Peru tops half a million coronavirus cases as political crisis deepens

Cesar Uco & Bill Van Auken

With COVID-19 infections and deaths having soared since the economy began to reopen in July, Peru’s political and social crises have escalated. Strikes have broken out in the mining sector over high rates of infections, and an August 9 clash between indigenous protesters and police in the hard-hit Amazon region left four indigenous workers dead.

MARSA miners walk out over COVID-19 infectiions.

With 796 COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants, Peru has the highest mortality rate in all the Americas and the second-highest in the world, trailing only Belgium. Its total number of coronavirus cases has topped 535,000, with a record of over 10,000 new cases being recorded on Sunday. The Ministry of Health (Minsa) has recorded over 26,000 deaths, although the real number is believed to be twice as high because of excess deaths that were not investigated.

Since the beginning of the re-opening of the economy, the number of infections jumped by 78 percent in six weeks, reports El Comercio. There has also been a 75 percent increase in infections among children and adolescents.

In response to this uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, President Martín Vizcarra has ordered the reinstatement of a blanket quarantine on Sundays only. This means “all family and social reunions are prohibited,” and parks will remain closed. As for the rest of the week, work will continue. This comes on top of rolling lockdowns in 15 of Peru’s 25 regions. In the capital of Lima and elsewhere, militarized units of the Peruvian National Police have been deployed to rigorously enforce the Sunday curfew.

The government’s contention is that the deadly virus is being spread primarily by social gatherings between friends and families—not by herding Peruvians back into the mines and other workplaces.

Within the working class, however, there is growing resistance to the homicidal conditions of work imposed by the employers and backed by the government. Miners at the Minera Aurifera Retamas S.A. (MARSA) gold and silver mine walked out last week after 280 miners had contracted the coronavirus on the job. They denounced the owners of the mine, one of the largest underground mines in the country, for failing to provide the most minimal sanitary conditions. In addition to the enforcement of basic health norms, one of their demands was an end to the “hot bed” (camas calientes) practice, under which workers from the morning and evening shifts are forced to share the same beds.

The MARSA miners indicated that their strike could continue following the arrest of the leader of the local union, Luis Cerna Polo.

Miners have protested and struck elsewhere as the coronavirus cases and deaths mount. At the Uchucchacua, about 150 miles northeast of the capital, workers have reported 150 infections within their ranks. At the Cerro Lindo mine, 700 workers were quarantined because of COVID-19 symptoms, while at the Cerro Corona mine, 150 workers were evacuated after coming down with the disease. At both facilities, miners are forced to share crowded quarters.

Military police deployment to enforce Sunday curfew in Lima.

Meanwhile, in the Amazon region, indigenous protesters took over an oil complex at Lot 95, located in the Loreto region, to protest against the failure of the government to provide aid amidst one of the most virulent outbreaks of the pandemic. Across the Amazon basin, there have been more than 100,000 infections and at least 3,000 COVID-19 fatalities. With an indigenous population of 330,000 people, this means that nearly a third have been infected and nearly one out of 100 have died.

Security forces responded with brutal repression to the indigenous protest, killing three people outright and mortally wounding another. Seventeen other protesters were wounded.

The Lot 95 oil facility is owned by the Canadian-based transnational PetroTal, which restarted production last month over the protests of the local population, who fear oil workers returning to the northern Peruvian jungle will bring the coronavirus with them. The government and the transnationals have treated the indigenous population as little more than an obstacle to resource extraction and profits.

Vizcarra has seen his approval rating plummet in the face of the spiraling COVID-19 toll and the reopening of the economy, falling from 83 percent in June to barely 56 percent today.

On July 1, Vizcarra carried out a cabinet shakeup in the face of his government’s mounting crisis, tapping Pedro Cateriano as his new prime minister. The Congress, however, rejected the appointment by 54-37 in an August 4 vote of no-confidence.

While Vizcarra denounced the rejection as a political maneuver, critics faulted Cateriano for delivering a speech to the Congress that too openly promoted the interests of the mining transnationals and other sectors of big business, without even feigning concern for the suffering of the masses of Peruvian workers and poor under conditions of the pandemic, mass unemployment and deepening poverty.

Subsequently, Vizcarra proposed retired general Walter Martos, the former defense minister, as his new prime minister. Martos was approved with the widest congressional support seen in 50 years: 115 votes in favor, five against and four abstentions.

His elevation to the prime minister’s post is part of the increasing dominance of the military within Vizcarra´s cabinet. Three of the 19 cabinet seats are now occupied by active-duty or retired generals: that of the prime Minister and the secretaries of Defense, and National Security, Army Gen. Jorge Luis Chávez Cresta and Air Force Lt. Gen. Jorge Montoya Pérez, respectively.

Vizcarra is keeping his initial pick, Pedro Cateriano, the darling of the Peruvian big business lobby Confiep (Confederación Nacional de Instituciones Empresariales Privadas), on as a liaison with the powerful mining sector.

Vizcarra’s commitment to mining and foreign capital was further demonstrated with his choice of Miguel Incháustegui for the Energy and Mining cabinet post. Incháustegui’s experience includes having been director of Turmalina Metals Corp and Cañariaco Copper Peru. He also worked at Gold Fields and Lumina Copper.

In his speech to the Congress, Gen. Martos acknowledged the backwardness of Peru’s economy, which was masked during the period of the commodities boom when the country recorded an average 6.3 percent annual growth between 2002 and 2014. He noted that this year alone public spending has dropped 35 percent.

As a remedy for the country’s deepening economic crisis—the central bank projects a 12 percent contraction this year—Martos proposed injecting billions of dollars into PYMES (Small and Medium Size Enterprises). While this sector accounts for 86 percent of private employment and generates 30 percent of GDP, statistics show that most PYMES go bankrupt in few years, with even more daunting prospects in face of the pandemic.

Martos cast the struggle against the pandemic as “a war that radiates to all areas of national life,” emphasizing that he was speaking “as a proud member of our forces of order...”

