willing to accept hundreds of thousands more deaths if it means that stock values will rise further. That is why matters cannot be left to them.

Across the country, opposition is mounting among teachers and educators to the premature return to school. This struggle must be linked with the fight by workers at factories and other workplaces across the country to ensure workplace safety and an end to non-essential production until the pandemic can be contained and eradicated.

Above all else, this year’s grim harvest of human lives has revealed the homicidal essence of capitalism and made clear that its urgent replacement with socialism is a matter of life and death.

New Education Policy : India Takes a Great Leap Backwards

Prabhat Patnaik

The document is exclusionary, reactionary and promotes conformism aimed at serving the interests of capitalism.

In a document like the New Education Policy, one must distinguish platitudes from new provisions, including the dropping of old platitudes. Thus, phrases like “education is a public good”, “6 per cent of GDP should be earmarked for education” are just platitudes, unless some concrete suggestions are advanced to realise these.

In short, repeating old platitudes is inconsequential; it is only not repeating them that has some significance, but such inconsequential repetition of old platitudes in the New Education Policy has impressed many otherwise well-informed observers, which explains the strange phenomenon of their according some approval to a policy that is downright reactionary and represents an obvious retreat from the goal of laying the foundations for an egalitarian society.

This retreat takes the form, above all, of exclusion of the socially and economically deprived sections from the ambit of education. There is scarcely any mention of affirmative action in the form of reservation for the socially oppressed anywhere in the document. And given the way reservations are being given a quiet burial in universities, such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, directly under the nose of the Central government and hence undoubtedly with its tacit support, the trend towards the exclusion of students from dalit and OBC (Other Backward Classes) backgrounds is unmistakable.

Legitimising Dropping Out

There is in additional exclusion for economic reasons, through the privatisation of education, which the New Education Policy (NEP) encourages. With “autonomy”, including financial autonomy, that is proposed to be granted to numerous colleges, they would obviously garner funds by charging higher fees, which would make them out of bounds for students from poor economic backgrounds, including those from the oppressed castes.

The proponents of the policy may contend that there will be scholarships for poor students, so that the better off students would in effect be cross-subsidising them. But, if at all such a scheme is implemented, given the investment required for making these institutions attractive enough for the well-to-do students, the fees charged to them, both for financing investments and for financing scholarships, will have to be very high.

This will create a social cleavage among students (“my fees are going to educate you”), destroying all collegiality. The obvious solution, of having publicly funded institutions with government scholarships, is precisely what the NEP, operating within the ambit of neo-liberalism, is moving away from. Hence, the impecunious students will either be completely excluded, or remain in such institutions as second-class students, derided by the better-off students until they eventually drop out.

Interestingly, in the Draft NEP of 2019, on which the current NEP is based, there were sentences expressing disapproval of private non-philanthropic educational institutions. But, in this final version, those sentences have been removed. Likewise, in the initial document released by the government as the final NEP, there were references to the Right to Education, but these, too, were removed in the version put out on the government website.

In fact, the NEP plans explicitly for the dropping out of students, which would inevitably occur according to us, though it camouflages such dropping out as an exercise in “flexibility”.

The policy provides for a four-year under-graduate programme, though the reasons for having such a programme are wholly unclear. Such a programme was introduced in Delhi University by the then HRD minister Kapil Sibal, under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance-II government, and had aroused much opposition.

It was withdrawn by human resource development minister Smriti Irani during the tenure of the first Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government, but has now been inexplicably re-introduced for the entire country!

Within this programme, however, students can drop out after the first year with a certificate and after the second year, with a diploma. There is, however, no one-year or two-year programmes as such that are being offered. So, anyone dropping out would be doing so in the middle of a four-year programme after having done just a few courses.

What the NEP does is thus to legitimise dropping out, except that it promises a piece of paper as a sort of consolation, called a certificate or a diploma, to students who are dropping out. These pieces of paper will not enable their holders to lay claims to any worthwhile jobs; and one or two years in college, which is all they would have spent, will not provide them any worthwhile education, not even any worthwhile experience of “college life”.

In effect, therefore, the idea of NEP is to produce a whole army of barely-educated persons, who would only be given the illusion of being “educated”. And these persons would typically belong to the socially and economically deprived categories.

Exclusion of Marginalised Students

This is a travesty of the social vision that independent India had set itself, of making education accessible to all as part of the country’s new awakening. Likewise, the policy of pushing people into career-oriented courses, into vocational training even before they have had a minimum number of years of general education, is typical of a government that wishes to wash its hands off its responsibility towards young persons. It offers them neither a proper education so that they can become citizens of the republic, nor a proper job. It just wants to dump them on the market with a modicum of training, and then let them fend for themselves.

This exclusion also makes a mockery of the NEP’s provision that school students, for the first few years, should be educated in their mother tongue, which may be a local language different from the language of the state to which they belong. This idea, which might otherwise have been a welcome one, requires as a complementary measure some assurance, through an appropriate policy of reservation for instance, that those receiving such education will not be at a disadvantage in going further in their educational careers. But in the absence of any such reservation, learning in one’s mother tongue may well turn out simply to be a ghetto to which the non-elite students would get consigned, without much chance of progressing further.

But it is not just the de facto dichotomy that the NEP introduces among the elite and non-elite students that is reprehensible. Its very philosophy is to make people accept such dichotomies.

One of its explicit objectives is to make students take pride in being Indian. Since none can possibly take pride in being part of a civilisation characterised by inhuman practices like “untouchability”, the syllabus will naturally play down such practices and present a “prettified” picture of Indian civilization.

Likewise Niskama Karma may inform one’s personal philosophy of living; but if it is taught as part of a curriculum to every student, then that inevitably amounts to playing down exploitation; if a factory worker’s child is taught that Niskama Karma is an ideal, then that child will have little sympathy for his or her father’s going on a strike for higher wages.