The retired general stressed the modernization and buildup of the security forces as central to this “war,” with proposals for the digitalization of police operations, the opening of 28 new police stations by December 2020 and the deployment of “the Armed Forces, with the support of night-watch [civilian] Municipal patrols, in order to increase the number of troops and the frequency of rounds, with special strategic actions focused on the places of greatest criminal incidence.”

In Peru, as in the rest of Latin America, the capitalist ruling class and its transnational partners are leaning ever more heavily on the military and police forces as they confront the threat of an explosion of the class struggle, driven by mass unemployment, social inequality and the criminal back-to-work drive that is claiming ever greater numbers of COVID-19 victims.

Responding to US provocations, Chinese officials appeal for “peaceful coexistence”

Peter Symonds

In a keynote speech on July 24, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo effectively overturned nearly 50 years of US engagement with China and set course for an aggressive confrontation with Beijing. He denounced the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in McCarthyite terms and called for the victory of “the free world” over “tyranny.” In rejecting the policy of “containment,” Pompeo in essence dismissed the notion of a new “cold war” in favour of a hot one—that is, the slide towards military conflict.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi (Credit: Chinese foreign ministry)

Pompeo’s demagogic speech has clearly prompted deep concerns in the Chinese leadership. There have been significant responses by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a lengthy interview with the state-owned Xinhua news agency on August 6 and by former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in a long essay published in the Global Times on August 7. In the CCP hierarchy, Yang is formally the top foreign policy official.

Both officials appeal for an end to US-China tensions, as well as dialogue, continued engagement between the two countries and “peaceful coexistence,” while pointing to the dangers of a deepening confrontation. “Peaceful coexistence” was itself a Cold War term used by the Soviet Union which collaborated with US imperialism to contain tensions, defuse wars and conflicts, and stave off another world war.

Wang warned that relations between the countries were facing “the gravest challenge since the establishment of diplomatic ties” in the 1970s. He said that the “root cause” lay with “some American politicians who are biased against and hostile to China” and smeared China with fabrications in what amounted to a new McCarthyism. “Ultimately, they want to drag China and the US into renewed conflict and confrontation and plunge the world into chaos and division again,” he declared.

Wang called on the US to “stop acting with arrogance and prejudice” and to enter into a constructive dialogue. He declared that China was ready to restart talks with the US “at any level, in any area and at any time. All issues can be put on the table for discussion.” The conciliatory message was not so much directed to the Trump administration, but to the Democrats, and more broadly to US allies in Europe and Asia, in an attempt to wind down rapidly escalating tensions.

However, Chinese pleas to Washington are likely to fall on deaf ears. The root cause of the reckless US anti-China campaign does not lie with particular politicians but is the response of the American ruling class to its historic decline, now accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that the US confrontation with China was initiated by the Obama administration, and that Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is attacking Trump for being soft on Beijing signifies that the dominant sections of the American ruling class regard China as the chief threat to US global dominance.

Moreover, Pompeo is conducting a concerted campaign, above all in Europe, to line up US allies in the war drive against China. Last week he made the third of three forays into European forums in two months, addressing the Czech parliament in a speech that focused on China, which he characterised as a greater threat than Russia and denounced for its “campaigns of coercion and control.” Directly appealing to anti-communism, Pompeo called on the assembled politicians to back Washington’s punitive campaign of sanctions and economic penalties against Beijing.

In his Xinhua interview, China’s Foreign Minister Wang, while appealing for dialogue, nevertheless made clear that Beijing would not compromise on what it regarded as “core issues”—including Chinese sovereignty in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the US is again winding up its cynical “human rights” campaigns.

Wang also pointed to the utter hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s unsubstantiated allegations of spying, including by Chinese tech giants such as Huawei. Ridiculing US calls for a coalition of “clean countries” that exclude Chinese technology, he pointed to the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden about US spying on an industrial scale. In stark contrast to China, he said, “the US is behind such scandals as PRISM and ECHELON. It conducts wire-tapping and mass surveillance around the globe, and these wrongful acts are already an open secret.”

In his lengthy essay, China’s top foreign affairs official Yang Jiechi also pointed to the accelerating global crisis, writing that the “once-in-a-century major shift in the world landscape is picking up speed. Instability and uncertainties in the international situation are growing markedly.”

Yang reviewed at length the development of US-China relations since US President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China in 1972 that established a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union. He emphasised the benefits to the US that had flowed from the relationship, economically, as the CCP leadership turned to capitalist restoration and opened up to foreign investment, and, on the world stage, advancing US interests, such as by pressuring North Korea.

At the same time, Yang repeated the somewhat muted criticisms of “some US politicians” who “out of arrogance and ignorance, have acted in violation of the UN Charter and basic norms governing international relations, and have willfully and blatantly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries.” He declared that the attempts to drive a wedge between the CCP and the Chinese people were “doomed to fail”—reflecting no doubt a sensitivity in the Chinese leadership to the mounting social tensions at home.

The responses by China’s top two foreign affairs officials signify a somewhat more conciliatory tone from Beijing. While President Xi Jinping has not responded to Washington’s anti-China campaign with the same degree of vitriol as Trump officials, he has nevertheless reacted to US punitive measures in kind. In the US this has led to denunciations of Chinese “aggression” and “expansionism.”

Within Chinese ruling circles, Xi has come under fire for failing to defuse tensions with Washington and take action to end the trade war between the two countries. In the lead-up to an annual seaside retreat of top Chinese leaders and “party elders” at Beidaihe, some press reports speculated that Xi would come under pressure even though he has removed the limits on his term of office and his supporters dominate leading party bodies. The “secretive” two-week retreat has just concluded. As usual, no official statements or comments were issued.

Nevertheless, perhaps to mollify Xi’s internal critics, the Chinese response to Pompeo’s speech and continued punitive measures against Chinese companies has been rather low-key. Xu Qinduo, a commentator for the state-run China Radio International, was cited in the New York Times as saying: “There’s a reflection that we should not let nationalism or hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy. Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

The New York Times last week noted that other prominent Chinese officials had also repeated the call for dialogue, including Cui Tiankai, the ambassador to the US. The senior Chinese diplomat had accused American politicians of telling lies to smear China, but also called for steps to prevent relations from “spiraling out of control” over the next several months.