NEP: A Reactionary Project

The purpose of education must be to create a better world. For doing so, one must be dissatisfied with the existing world. Making one adjust to the existing world, or, worse still, to a world that had existed earlier but which the people are engaged in transcending through their praxis, is a reactionary project in the realm of education. The NEP promotes such a reactionary project.

This is also reflected in the fact that students are not going to be taught anything about their fundamental rights but only about their fundamental duties. The accent everywhere in the document is to produce conformism. The children of the elite will become conformist servitors of international finance capital in executive positions; the children of the excluded, the socially and economically under-privileged, will become conformist members of the working classes, among whom a shrinking number of jobs will be rationed out, but who will lack the intellectual wherewithal to fight against their predicament effectively. This is an inappropriate philosophy of education in any country, especially in a country like ours.

In the name of flexibility, inclusion, reduction of burden on students, and such like, what is being attempted is the very opposite: exclusion and reconciliation to the state of being excluded. In fact, one would understand NEP better if one approached it differently.

The introduction of a homogeneous mass education is a requirement of capitalism since it entailed substantial mobility of personnel, in contrast to the feudal era, when people scarcely went out of their villages or local areas. Capitalism still needs such an educational system that would impart a homogeneous education to equip a person to serve the needs of capital, no matter where s/he is. But education on a much larger scale would be entailed in the programme of “universal education” that independent India had promised, compared with what the operation of capitalism per se needs today.

The objective of an education policy under neo-liberal capitalism, therefore, is to educate people merely on the scale required by capital, and to renege, through various subterfuges, on the promise of universal education. One would understand the NEP better if one approached it by looking for such subterfuges, namely how it reneges rather than what it says.

Covid-19 and Maternal health in India

Monica Singh

The World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease 2019    (COVID-19) outbreaks a global pandemic. In India, during the last six months had a tough time for everyone as government had announced the lockdown in the month of March because of day by day increasing in the number of cases of coronavirus. Pregnant women have more stress about the effects of coronavirus on their pregnancy. UNICEF data shows that India will have the largest burden of Covid19 pandemic on baby births in the world.

Coronavirus pandemic creates many hitches for the pregnant women. The pressure on the healthcare system due to the pandemic, lockdown and lack of clear guidelines have caused severe interruptions in access to maternal healthcare and antenatal services.  From the first trimester to the third trimester, pregnant women needs a proper antenatal checkups, appropriate medications, counselling and dietary advices to overcome from undesirable symptoms (like nausea, vomiting, fatigue, weakness and giddiness, etc) of their pregnancy. This is not possible in the present circumstances, and as a result, many pregnant and lactating mothers are left without medical care – which may lead to the increased sufferings and eventual deaths of pregnant women.

According to the reports, after lockdown institutional deliveries declined as unattended on the other hand home deliveries increased. Data collection, reporting and examining have been all strictly impeded by the lockdown, and so that there is an incomplete depiction of the exact extent of the problem which pregnant women have faced. According to the NFHS 2015-16, around 70 percent of all deliveries are institutional deliveries in India. But in the coming months it will be decreased as people are afraid of coronavirus to visit in hospitals on one hand and on the other hand women unable to access antenatal services especially in the rural area. Home deliveries are not a problem but in the case of complications medical interventions are needed. Globally, it is estimated that about 830 women out of every 1,00,000 women die every day due to pregnancy related complications, according to the W.H.O report. It is also estimated that about 4,00,000 maternal deaths occur every year around the world and out of these 1,00,000 deaths occur in India. All the pregnant women are at equal risk, hence need to go hospital for regular check-ups. Some high risk cases delivers a baby.  normally and many normal cases delivers end up with high risk deliveries and this coronavirus infection makes it more worse. It has been observed that covid19 has led higher levels of depression among pregnant women. Pregnant may feel social isolation and fear of infection for themselves as well as for their infants. Lack of medical facilities and increasing number of home deliveries without the assistance of trained workers heighten the distress and depression among them. The lockdown was declared without proper planning and preparation which was clearly evident in the state’s response to the plight of migrant workers who are left without food and shelter. These migrant workers are the worst affected due to loss of employment. Thousands of migrant workers had started walking hundreds of miles to reach their respective homes, exposing the women who are pregnant to even more stress and health risks.

This is my story of lockdown. On 24th March, the government of India had declared lockdown when I was 38 weeks pregnant and I had delivered my baby on 5th April, the time in between it was so difficult for me and my family. Due to the lockdown, OPD was closed and doctors don’t want to meet. I had visited many times at hospital because I was in pain but doctor don’t scan me. They don’t want to admit me due to coronavirus infection. At last my condition became worse and I go through an emergency caesarean. This is not only happens with me but with the many others that will end up with their death for some women.

Our concern is that this isn’t a temporary setback, but one whose consequences will last for years to come. All schemes have suffered that are working for reducing maternal mortality and providing healthcare for pregnant women everywhere. From antenatal care to nutrition, weight monitoring and child health care has taken a hit due to coronavirus infection. Hence there should be provided appropriate information about Covid19 as well as counselling for reducing stress among pregnant women. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure their well being and make the necessary effort to minimize the uncertainty.

PM Modi’s never ending bogus farm promises

Sankara Narayanan

The farmer’s job is to cultivate and harvest. Not to construct grain silos.

Prime Minister Modi on Aug 09, 2020 launched a new financing scheme under the Rs. 1 lakh crore Agriculture Infrastructure Fund meant for setting up storage and processing facilities, which will help farmers get higher prices for their crops, according to the government statement.

“The scheme will support farmers, PACS [primary agricultural credit societies], FPOs [farmer producer organisations], agri-entrepreneurs, etc. in building community farming assets and post-harvest agriculture infrastructure. These assets will enable farmers to get greater value for their produce as they will be able to store and sell at higher prices, reduce wastage, and increase processing and value addition,” the statement said.
Modi said the scheme would give farmers and the agriculture sector a boost and “increase India’s ability to compete on the global stage”. Modi reiterated that “India has a huge opportunity to invest in post-harvest management solutions like warehousing, cold chain, and food processing, and build a global presence in areas such as organic and fortified foods.”

It is not known why was this scheme waiting for six long years. And the PM keeps his pet word ‘Global’ always in his kurta sleeves to entertain the audience, wherever he goes! In the US, they have safe grain bins to store 80% of their annual produce. But our Food Corporation of India’s post-harvest management solution is the grandoise tarpaulin.

According to a June 2020 report of Scroll.in, the government does not have proper storage facilities for stocking large amount of excess grain. Since much of this excess grain has been stored in suboptimal conditions for long, a significant part of it has been damaged. As of May 1, 60.5 lakh tonnes of wheat and 11.3 lakh tonnes of rice held by government was not “readily issuable”. This included grain that was sub-standard, partially spoilt (what the Food Corporation considers as partially salvagable) or completely damaged (nonissuable).

The report further states: “In just four months, between Jan 1 and May 1, the stock of rice and wheat that was not “readily issuable”, which included partially spoilt as well as damaged grain, increased from 7.2 lakh tonnes to 71.8 lakh tonnes. This is more than the amount of grain that has been distributed through PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana in April and May to deal with the crisis of livelihoods and food insecurity created by the Covid-19 lockdown.

Tamil Nadu’s Cuddalore district farmers were complaining on Aug 10, 2020 that one bag of paddy (75 kg) is fetching them Rs. 850 whereas the same quantum of husk is selling at Rs. 900. Mr. Prime Minister, When will the new infra assets enable these farmers ‘to get greater value for their produce as they will be able to store and sell at higher prices’?

The farmer’s job is to cultivate and harvest. It is the responsibility of the state to construct or cause to construct godowns and store the foodgrains safely. How can the PM outsource his business to the farmers?

Numerous farm blue baloons were floated by Narendra Modi from 2013 onwards. A few of them: Minimum Support Price as per Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations (Cost price + 50% profit), the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna, Doubling the farmer’s income in 5 years (2017-2022), Soil test, Optimum use of water & fertiliser, focus on fisheries, animal husbandry, honey bee keeping, timber farming, neem-coated urea etc. List is very bombastic like Modi’s lectures. Effect is pedestrian. Agri-Infra Fund’s result won’t be different.

Saudi Arabia is normalizing relations with Israel?

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

A drama series telecast on the Saudi-controlled MBC during the holy month of Ramadan is being seen as a clear signal from Saudi Arabia about its growing ties with Israel, the Brussels Times said Tuesday.

The TV series, ‘Umm Haroun’ (mother of Aaron), begins with a long monologue in Hebrew, in which a Jewish character says “we are the Gulf Jews who were born in the Gulf lands.”

Although Saudi-Israeli, behind-the-scene parleys, have been an open secret for long, since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, popularly known as MbS, took over as the de facto ruler the warming of ties between two bitter enemies of Iran has become quite obvious, according to the paper.

The first clear sign of rapprochement came when in 2018 in an interview to the US magazine The Atlantic, MbS said that Israelis are entitled to live peacefully on their own land, a complete U-turn from the stated Saudi policy that normalisation of relations hinges on an Israeli withdrawal from lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war – territory Palestinians seek for a future state, the Brussels Times said.

Haaretz commentator Zvi Bar’el

Haaretz, commentator Zvi Bar’el was quoted by the Brussels Times as saying, Saudi Arabia has emerged as Israel’s ‘dream state’. He says Israel has no better ally than Saudi Arabia. It fights Hezbollah and overthrew the Lebanese prime minister who had lived in peace with that organization for a year.

Bar’el further says it seems as if Saudi Arabia would be happy to have Israel join the “Sunni axis”. He says to be part of this new alliance, Israel may have to make some concession and does not see any harm in reviving the Saudi peace initiative, which calls for Arab normalization with Israel in return for withdrawing from the occupied Palestinian territories.

A quiet revolution is changing the Middle East

A revolution is taking place in the Arab world that is quietly moving the Middle East’s tectonic plates in ways no one ever thought possible, Ronald S. Lauder, is president of the World Jewish Congress, said in an article published by the Saudi newspaper, Arab News in May last.

The old broadside attacks against Israelis by almost all Arab countries have quietly dissipated and the evidence is as clear as the nightly television entertainment shows that people are watching, Lauder said adding:

“The Saudi satellite network MBC has challenged old taboos with a surprisingly positive depiction of Jews. “Um Haroun” is a fictionalized recounting of a Bahraini-Jewish woman who played a significant role in developing Bahraini midwifery. The series is set in an unnamed Arabian Gulf town in the 1940s, and it shows how Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together as one community in relative harmony.

“The show appears on Saudi television, and production involves Emiratis and Bahrainis. One of the consultants is a politician as well as the representative of the Bahraini Jewish community at the World Jewish Congress. This reality embodies huge progress and change on an international scale.

“One of the most popular references we heard were the times described in “Um Haroun,” when Muslims and Jews lived together as neighbors and friends. It’s amazing that a TV show has led to a constructive dialogue and bridge building.”

In February, King Salman stated that it was a religious duty for Islam’s adherents and Jewish people to know one another and cooperate for the good of society. This Ramadan, through “Um Haroun,” we see that the region is looking back to a neighborly era, a time when Jews were friends, not foes. This reality embodies amazing progress and change, the World Jewish Congress president concluded.

Historic perspective of Jewish-Muslim relations

In May last, the Saudi newspaper Arab News published a long interview of Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League, explaining Jewish-Muslim relations during Prophet Mohammad’s life time.

Quoting the Quran and hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad), Sheikh Al-Issa said: “It is permissible to engage in normal business and friendly relations with members of other faiths, including Jews, as was the case in the Prophet Muhammad’s time.”