The CCP leadership has no progressive answer to US war drive—appeals to US imperialism that will quickly prove futile, go hand in hand with an arms race with Washington that can only end in disaster for humanity. Far from being socialist or communist, the CCP represents the interests of a tiny ultra-rich layer and is incapable of making any appeal to the working class, either at home or internationally. Facing a mounting social crisis domestically, the regime uses police state measures to suppress any opposition.

At the same time, the Trump administration continues its anti-China provocations virtually on a daily basis. Last week, the State Department announced that it was classifying the US headquarters of Confucius Institutes—Chinese government educational and cultural organisations—as a “foreign mission,” thus requiring it to declare its property and personnel. Already a number of Chinese media organisations in the US have been branded as “foreign missions,” limiting their operations.

Canadian authorities to reopen schools, facilitating COVID-19 spread

Laurent Lafrance

With the full support of Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government in Ottawa, provincial governments have unveiled back-to-school plans in recent weeks that will accelerate the COVID-19 pandemic across Canada and endanger the lives of teachers, students and their families.

Despite the minor differences over details, the provincial reopening plans have met with widespread opposition from parents and teachers. Some governments have had to announce last minute changes in an effort to dissipate opposition in order to impose their reckless policies on a reluctant population.

In general, the essential content of these plans can be summarized as follows: classrooms at elementary school and the first three years of secondary school will reopen full-time and remain as crowded as before the pandemic, without any real protective measures being put in place.

For the last two years of secondary school, the situation varies depending on the region of the country. While most provinces will require all students to attend school in person, Ontario has identified some school boards in urban areas that will allow half of the student body to attend school in person and the other half to do online learning.

No province will seriously increase the education budget for the smaller class sizes required to ensure social distancing, or even support the so-called hybrid model, where some students are in the classroom and others take courses online.

Ontario has indicated that parents worried about the pandemic will have the option of keeping their children at home to receive online instruction. To the extent that this is put in place, it will lead to greater social inequality since not all families can to provide their children with the space and equipment for distance learning or afford taking time off from work. The province has not even considered subsidizing parents who take time off, let alone protect them from being fired.

In the province of Quebec, which was the hardest hit by the pandemic, there will be no social distancing between students in classrooms, and barely any in common areas. Other provinces, such as Ontario and British Columbia, will create “study groups” of about 60 students in which contact will be allowed on the playgrounds and in some common areas.

On school buses, students will have an assigned seat, but will be seated two per row. The safer option of having fewer students on the buses, which would involve hiring more drivers and buying new buses, was discarded for purely economic reasons.

Under conditions where the country’s public schools have been the target of major budget cuts in recent decades, only paltry sums have been earmarked for protective equipment and cleaning materials. This is the case in Ontario, where public schools, which accommodate more than two million students, will have to use an additional $500 million from their own reserves to fund safety measures.

In all provinces, masks will not be mandatory for students under the age of 10. For older students and adults, masks will be mandatory in public places, but not in classrooms.

There will be no systematic testing done in schools for either teachers or students, even though recent studies have shown that children infected with COVID-19 can be even more contagious than adults. The criminal indifference of Canada’s ruling elite was summed up in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s words, “We have full control of our plan and yes, I pray to God no one gets sick.”

The back-to-school drive shows that the government’s response to the pandemic is based on the deadly principle of “herd immunity,” that is, allowing the virus to run rampant through the population. This was all but admitted by Quebec’s national director of public health, Horacio Arruda, when he said, “If we want the schools to work, the virus will circulate.”

Schools will reopen to force working parents back to work. Having received in March $650 billion from Ottawa in various bailout packages, the corporate and financial aristocracy is now demanding the premature resumption of all economic activity to resume the flow of profits and force workers to pay for the bailout.

Governments know that the coronavirus is still very present in Canada and that the hasty reopening of schools will lead to a massive spread of the virus and thousands of preventable deaths across the country. At a recent press briefing, Montreal’s director of public health, Dr. Mylène Drouin, stated darkly, “[W]e must prepare for the worst.”

The politically motivated back-to-school campaign poses an immense health, educational and workload challenge to teachers, a significant portion of whom are older and have health problems.

To justify this, government officials are feigning concern for the mental health of children and the learning problems of more vulnerable students, even though they have been imposing decades of brutal spending cuts on education, health and social services.

Another lie is that children are little affected by COVID-19. Arruda has even gone so far as to say that “depriving a child of schooling, of socialization, is more serious than the potential risk of him or her catching the disease.” Quebec’s minister of education, Jean-François Roberge, said that “the information we have about COVID-19 assures us that children, most of the time, do not get sick and do not transmit the disease.”

In fact, recent research indicates that children not only can get sick and even die but are also important vectors for the transmission of the virus. Even asymptomatic children can and will infect adults both at school and at home. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US have also found that hospitalization rates for children increased steadily between early March and the end of July.

The procedures to deal with COVID-19 outbreaks are unclear or non-existent, as authorities are determined to keep schools open even if the coronavirus circulates freely. School boards have until mid-September to develop emergency protocols, well after the start of the school year. In Quebec, Minister Roberge indicated that if there is a second wave, “There is no question of closing schools across Quebec.” Outbreaks will rather be managed on a “case-by-case” basis.

In several provinces, groups of parents who are skeptical about reopening the schools have emerged on social networks. Many denounce, among other things, the lack of resources for preventive measures.

In Alberta, the Coalition for a Safer School Relaunch, a group representing “parents, physicians and educators,” has called the province’s plan “reckless.” The group issued a list of demands, including the provision of all necessary personal protective equipment to workers at no cost and clear protocols for regular testing and outbreak management.

In Quebec, a petition demanding that parents be given the choice between sending their children to school or online education collected 18,000 signatures. In Ontario, an online petition demanding a reduction in class ratios collected nearly 170,000 signatures.

While parents and educators are speaking out against the reopening of schools, it is being planned with the direct involvement and sanction of teachers’ unions. For example, Ontario’s four teachers’ unions issued a statement last Thursday describing the back-to-school plan as violating the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Yet despite this, all they did was request “an immediate meeting” with the minister of labour and officials from the Ministry of Education, i.e., with the same right-wing government that has spent the past two years gutting education budgets and attacking education workers.

The fight against the criminal back-to-school drive of the ruling elite depends entirely on the initiative of rank-and-file workers themselves. In every school, teachers must establish their own safety committees, independent of the unions, to unify parents, students and every section of the working class to oppose the school reopenings.

These committees must demand that schools close or remain closed throughout the country, and that the necessary resources be deployed for distance learning and psychological support for students. Such a campaign must also demand the cessation of all non-essential economic activity, with full financial compensation for the workers affected, until the pandemic is brought under control.

Amid mass strikes in Belarus, Lukashenko regime teeters on brink

Andrea Peters

As workers across Belarus take strike action after disputed August 9 presidential elections, President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s government is on the brink of collapse. Factories across the country were on strike yesterday, after hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the capital, Minsk. Lukashenko was booed as he spoke at a Minsk tractor factory, combining threats and apparent attempts to reach out to the right-wing, NATO-backed opposition parties supporting candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Amid calls for a nationwide general strike, workers at dozens of industrial firms walked off the job yesterday. These firms included the Minsk Tractor Plant, the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant, the Belarusian Metallurgical Plant, Naftan (chemical and petroleum products), GrodnoAzot (chemical goods), the Belarusian Railways, the Minsk Metro, the Belarusian Automobile Plant, the Minsk Automobile Factory, the Minsk Electrotechnical Factory, Terrazut (windows and doors), Belaruskali (fertilizers, mining and processing), Belteleradiokompania (telecoms).

They were joined by striking healthcare workers, teachers, miners, state television employees, oil workers, textile workers, and others from key industries. Social anger is mounting at Lukashenko’s handing of the coronavirus, which he previously dismissed as a “psychosis.” It has infected nearly 70,000 people so far in Belarus. Lukashenko blithely told Belarusians to drink vodka and “stay positive.”

Strikers are demanding Lukashenko’s ouster and the holding of new elections. Trying to address strikers at the tractor factory yesterday, Lukashenko faced cries of, “Get out!”—the slogan that now predominates in the country’s large, socially-disparate demonstrations.

Lukashenko, who raised this weekend the deployment of paratroopers against strikers, replied that for his opponents to remove him, “they would have to kill me.” In a nationalist tone, he claimed his authoritarian rule and his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic were all a defense of the Belarusian nation: “You know my harshness. You know that if I had not been harsh, there would be no country.”

Lukashenko also signaled, however, that he might consider Tikhonovskaya’s calls, earlier that day, for him to conduct “dialogue” with the opposition, adopt a new constitution and hold new elections. Tikhonovskaya hoped this would ensure that the “country returns to calm and normalcy.”

At the Minsk tractor factory, Lukashenko declared, “We need to adopt a new constitution. You would need to ratify it at a referendum, and then, under the new constitution, if you want, have parliamentary elections, presidential elections, and elections for the local officials.”

The NATO powers are intervening in an effort to ensure the eruption of working class anger remains under the control of the right-wing opposition, which currently dominates the protests with promises of “free and fair elections,” democracy, and an end to state violence to Belarus.

Tikhanovskaya, who fled Belarus after denouncing the election result, is now under the protection of the government of Lithuania. Along with the other Baltic states, it is demanding that Lukashenko subordinate himself to a national council of reconciliation that would negotiate terms for the holding of new elections.

Lukashenko’s concessions to the opposition come amid signs of collapsing support for his rule within the state machine. The Interior Ministry apologized late last week for violent attacks on protesters and began releasing some imprisoned demonstrators. There are reports that members of the OMON, Belarus’ paramilitary internal security forces, dropped their weapons in response to appeals from protesters.

The latest NATO head of state to speak on Belarus was French President Emmanuel Macron, who is despised at home and internationally for his brutal police repression of the “yellow vests”. He declared, “The European Union must continue to mobilize itself alongside hundreds of thousands of Belarusians who are peacefully protesting for their rights, liberty and sovereignty.”

The EU, having announced that it will not recognize Lukashenko’s claimed election landslide and condemned the Belarusian government for its violent attacks on peaceful protesters, is pushing forward Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as the winner. She declared Monday that she is prepared to return to Belarus to serve as a “national leader.” The same day, the German government confirmed that it is in regular communication with Tikhanovskaya.

Press reports indicate that the US government, which in a staggering display of hypocrisy has condemned Lukashenko for police violence, is deciding whether to push for a deal between him and the opposition and press them to break with Russia; or whether to bring down Lukashenko and orchestrate regime change in Minsk as part of the ongoing NATO military build-up across Eastern Europe aimed at Russia.

According to an August 12 story in Foreign Policy, disagreements within Congress over US policy on Belarus center on whether to continue with its pre-crisis plans to continue restoring diplomatic relations with the country.

One reason for the confusion in Washington is doubtless that several leaders in the Belarusian opposition have close ties with Moscow. Viktor Babariko ran Belgazprombank, a bank owned by Russian state-controlled firm Gazprom, until last May. Valery Tsepkalo, a businessman who had longstanding ties to the Belarusian regime before becoming an opposition politician, fled this April to Russia after he was barred from running for the presidency.

The critical question facing workers in Belarus is to struggle independently of and against all the factions of the post-Soviet capitalist kleptocracy, and their international allies. Lukashenko took power in 1994 amid the economic collapse triggered by the Stalinist regime’s restoration of capitalism and its dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, the opposition speaks for a dissident faction of the same corrupt oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s theft and plundering of state assets during capitalist restoration.

Despite being commonly portrayed in anti-Russian media as Putin’s unswerving ally, Lukashenko has a long history of trying to balance between Russia and Western imperialism. In 1996, he started creating free-market economic zones across the country, ensuring private foreign companies tax-free access to its low-wage workforce. As of 2020, 270 corporations had set up shop in these areas. In the mid-2000s, Lukashenko’s government implemented budgets cuts and privatizations in order to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan.