Further endorsing relations with Jews, he said: “With our Jewish brothers, we concluded agreements and mutual cooperation, and we love them and respect them greatly, far from the problems of politics, as our principle is not to interfere in politics.”

Speaking on the alliance with the Jewish state, Sheikh Al-Issa quoted the famous Madinah Charter. Calling it as Prophet Muhammad’s signature achievement, he told the paper that the Madinah Charter was an example of Islam’s position on religious existence put into practice.

“The Prophet has signed the most important Islamic constitutional document, which is the Madinah Charter, which preserved religious and civil rights, as well as provided for Jews and others to live within Madinah in dignity as part of the ummah (community),” he said.

Sheikh Al-Issa said: “The neighbour of the prophet was a Jew, whom he visited and accepted his hospitality, and considered all the food of the Jews permissible for Muslims, permitted marriage to them, and built a family from a Jewish mother, and the Jewish community lived with Muslims in Madinah in peace.”

“In terms of winning and losing, Israel will be the biggest winner in any normalised relation with a country of Saudi Arabia’s size and status. I do not believe Saudi Arabia’s agendas will include taking advantage of this rapprochement to convince Israel of the need to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, Riyadh will comply with Tel Aviv’s position on the Palestinian issue, which the Israelis and Saudi leaders are well aware of,” according to Hassan Al-Brari of the Middle East Monitor.

The Politics of War: What is Israel’s Endgame in Lebanon and Syria?

Ramzy Baroud

On August 4, hours before a massive explosion rocked the Lebanese capital, Beirut, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued an ominous warning to Lebanon.

“We hit a cell and now we hit the dispatchers. I suggest to all of them, including Hezbollah, to consider this,” Netanyahu said during an official tour of a military facility in central Israel.

Netanyahu’s warning did not bode well for Israel when, hours later, a Hiroshima-like blast devastated entire sectors of Beirut. Those who suspected Israeli involvement in the deadly explosion had one more reason to point fingers at Tel Aviv.

In politics and in war, truth is the first casualty. We may never know precisely what transpired in the moments preceding the Beirut blast. Somehow, it may not matter at all, because the narrative regarding Lebanon’s many tragedies is as splintered as the country’s political landscape.

Judging by statements and positions adopted by the country’s various parties and factions, many seem to be more concerned with exploiting the tragedy for trivial political gain than in the tragedy itself. Even if the explosion was the unfortunate outcome of an accident resulting from bureaucratic negligence, sadly, it is still inconsequential. In Lebanon, as in much of the Middle East, everything is political.

What is almost certain about the future, however, is that the political discourse will eventually lead back to Israel versus Hezbollah. The former is keen at undermining the group’s influence in Lebanon, while the latter is insistent on thwarting Israel’s plans.

But what is Israel’s plan anyway? After decades of trying to destroy the Lebanese group, the Israeli government is keenly aware that eradicating Hezbollah militarily is no longer feasible, certainly not in the foreseeable future. The Lebanese group has proven its prowess on the battlefield when it played a major role in ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in May 2000.

Subsequent Israeli attempts at reasserting its dominance on Lebanon’s southern border have, thus far, proven futile. The failed war of 2006 and the more recent conflagration of September 2019 are also two cases in point.

Hezbollah is uninterested in inviting another Israeli war on Lebanon, either. The country is on the verge of economic collapse, if it has not already collapsed.

While Lebanon has always been in the throes of political division and factionalism, the divisiveness of the current political mood in the country is more destructive than it has ever been. Losing hope in all political actors, the Lebanese people have taken to the street demanding basic rights and services, an end to the endemic corruption and a whole new social and political contract – unsuccessfully.

While stalemates in politics are somewhat ordinary occurrences, political deadlocks can be calamitous in a country on the brink of starvation. The Hiroshima-like cloud of explosives that shocked the world was a perfect metaphor for Lebanon’s seemingly endless woes.

Former Israeli Knesset member, Moshe Feiglin, was among many jubilant Israelis who celebrated the near-demise of the Arab city. Feiglin described the horrendous explosion as a ‘day of joy’, giving a ‘huge thank you to God. “If it was us,” meaning Israel being involved in the deadly explosion, “then we should be proud of it, and with that we will create a balance of terror.”

Regardless of whether Feiglin is speaking from a position of knowledge or not, his reference to ‘balance of terror’ remains the basic premise in all of Israel’s dealings with Lebanon, and Hezbollah, in particular.

The convoluted war in Syria has expanded Israel’s war of attrition, but has also given Israel the opportunity to target Hezbollah’s interests without registering yet another aggression on Lebanese territories. It is much easier to target war-torn Syria and escape unscathed rather than to target Lebanon and pay a price.

For years, Israel has bombed many targets in Syria. Initially, it was unforthcoming about its role. Only in the last year or so, it has begun to openly brag about its military conquests, but for a reason.   The embattled Netanyahu is desperate to gain political credits, as he is dogged by multiple corruption charges, which have tarnished his image. By bombing Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, the Israeli leader hopes to garner the approval of the military elite, a critical constituency in Israeli politics.

Netanyahu’s comments before the Beirut explosion were in reference to a series of incidents that began on July 21, when Israel bombed an area adjacent to the Damascus International Airport, killing, among others, a senior Hezbollah member, Ali Kamel Mohsen.

This incident placed Israel’s northern borders on alert. The state of emergency was coupled with massive political and media hype, which helped Netanyahu by distracting ordinary Israelis from his ongoing corruption trial.

But Israel’s strategic interests in the Syria conflict go beyond Netanyahu’s need for a cheap victory. The outcome of the Syria war has the potential of yielding a nightmare scenario for Israel.

For decades, Israel has argued that an ‘axis of terror’ – Iran, Syria and Hezbollah – had to be dismantled, for it represented Israel’s greatest security threat. That was long before pro-Iran forces and militias began operating overtly in Syria, as a result of the ongoing war.