The average monthly wage is just $500, among the lowest in Europe. A “freeloaders tax” introduced in 2015 fines those without jobs for more than six months. If the fine is unpaid and the person continues to be unemployed, the individual faces a six-month jail sentence. Experts estimate that the poverty rate, which the government claims stands at just 5 percent, is actually closer to 20 percent.

In mid-April, Belarus Finance Minister Maxim Yermolovich announced that Belarus had turned to the IMF to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and would receive a $500-900 million loan. Major budget cuts are to follow, amid a raging pandemic.

The various bankers, businessmen and political operatives in the anti-Lukashenko opposition do not represent the grievances of the working class, but the continuation of the same policies that led to the disastrous handling of the pandemic and the upsurge of working class anger.

All the political forces operating in Belarus—the official opposition, the EU, the United States, Ukraine, and the Russian regime—are terrified by the eruption of the longstanding economic and social grievances of the Belarusian working class. Mass strikes in Belarus are all the more alarming to the bourgeoisie, as the same causes are driving growing strikes and protests across Europe and beyond. The NATO countries, including above all the United States, have also responded to the pandemic with naked contempt for workers’ lives.

Obtaining the necessary resources to fight COVID-19, stopping the NATO war drive against Russia and establishing a regime that safeguards democratic rights, require a common, international struggle of the working class for power, based on opposition to the political settlement that emerged from capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. This means a turn towards the Trotskyist movement’s socialist and internationalist struggle against Stalinism’s nationalist and counter-revolutionary legacy in the former Soviet Union and internationally.

“A poor man’s virus:” COVID-19 reveals the class chasm in America

Andre Damon

A massive social and economic catastrophe is unfolding in the United States. More than 170,000 people—predominantly workers and the elderly—are dead from the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty million have lost their jobs. One fifth of mothers with young children say their families do not have enough to eat. In July, half of Americans said they felt depressed or hopeless.

A large homeless encampment near downtown St. Louis (Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

And this was all before Congress allowed federal unemployment benefits to expire, slashing the incomes of the tens of millions of unemployed people by two thirds overnight and throwing them, and their children and dependents, into poverty.

The world looks very different when viewed from the standpoint of the ruling class. For the super-rich, “things are better than normal,” observes one insider account in Vanity Fair. They are “mostly living life as they did before coronavirus,” with one exception: they are far wealthier.

With the NASDAQ up by 20 percent over the past year, the wealth of America’s top ten billionaires has surged by a combined 22 percent.

America’s health care workers have been forced to treat COVID-19 patients without the most basic personal protective equipment (PPE). Teachers and students, forced to return to crowded schools, have been denied PPE as well. One teacher posted a photo of a single mask, a package of alcoholic wipes, and one bottle of disinfectant, noting “this is what the school gave me for PPE for the entire year.” Another added, “Seems they forgot the urn for my ashes.”

For the millions of front line workers in America, preventive testing is out of the question under conditions where tests take more than a week to return, making them effectively useless. Indeed, despite the surging pandemic, daily testing has declined by more than 20 percent in the US, with one leading diagnostics company admitting in internal documents that tests are taking more than 10 days to return.

This problem does not exist for the super-rich. Vanity Fair recounts that one “billionaire in Los Angeles has been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back negative.”

The New York Times interviewed a doctor at a concierge medical service in the Hamptons, who provides instant on-demand testing, who said, “We’ve gone to these private, private, private events, where they have me sign a ‘nothing you see in this house can be leaked’ document.”

Crowded planes are not a problem for the oligarchs as they fly private and chartered jets between their multiple homes (the average ultra-high-net-worth individual owns nine homes abroad). NetJets, the private jet chartering service, reports that requests were up by 195 percent over the previous year.

Meanwhile sales of yachts grew by 51 percent in May compared to April.

While students are piled into crowded classrooms, “One California government official” told Vanity Fair that “some public school teachers are being enticed away to teach a single child in more affluent areas, like Beverly Hills and Palo Alto—a scenario this person called ‘fucked up,’ and one that’s proving to be a real problem for school systems.”

One doctor added, “Coronavirus is a poor person’s virus. We’re seeing it spread in poor neighborhoods, to poor families who have to go to work and live in close proximity to each other, and poor kids are the ones who will not get a proper education.”

It is this class reality that underpins all aspects of the US government’s response to the pandemic, which has been characterized by total disregard for the health, safety and well-being of the vast majority of the population.

For months, the Trump administration deliberately sabotaged any effort to contain the pandemic through testing, fearing this would trigger a panic on the stock market. When it became clear that the pandemic was raging throughout the country, the US ruling class’s response was to carry out a massive bailout of major corporations and banks, to the tune of some $6 trillion.

A major US foundation recently called for the allocation of just $75 billion to create the most minimal system of testing to contain the pandemic. And yet this figure, less than the amount of money Jeff Bezos made in a single year, remains somehow impossible to raise in a country that spends $1 trillion on its military every year.

For the ruling class, the death of tens of thousands of people is a non-issue, so long as its own wealth and profits are secured. The oligarchy has all the tests it needs, and it is wealthier than ever. Mass unemployment for workers means lower wages, lower labor costs and higher profits.

With their bailout secured and the stock markets surging, the only concern of the American oligarchy is that workers get back in the factories, and that workers’ children be herded back to the schools so that their parents can report for their shifts.

The claim by the Democrats that the COVID-19 disaster was the outcome simply of Trump’s mismanagement is a fraud. Every state opened businesses prematurely, whether led by Democrats or Republicans, with many not even meeting CDC guidelines before reopening. The leading spokesman of the campaign to reopen schools is Andrew Cuomo, who has declared that all schools in New York State should reopen.

The election, whether it results in a Biden presidency or the reelection of Trump, will not address the pressing issues facing the working class. This is because the US ruling class’s homicidal response to the pandemic is rooted, fundamentally, in capitalism and the class interests that dictate government policy.