While Israel argues that its recurring bombardment of Syria is aimed largely at Hezbollah targets – the group’s military cache and Iranian missiles on their way to Lebanon via Syrian territories – Israel’s war in Syria is largely political. As per Israeli logic, the more bombs Israel drops over Syria, the more relevant a player it will become when the conflicting parties engage in future negotiations to sort out the fate of that country.

However, by doing so, Israel also risks igniting a costly military conflict with Lebanon, one that neither Tel Aviv nor Hezbollah can afford at the moment.

Israeli policymakers and military planners must be busy trying to analyze the situation in Lebanon, to understand the best way to exploit Lebanon’s tragedy in order to advance Israel’s strategic interests.

The future of Lebanon is, once more, in the hands of war generals.

Russia’s vaccine intensifies global struggle for profits and geopolitical advantage

Barry Grey

Vladimir Putin’s announcement Tuesday that Russia has officially approved a COVID-19 vaccine has intensified the global conflict between national powers and pharmaceutical giants to be the first to mass produce and market a vaccine for the deadly virus.

It has also underscored the perverse and destructive subordination of medical science and technology to the financial and geopolitical interests of rival cliques of nationally-based capitalists. The conflict, particularly between the ruling elites in United States on the one side and their counterparts in Russia and China on the other, to control the production and distribution of a vaccine is an immense obstacle to the rational and efficient development of a life-saving drug in the midst of an international public health catastrophe.

Putin declared his government’s registration of a vaccine developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute for Epidemiology and Microbiology a “world first.” He named the vaccine “Sputnik V” after the 1957 Soviet satellite that stunned the West and sparked the Cold War “space race” between the USSR and the United States.

Vladimir Putin, center (Credit: en.kremlin.ru)

He said the vaccine had passed “all needed tests,” but his government has failed to provide any data on the safety and efficacy of the drug to the World Health Organization (WHO) or any other international scientific or medical organizations. Moreover, in a reckless and dangerous break with international protocols on vaccine research, his government has approved the drug before phase three clinical trials—involving thousands of volunteers—have even begun. This phase of human trials is considered decisive in determining whether a vaccine is safe and effective.

To date, there have been only two months of human trials of the Russian vaccine, involving a mere 76 individuals. And yet Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is financing the vaccine project, told reporters, “People outside of clinical trials will have access to the vaccine in August, and some, already on the massive scale, in October.” He added that Russia had received applications for over one billion doses from 20 countries. Russian Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko said the country would soon begin a mass campaign to distribute the vaccine.

This rush to produce a vaccine by ignoring safety protocols has evoked sharp criticism not only from the US and other Western powers, but also from scientific and commercial bodies within Russia. The Moscow-based Association of Clinical Trials Organizations published an open letter on Monday asking the health ministry to delay registration of the vaccine until all clinical trials had been completed.

“Fast-tracked approval will not make Russia the leader in the [vaccine] race,” the letter stated. “It will just expose consumers of the vaccine to unnecessary danger.”

In the US, Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, said, “I think it’s really scary. It’s really risky.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease official, on Tuesday made clear he considered the Russian vaccine unsafe.

There are geopolitical, commercial and domestic political motivations behind Putin’s rush to produce a vaccine. It is clearly an attempt to steal a march on international competitors in the vaccine sweepstakes, first and foremost, the United States. Washington has been waging a campaign of fabrications to discredit Russia’s vaccine program in anticipation of an announcement such as that made on Tuesday.

Last month, the New York Times published a series of lurid articles, based on a joint statement by US, British and Canadian intelligence agencies, making completely unsubstantiated charges that Moscow was hacking American vaccine research. While that charge has been largely dropped, the campaign of lies about Russian meddling in the US elections has continued unabated. Last week the director of national intelligence declared, without providing any evidence, that Russia was actively working for Trump’s reelection, while Iran and China “preferred” a Biden victory in the November presidential contest.

These propaganda efforts, spearheaded by the Democratic Party-aligned Times, are preparations to ban the import of any vaccine developed by Russia or China, considered by many to be ahead of the US in the production of a vaccine, and block such a vaccine’s distribution to allies and US client states. Last month, Fauci testified before Congress and said the US would likely bar distribution within its borders of any vaccine developed by Russia or China.

The country that dominates distribution of the vaccine will have immense leverage over allies and enemies alike, who will be dependent on the good will of the vaccine-owning country to obtain supplies of the drug.

Second, there are countless billions in profits involved in winning the vaccine race.

Third, all capitalist governments are in crisis and facing mounting domestic opposition as a result of the devastating impact of their unprecedented bailouts of the rich and their “herd immunity” policies, summed up in the back-to-work and back-to school drives being universally implemented. Putin and Trump have in common the attempt to divert public attention from the criminal ineptitude and contempt for human life expressed in their response to the pandemic by hyping advances in the development of a vaccine.

Putin’s premature announcement of a vaccine takes place under conditions of infections in Russia heading rapidly toward one million and more than 15,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus. His approval ratings are plunging, and Russian social media are rife with denunciations of the government, particularly from health care workers decrying the conditions in hospitals and clinics. Meanwhile, his government has released a budget calling for sweeping cuts in health care.

Nevertheless, for all of Putin regime’s corruption and criminality, it is the American government and ruling elite that are in the forefront of the sabotage of any global coordination of the battle against the pandemic. It is Trump, after all, who has pulled out of the WHO, called it a stooge of China, and sought to whip up a war fever against China, blaming the more than five million infections and over 160,000 deaths in the US on the “China virus.” In this, he is joined by the Democratic Party, whose presidential candidate, Joe Biden, regularly attacks Trump from the right for being “soft” on Beijing.

Trump, through his “Operation Warp Speed,” has used the pandemic to lavish billions of dollars in tax-payer funds on his corporate cronies in the pharmaceutical industry. Just Monday he announced a $1.5 billion deal with Moderna to provide 100 million doses of an eventual vaccine. This is on top of $950 million previously handed to the company to underwrite development and testing of the drug. In all, the US government has to date handed out over $9 billion to five companies working on vaccines.

Moreover, as sciencemag.org noted on Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration can approve the use of medicines prior to the completion of efficacy trials through what is known as an “emergency use authorization.” The publication pointed out that “there has been growing concern that President Donald Trump will push for this with a COVID-19 vaccine to help his re-election prospects in November.”

The chief obstacles to the development and mass distribution of an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine to the world’s people are the class interests of the ruling capitalist oligarchy. The containment and eradication of the virus and the saving of lives take a back seat to utilization of the pandemic to plunder the economic resources of society and restructure class relations to further impoverish the working class.

As the World Socialist Web Site stated previously:

In a rational and humane society, the issue of secrecy in the development of a life-saving vaccine, all the more in the midst of a deadly pandemic, would never even arise. All questions of personal gain or national advantage would be completely subordinated to the pursuit of a globally coordinated effort, utilizing the revolutionary gains in science and technology and the knowledge of experts in every country, to contain and ultimately eradicate the virus and provide the needed medical care and social support for all those impacted both physically and economically.

This, however, is impossible within the framework of capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to the enrichment of a parasitic elite and the pursuit of its predatory geopolitical interests. The capitalist framework of private ownership of the means of production and production for profit, along with the division of the world into rival nation states, stands as an absolute barrier to defense of basic rights, including the right to life.

The struggle against the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle for the expropriation and overthrow of the capitalist oligarchy by the international working class.

Beirut disaster highlights dangerous ammonium nitrate stockpiles in regional Australian city

Patrick Davies

Last week’s catastrophic explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at Beirut port has drawn fresh attention to the storage of up to four times this amount at Orica’s Kooragang plant in New South Wales (NSW). The facility is 800 metres from residential areas in the Newcastle suburb of Stockton and just three kilometres from the regional port city’s central business district.

The disaster in Lebanon, which killed over 200 people and injured 5,000 others, shows that the potential exists for a similar catastrophe in Newcastle. Orica stores between 6,000 and 12,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate at its Kooragang facility.

Industrial explosives expert Tony Richards, a former blast operations manager for Orica and BHP, told the Newcastle Herald last week: “It doesn’t matter how small the risk is, the consequences are catastrophic when you are dealing with something that can turn solid iron mountains into mounds of rubble.” Richards estimates 40,000 people live within the blast zone, if an explosion was to occur in Newcastle.

Orica is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of mining and commercial explosives, and other chemical products used in mining, water treatment and other industries. Ammonium nitrate produced at Kooragang is used primarily for explosives in the coal mining industry in nearby Hunter Valley.

The highly-profitable company is allowed to operate, despite the real dangers, because its products are indispensable to local mining activities. Orica’s Kooragang plant and its Botany facility south of Sydney have a dangerous history of chemical leaks and operating-licence breaches.

On August 8, 2011, up to 10 kilograms of the carcinogen hexavalent chromium leaked from the Kooragang facility, showering homes in Stockton with a toxic red and yellow substance. Nearby residents were not informed of the leak by Orica or government authorities for 54 hours.

While under investigation for the first leak, a second spill occurred on November 9, 2011, involving the release of hundreds of kilograms of ammonia. The fumes drifted into nearby suburbs resulting in two workers at a rail yard being hospitalised.

Subsequent inquiries by the NSW and the federal governments into these leaks were a whitewash. They were designed to shield Orica from community anger and politically protect Liberal and Labor state governments who allowed the company to continuously violate basic safety requirements.

The Kooragang facility breached its operating licence hundreds of times in the decade prior to the 2011 leaks, including by dumping effluent containing arsenic into the Hunter River. In September 2011, mercury vapours were released into the atmosphere at Orica’s Botany facility.

In 2014, Orica, which made $602.5 million profit that year, was fined just $768,000 by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) over the chemical spills and safety breaches in 2011 at its Kooragang and Botany sites. The fine was slightly more than the median price of a house in Sydney at the time.

Stockton residents have been raising concerns for years over Orica’s toxic leaks in 2011 and called for the plant to be relocated away from populated areas and closer to the mines.

Chemical engineer and community campaigner Keith Craig, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week that it was a “totally inappropriate place to have such a dangerous material produced and stored… many people would be killed and injured if we had an accident at Orica.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week attempted to play down the dangers of a Beirut-like disaster in Newcastle insisting that “the regulations here in Australia are very strong.” These assurances, given Orica’s violation of environmental policies, are worthless.

While ammonium nitrate normally becomes explosive when it comes into contact with fuel or oil, it can erupt due to shock, fire or contact with a contaminant.

Orica claims to adhere to all state and federal regulations and insists its stockpiles are adequately contained by fire proof materials and separated by designated exclusion zones.

The company’s comfortable arrangements with state government authorities increase the danger of complacency towards safety regulations. This relationship is underpinned by Orica’s production of explosives for coal mining amid the state’s dependence on royalties from the sector amounting to around $1.6 billion annually.

Orica is also not the only company storing vast quantities of ammonium nitrate in close proximity to Newcastle. In 2012, the Crawfords Freightlines trucking company was found to have been storing in excess of its limit of 2,000 tonnes at its Sandgate facility west of Newcastle, just 500 metres from homes. The inspection also revealed poor chemical and dangerous goods storage. The EPA fined Crawfords only $15,000 for the breaches.

The Beirut disaster is just the most recent deadly example of an ammonium nitrate explosion. Others include a 2015 explosion in the Chinese port of Tianjin, in which 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate were detonated. Some 165 people died and almost 800 more were injured.

In April 2013, 15 people were killed and 200 wounded when 240 tonnes of fertiliser at a plant in West, a city in the US state of Texas, exploded. Around 80 houses and a school were destroyed.