It is impossible to defend the most basic social rights of the working class—even the right to life itself—within the framework of the capitalist social order. It must be rooted out completely and replaced with socialism and the rational organization of society to meet social needs.

Tho­mas San­ka­ra PhD Scholarships 2021

Application Deadline: 29th August 2020 (12:00PM, GMT+1)

About the Award: The GPN decided to name its PhD scholarships after Thomas Sankara being an outstanding personality from the Global South, whose ideas and practices of resisting neo-colonialism and promoting independent pathways for countries of the Global South are deemed to inspire the work of the Global Partnership Graduate School.

Type: PhD

Eligibility:

• a completed MA/MSc degree (exception: the defence of the MA thesis should have happened until the application deadline), with very good results, in a discipline related to the above topics; the applicant’s last academic degree should not be more than six years ago; if an applicant already started with his/her PhD project, it should have started not more than three years ago;
• a very high proficiency in English (CEFR level: C1 or above) demonstrated by one of the following language certificates: TOEFL, with a minimum score of 95 IBT (Internet-based test); IELTS 7.0 or above; the Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English or an equivalent; native speakers and applicants who have completed [one of] their first degree[s] fully in English do not have to provide an English proficiency certificate; if the PhD dissertation will be written in another language than English: a high proficiency of English (CEFR level: B2 or above) for the participation in the Graduate School demonstrated by one of the just mentioned language certificates.
• academic or vocational experience in one of the disciplines related to the thematic field of global partnership;
• citizenship of an ODA recipient country. If the applicant resides in Germany or other countries which are not on the DAC list and is currently not enrolled in a university, s*he  should not have lived in the country of residence longer than two years before the potential start of the scholarship.

Eligible Countries: Developing countries

To be Taken at (University): The universities contributing to the GPN are the following:

• Haramaya University (Ethiopia)
• Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, India)
• Makerere University (Uganda)
• Rhodes University (South Africa)
• Université des Sciences Appliquées du Développement (USAD, Burkina Faso)
• Université d’Etat Haiti (UEH, Haiti)
• Université Virtuelle Senegal (UVS, Senegal)
• University of Cape Coast (UCC, Ghana)
• University of the West Indies (UWI, Jamaica)
• University of the Witwatersrand (Wits, South Africa)*
• University of Kassel (UKS, Germany)

Only those two universities marked as bold, University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Coast, participate in this call for applications. All other listed universities are only involved as possible secondary institutions providing second supervisors.

Number of Awards: Not specifie

Value of Award:

• Building on successful earlier initiatives, the network will include a graduate programme in which PhD students are co-supervised by professors from two partner universities. The supervisors are chosen by the PhD student based on thematic preferences and if they agree to the supervision, they will monitor the thesis progress at least once every three months in a one-hour online session. The PhD student will spend at least six months at the partner university of the second supervisor. 
• PhD students of the GPN Graduate School will be based at the respective partner universities (see above) and enrolled in the virtual PhD training programme. Moreover, successful candidates participate in the annual PhD virtual conferences of the GPN Graduate School and get involved in the lively academic exchange and activities within the GPN network.
• This grant will enable them to attend courses in one of the partner universities and improve their proposal.The scholarships will cover a country-specific monthly living allowance (including a family allowance if applicable), the participation in virtual GPN Graduate School activities as well as the opportunity to apply for funding towards completing empirical research. Final admission to the GPN Graduate School is conditioned on the admittance to the PhD programme of the chosen GPN partner universityand a positive progress evaluation by the GPN in the first scholarship year.

Duration of Award: The PhD scholarship will be awarded for three years. An extension for a fourth year is possible under certain conditions. In exceptional cases, preparatory PhD grants are given for up to one year for students (especially from countries with weaker higher education systems) who exhibit potential for interesting research but need more academic training.

How to Apply: The application process involves three elements. Your application is only complete if all three are submitted:

• Step 1: Ap­p­li­ca­ti­on pa­cka­ge
• Step 2: Com­ple­ti­on of the on­line ap­p­li­ca­ti­on form and upload of your ap­p­li­ca­ti­on pa­cka­ge
• Step 3: Two let­ters of re­com­men­da­ti­on

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Important Notes: *Applicants to the University of the Witwatersrand must also please apply simultaneously to one of the PhD programmes in the School of Social Sciences (e.g. Sociology, Development Studies or International Relations). Please consult the website of the university for details and the closing dates of such programmes. Successful applicants to the GPN will also need to be accepted by one of these PhD programmes.

The Decline in Power of the Oil States

Patrick Cockburn

President Donald Trump is cock-a-hoop over the United Arab Emirates becoming the first Arab Gulf state to normalise its relations with Israel. He needs all the good news he can get in the months before the US presidential election.

“HUGE breakthrough today! Historic Peace Agreement between our two GREAT friends, Israel and the United Arab Emirates!” Trump tweeted. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed a triumph in establishing full diplomatic relations with an Arab state that had once been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians. The UAE, for its part, said it had averted Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, while the Palestinians denounced yet one more betrayal by their fellow Arabs.

Much of this is overblown. Trump and Netanyahu will exaggerate their achievement to strengthen their domestic political status. The UAE had long ago established security and commercial links with Israel and Netanyahu’s annexation of the West Bank had been postponed previously. Pious talk by the US and its western allies in pre-Trump days about fostering a non-existent peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, at the heart of which was an imaginary “two-state solution,” was always a device for ignoring the Palestinians while pretending that something was going on.

Yet there is a real historic change going on in the Middle East and north Africa, though it has nothing to do with the relationship between Israel and the Arabs. It is a transformation that has been speeded up by the coronavirus cataclysm and will radically change the politics of the Middle East.

The era characterised by the power of the oil states is ending. When the price of oil soared in the aftermath of the 1973 war, countries from Iran to Algeria, mostly though not exclusively Arab, enjoyed an extraordinary accretion of wealth. Their elites could buy everything from Leonardo da Vinci paintings to Park Lane hotels. Their rulers had the money to keep less well-funded governments in power or to put them out of business by funding their opponent.

It is this historic period that is now terminating and the change is likely to be permanent. Saudi Arabia and UAE still have big financial reserves, though these are not inexhaustible. Elsewhere the money is running out. The determining factor is that between 2012 and 2020 the oil revenues of the Arab producers fell from $1 trillion to $300bn, down by over two-thirds. Too much oil was being produced and too little was consumed pre-coronavirus and, on top of this, there is a shift away from fossil fuels. Cuts in output by Opec might go some way to raising the oil price, but it will not be enough to preserve a crumbling status quo.

Ironically, a petrostate like the UAE just is flexing its political muscles by normalising relations with Israel just as the economic world of which it was part is breaking up. Nor is the UAE alone: the oil states have always had a problem turning money into political power. Saudi Arabia, UAE and their arch rival Qatar took a more aggressive role during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain in 2011. Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto rulers of Saudi Arabia and UAE, became even more interventionist in 2015 and were overjoyed the following year when Trump, over-impressed by their riches and apparent influence, entered the White House.

The successes of the alliance of Trump and the Gulf monarchies have been skimpy. Their prime target Iran is battered but surviving. Saudi Arabia and UAE began a quick war in Yemen five years ago which is still going on. Bashar al-Assad remains in power in Damascus and Libya is engulfed in an endless civil war of extreme ferocity.

The super-rich oil producers are feeling the draft, but states like Iraq are close to capsizing because they can no longer pay the bills. Last October, hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis took to the streets to protest against lack of jobs, corruption and the failure of the government to provide water and electricity. Ferocious repression killed at least 600 protesters and injured 20,000, but they kept coming back to the streets.

Similar protest swept through Lebanon as its economy imploded. It is not only oil producers that are suffering, but countries like Lebanon and Egypt which looked to the petrostates for business and jobs. Lebanon used to be kept going by remittances. More than 2.5 million Egyptians work in the oil states. If there are not enough Egyptian doctors to treat Covid-19 patients at home, it is because they are earning better money in the oil states.

Strains were already showing before the pandemic. The whole system looked increasingly rickety. Oil states at the height of their prosperity had operated similarly, regardless of whether they were monarchies or republics. The ruling elite, be it Saudi, Iraqi, Libyan or Algerian, exploited governments that were what one expert described as “looting machines”, whereby those with political power turned this into easy money.

They were not alone. They could cream off great fortunes without provoking a revolt by the rest of society because they ran vast patronage machines. Ordinary Saudis, Libyans, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, Iraqis were guaranteed jobs as their small cut of the oil revenue cake.

It is this fifty-year-old system that is now faltering. As populations rise and young people flood into the labour market, more and more money is required to keep society running as before, but such resources are no longer there. This change has revolutionary implications as the unspoken social contract between rulers and ruled breaks down. Nothing much can be done to preserve it because the oil industry blights all other forms of economic activity. Little is produced locally and then only with massive state subsidies.

The rulers of oil states tend to be in a state of denial about the lack of alternatives to oil. Soon after taking over as de facto ruler in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman promoted “Vision 2030” that was supposedly intended to wean Saudi Arabia off oil. Nobody with any experience of the country took this seriously, though western consultants were happy to fan such fantasies so profitable to themselves.

The world understands all too well the impact of the pandemic on health. It is beginning to foresee the economic devastation that follows. But it has yet to take on board the political turmoil inevitably caused by pandemic-hit economies, though Lebanon has given a foretaste of this. Beset by wars and dysfunctional social and economic systems, the Middle East is too fragile to cope with the coming earthquake.

Mining the Deep Sea

Julia Barnes

They want to mine the deep sea.

We shouldn’t be surprised. This culture has stolen 90% of the large fish, created 450 deoxygenated areas, and murdered 50% of the coral reefs. It has wiped out 40% of the plankton. It has warmed and acidified the water to a level not seen since the Permian mass extinction. And indeed, there is another mass extinction underway. Given the ongoing assault on the ocean by this culture, there is serious question as to whether the upper ocean will be inhabitable by the end of this century.

For some people, a best-case scenario for the future is that some bacteria will survive around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean. Deep sea mining is about to make that an unlikely possibility.

It’s being touted as history’s largest mining operation.

They have plans to extract metals from deposits concentrated around hydrothermal vents and nodules – potato sized rocks – which are scattered across the sea floor.

Sediment will be vacuumed up from the deep sea, processed onboard mining vessels, then the remaining slurry will be dumped back into the ocean. Estimates of the amount of slurry that will be processed by a single mining vessel range from 2 to 6 million cubic feet per day.

I’ve seen water go from clear to opaque when an inexperienced diver gives a few kicks to the sea floor.

Now imagine 6 million cubic feet of sediment being dumped into the ocean. To put that in perspective, that’s about 22,000 dump trucks full of sediment – and that’s just one mining vessel operating for one day. Imagine what happens when there are hundreds of them. Thousands of them.

Plumes at the mining site are expected to smother and bury organisms on the sea floor. Light pollution from the mining equipment would disrupt species that depend on bioluminescence. Sediment plumes released at the surface or in the water column would increase turbidity and reduce light, disrupting the photosynthesis of plankton.

A few environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining. Meanwhile, exploratory mining is already underway. An obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority has been given the responsibility of drafting an underwater mining code, selecting locations for extraction, and issuing licenses to mining companies.

Some companies claim that the damage from deep sea mining could be mitigated with proper regulations. For example, instead of dumping slurry at the surface, they would pump it back down and release it somewhere deeper. Obviously, regulations will not stop the direct harm to the area being mined. But even if the most stringent regulations were put in place, there still exists the near-certainty of human error, pipe breakage, sediment spills, and outright disregard for the rules. As we’ve seen with fisheries, regulations are essentially meaningless when there is no enforcement. 40% of the total catch comes from illegal fishing. Quotas are routinely ignored and vastly exceeded. On land, we know that corporations will gladly pay a fine when it is cheaper to do so than it is to follow the rules.