In 2001, a fire at a fertiliser plant in Toulouse, France resulted in the explosion of up to 300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, killing 31 people and injuring over 2,400. The blast shattered windows up to 3 kilometres away.

The deadly explosion in Beirut is another clear warning that large stockpiles of ammonium nitrate are catastrophes waiting to happen while this industry, and the giant profit-making corporations that run it, are protected by capitalist governments.

South Asian governments ignore millions of monsoon flood victims

Wimal Perera

Heavy monsoon rains since May across South Asia, including in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan have caused floods and landslides leaving 1,300 dead or missing and displacing over 18.5 million. The governments’ failure to take adequate relief measures amid the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified flood victims’ suffering. They are also contracting water-borne diseases.

In India, over 13 million people are affected, and 900 deaths have been reported from the states of Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Maharashtra and Kerala.

In the southern state of Kerala, heavy rains in recent days triggered floods and landslides in Rajamala in the Idukki district, killing 52. In impoverished Bihar state, about 24 died and 7.5 million have been affected. In Assam, 136 deaths and over 5.7 million victims have been reported. Five persons have died in Mumbai. Media reports indicate 239 deaths and tens of thousands of flood victims in West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Rescuers work at the site of a mudslide triggered by heavy monsoon rain and flooding killed at least 15 people and buried 20 homes of tea plantation workers in southern India on Friday, police said. (AP Photo)

In Bangladesh, which is seeing its worst flooding in two decades, districts in the northern and central parts of the country, including the capital, Dhaka, were worst hit. The deaths stand at 145, and over 5.5 million have been affected.

In Nepal, floods and landslides have left 200 dead and 108 missing since May. In Pakistan 58 have died and in Afghanistan, at least 16.

Floods have damaged river embankments, bridges, culverts and roads, and houses, crops, livestock, domestic animals and poultry have been devastated. Victims lack drinking water and food. Social conditions are worsened by cuts to jobs and wages due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The governments of South Asian countries have responded to the crisis with contempt and hypocrisy, refusing to provide adequate relief materials, rescue equipment, medicine, trained manpower and infrastructure.

Hundreds of people in Bihar staged protests, demanding basic needs such as drinking water and food. They blocked a bridge in Muzaffarpur on July 27, accusing the government of neglect.

After the protest, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar ordered a pittance of Rs 6,000 ($US80) paid “to the accounts of flood-affected families,” to dissipate social anger.

Victims in Assam complained they did not receive aid. Nilima Khatun, a villager in Assam, said: “Our villages and all nearby villages have been under chest-deep water for about a week now. … We are passing days in misery with no relief coming our way from the government.”

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has declared that she advised state officials to ensure adequate facilities for those affected. However, flood victims are starving since relief supplies are insufficient. On August 10, the Daily Star reported: “People whose houses have been damaged by floods are passing their days in extreme hardship amid insufficient government relief and support for their rehabilitation.”

Arif Hossain from Munshiganj District in central Bangladesh, who lived by transporting people on his small boat, told Interpress Service: “Many people in the areas left the villages … those who have no place to go, like me, are staying here in homes that are already [flooded] … We’re staying in a room submerged in knee-deep water.” He added, “I haven’t received any kind of aid.”

While governments claim they are providing enough relief supplies, Dr Abhishek Rimal, Regional Emergency Health Coordinator of Asia Pacific for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said on August 6: “Millions of people are also gathered in confined spaces or sleeping in temporary shelters with limited access to food, safe water and protection from mosquitoes, creating the perfect storm for the spread of mosquito and water-borne diseases.” These include malaria, dengue, diarrhea, and skin diseases.

At least 10,000 people have fallen ill, with children among the worst affected by rising malnutrition. According to UNICEF estimates, around 1.3 million Bangladeshi children will be affected by flooding this year.

Flood victims also face the devastating COVID-19 pandemic in crowded makeshift camps. India has become the third-worst impacted country in the world, with 2.3 million cases and over 46,000 deaths. Bangladesh is now the 15th-worst impacted country, with over 260,000 infections and over 3,500 deaths. Nepal has surpassed 23,000 cases with 83 deaths, and Afghanistan 37,000 cases with 1,354 deaths.

At a meeting on Monday with chief ministers of six states—Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala—India’s Hindu-supremacist prime minister, Narendra Modi, declared that his government will install a “permanent system for forecasting of floods.” Such promises have frequently been made but not implemented in the past.

In a nationalistic attack on Nepal, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said Indian authorities are “not receiving full cooperation from Nepal for the past few years.”

Flooding is an ecologically natural and sometimes essential process in any landscape with rivers and streams. In India, where the monsoonal climate brings concentrated rainfall in two to three months each year, massive river flooding is a yearly event across much of the country.

Today, however, it is not just a natural, but a man-made disaster. The landscapes near rivers have been ravaged by unplanned “development,” haphazard “urbanization” by respective governments and corporations.

Hundreds of thousands of families have been forced to settle in flood prone areas, with no early warning or evacuation systems. Large river basins such as Ganga-Brahmaputra basin are segmented by arbitrary “national boundaries,” where rival nation-states’ policies undermine common watershed planning.

Even the meagre funding allocated for flood management goes into hard infrastructure projects, such as dams or embankment raising, which can become problems rather than solutions in the long run. For example, in the state of Odisha, nine of the 14 major floods reported in the last decade were due to the sudden release of water from the Hirakud dam. One hundred and fifty people died in the worst flood in three decades in Gujarat in 2006, when the Ukai dam had to release large amounts of water.

Such failures become more disastrous with time as these static structures cannot accommodate the extremes in rainfall due to global climate change.

In the past few decades, a global consensus has emerged among experts and engineers on the need for Integrated Flood Management (IFM). The Associated Program for Flood Management (APFM) defines this as a “process of integrated land and water resources development, with a view to maximizing the efficient use of flood plains and minimizing loss of life and property.”

Such an approach requires a massive reallocation of funding to thoroughly study and monitor the watershed ecosystems, relocate communities if necessary, restore degraded ecosystems, and build multi-purpose engineering systems to manage water without harming ecological processes.

Recent developments in communication technology, remote sensing, and computer modeling, and rapidly advancing skill levels of the working class, have laid a strong foundation to realize IFM. The main barrier remains the capitalist nation-state system, based on private profit rather than human needs. Protection from floods and effective utilization and sharing of waters from these rivers requires socialist planning by establishing a Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia as part of a world socialist federation.

New outbreak of COVID-19 in New Zealand

Tom Peters

Yesterday a “level three” lockdown was imposed in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, after four people in a family tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday. Thirteen other cases linked to the South Auckland family have since been found, including four children.

COVID-19 testing stations in Auckland were overwhelmed yesterday, with some people waiting up to 12 hours for a test and others reportedly being turned away.

About a quarter of Auckland’s workers are staying home and schools are closed, except for the children of essential workers. The restrictions were announced for three days, but are widely expected to be extended. They are not as stringent, however, as the “level four” nationwide lockdown imposed in March-April. Under level three, construction businesses, cafes and other shops can still operate, supposedly with social distancing protocols in place.

The rest of the country is on alert level two, with people told to practice physical distancing, and gatherings of more than 100 people banned. Schools and businesses remain open.

The new coronavirus cases are the first to be discovered in New Zealand in 102 days, apart from international travelers. More than 7,000 returned travelers are currently undergoing two weeks of quarantine in hotels controlled by the military. Of these, at least 23 have the virus.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party-led government has been glorified by the world’s media for its response to the pandemic, including a relatively early and strict lockdown. The country has experienced just 22 deaths from the virus.

The rediscovery of COVID-19 in the community, however, underscores that the pandemic cannot be defeated at a national level, but requires a coordinated and well-resourced international response that is incompatible with the capitalist nation-state system.

New Zealand joins a list of countries which have seen new outbreaks after apparently suppressing the virus, including Vietnam and parts of China. Australia, which had also been praised for its response, is experiencing a severe resurgence.

The outbreak in Auckland poses serious dangers to the entire working class. The source of the cases is unknown. Authorities have not identified any contact between the household and quarantine hotels or international travelers.

How far the virus has spread is not known. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, director-general of health, told Radio NZ today that it could have been “in the community for some weeks.”

Over the weekend, the family at the centre of the outbreak visited Rotorua and on Monday they went to Taupo, but the tourist towns have not been locked down. A positive case also visited an unidentified aged care facility in the Waikato region. The decision to limit the lockdown to level three, while mostly allowing business as usual in the rest of the country, is driven by demands from big business for the economy to remain open.

Restrictions in April and May were lifted earlier than health experts had recommended, and the government previously indicated that it would not impose another nationwide lockdown.

Bloomfield warned in recent weeks that the re-emergence of the virus in the community was a matter of “when, not if.” He urged people to keep records of their movements and use the government’s COVID Tracer smartphone app, which records visits to shops and other locations.

Epidemiologists have criticised the government’s failure to carry out widespread testing, which could have picked up the outbreak sooner. Testing is still limited to people with symptoms, despite the well-known fact that the virus can be transmitted by asymptomatic people.

Daily rates of testing fell dramatically in recent months, as the government and media trumpeted NZ’s “COVID-free” status. In early August around 2,000 people were being tested per day, much less than the health ministry’s low target of 4,000. According to the ministry, 508,711 people have been tested in total, about 10 percent of the population, and there are about 270,000 more test kits in stock.

On August 5, professor Michael Baker told the New Zealand Herald there was too much complacency and “smugness.” He warned that there were “multiple points” where the virus could enter the country, including quarantine facilities, airport staff and workers on ships.

A series of bungles at quarantine facilities prompted the resignation of David Clark as minister of health last month. In one case on July 9, a man escaped from a quarantine hotel and visited a supermarket in central Auckland. He later tested positive for COVID-19.

Baker noted: “If there was suddenly an outbreak in South Auckland tomorrow, for instance, it could take several generations before people were even aware of it. Small numbers of people can go on to infect large numbers of people.”

University of Auckland scientist Shaun Hendy also warned: “With relatively low numbers of testing, we could potentially have a large number of secondary and tertiary cases before we actually realised what was going on.”

South Auckland, where the new cases were detected, is a largely impoverished working class area, with many overcrowded and poorly-heated houses and widespread health problems. It was the epicentre for a measles outbreak last year, which spread from New Zealand to Samoa where it killed 83 people, most of them children.

Epidemiologist David Skegg told Stuff on August 5 that the catastrophic outbreak in Victoria, Australia, could “easily be replicated here, if we are not able to act quickly enough to eliminate the infection.” He called for “a greater sense of urgency in getting prepared,” including targeted community testing, sewage testing, greater capacity for contact tracing and preparations for mass masking.

A resurgence of COVID-19 could have major political implications. With an election scheduled for September 19, Ardern has made the government’s pandemic response central to Labour’s campaign. The perception that the government had eliminated the virus fueled support for the party, which is polling above 50 percent.

In reality, while failing to undertake adequate testing and other public health measures, the government’s main response to the pandemic has been to give billions of dollars to businesses through so-called “wage subsidies,” tax cuts and bailouts.

The global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has led to tens of thousands of job losses in NZ. The tourism industry, which accounts for one in 10 jobs, has been devastated, and there have been major redundancies in retail and manufacturing. The new COVID-19 outbreak will compound the social crisis that is already pushing workers and young people to the left.

The opposition National Party, which is polling between 25 and 30 percent, is now calling for the election to be delayed. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who leads the deeply unpopular right-wing NZ First Party in the coalition government, made similar calls in April. The government says it will make a decision on the election date before Monday.