But all this misses the point which is that some activities are so immoral, they should not be permitted under any circumstances. Permits and regulations only serve to legalize and legitimize the act of deep sea mining, when a moratorium is the only acceptable response.

Canadian legislation effectively prohibits deep sea mining in Canada’s territorial waters. Ironically, Canadian corporations are leading the effort to mine the oceans elsewhere.

A spokesperson from the Vancouver-based company Deep Green Metals attempted to defend deep sea mining from an environmental perspective, “Mining on land now takes place in some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. The ocean floor, on the other hand, is a food-poor environment with no plant life and an order of magnitude less biomass living in a larger area. We can’t avoid disturbing wildlife, to be clear, but we will be putting fewer organisms at risk than land-based operations mining the same metals.” (as cited in Mining Watch https://miningwatch.ca/news/2020/6/16/deep-sea-mining-environmental-solution-or-impending-catastrophe).

This argument centers on a false choice. It presumes that mining must occur, which is absurd. Then, it paints a picture that the only area affected will be the area that is mined. In reality, the toxic slurry from deep sea mining will poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles, with heavy metals like mercury and lead expected to bio-accumulate in everyone from plankton, to tuna, to sharks, to cetaceans.

A study from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that “A very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species.”

The idea that fewer organisms are at risk from deep sea mining is an egregious lie. Scientists have known since 1977 that photosynthesis is not the basis of every natural community. There are entire food webs that begin with organic chemicals floating from hydrothermal vents. These communities include giant clams, octopuses, crabs, and 10-foot tube worms, to name a few. Conducting mining in these habitats is bad enough, but the effects go far beyond the mined area.

Deep sea mining literally threatens every level of the ocean from surface to seabed. In doing so, it puts all life on the planet at risk. From smothering the deep sea, to toxifying the food web, to disrupting plankton, the tiny organisms who produce two thirds of the earth’s oxygen, it’s just one environmental disaster after another.

The most common justification for deep sea mining is that it will be necessary to create a bright green future. A report by the World Bank found that production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt would need to increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for so-called renewable energy.

There is an article from the BBC titled “Electric Car future May Depend on Deep Sea Mining”. What if we switched the variables, and instead said “the future of the ocean depends on stopping car culture” or “the future of the ocean depends on opposing so-called renewable energy”. If we take into account all of the industries that are eviscerating the ocean, it must also be said that “the future of the ocean depends on stopping industrial civilization”.

Evidently this culture does not care whether the ocean has a future. It’s more interested in justifying continued exploitation under the banner of green consumerism.

I do not detail the horrors of deep sea mining to make a moral appeal to those who are destroying the ocean. They will not stop voluntarily. Instead, I am appealing to you, the reader, to do whatever is necessary to make it so this industry cannot destroy the ocean.

Rental Inflation Appears to be Slowing, Especially in High-Priced Cities

Dean Baker

The overall Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.6 percent in July, the same as the rate in June. The core CPI rose 0.6 percent in July after rising 0.2 percent in June. Over the last year the indexes are up 1.0 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

The inflation of the last two months is overwhelmingly a story of bounce-back with sharp price increases in these months reversing large price declines in the period of shutdown. To a lesser extent, higher prices in some areas likely reflect efforts to pass on pandemic-related costs (e.g., reduced capacity in restaurants or airplanes). These costs will largely disappear if the pandemic is brought under control.

Gas prices are probably the clearest example of this pattern. They rose 5.6 percent in July after rising 12.3 percent in June. This follows a cumulative price decline of 33.8 percent from January to May. Over the last year gas prices are still down by 20.3 percent.

In the core index, apparel prices are up 1.1 percent in July after rising 1.7 percent in June. They had fallen 8.8 percent from February to May. They are now down by 6.4percent over the last year. Airfares rose by 2.6 percent and 5.4 percent in June and July, respectively. This followed a price decline of 29.5 percent in the prior three months.

Auto insurance prices rose 9.3 percent in July following a 5.1 percent rise in June. This is after falling 14.9 percent from February to May. The index is down 1.9 percent over the last year.

The CPI auto insurance index (unlike the one used in the personal consumption expenditure deflator) is a gross spending index. It captures what people pay out for their insurance, without netting out claims. Not surprisingly, this gross index fell sharply in the shutdown period as insurers gave rebates due to the fact that people were driving much less and therefore having fewer accidents. The rise in the last two months is the ending of these rebates. The insurance index accounts for almost 1.9 percent of the core CPI.

Restaurant prices rose 0.5 percent in July after rising 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent in the prior two months. Before the pandemic, restaurant prices had been rising 1.0–1.5 percent more rapidly than the price of food at home, reflecting rising wages in the sector. This was reversed during the shutdown period. In March, restaurant prices rose 0.2 percent, while at-home food prices rose 0.5 percent. In April the respective increases were 0.1 percent and 2.6 percent, and in May 0.4 percent and 1.0 percent. The story was sharply reversed in July, as the 0.5 percent rise in restaurant prices went along with a drop of 1.1 percent in the price of food at home. Going forward, restaurant prices are likely to again outpace food prices.

There appears to be some slowing in the rate of rental inflation, with owners’ equivalent rent rising at an annual rate of 2.4 percent, comparing the average of the last three months (May, June, July) with the prior three months (February, March, April). That is down from a rate of 2.8 percent over the last year. For the rent proper index, the increases are 2.6 percent compared to 3.1 percent.

This slowdown is most visible in areas where rents had been rising rapidly. In Los Angeles the rent proper index was rising at an annual rate of 2.5 percent over the last three months, down from 3.6 percent over the last year. In San Francisco the index has fallen at an annual rate of 3.3 percent over the last three months compared to a rise of 2.6 percent over the last year.

The high inflation of June and July is not a surprise and should not be a basis for concern about ongoing problems with inflation. It is overwhelmingly attributable to reversals of sharp price declines during the shutdown period. In addition, there are sectors that are experiencing one-time and temporary cost pressures as a result of adjustments necessary to cope with the pandemic. We may see another month or two of high inflation, but there is little reason to believe that this is the start of an upward spiral.