India: Death toll from Kerala landslide rises to 65

Shibu Vavara

The official number of those killed in a landslide early last month at a tea plantation in the southern Indian state of Kerala has climbed to 65. The tea estate was at Rajamala, near Munnar, in the Idukki district. Plantation workers and their family members died when the massive landslide buried a row of 20 estate workers’ homes in the early hours of August 7.

According to media reports, over 80 people lived in the dwellings—most of them single-room shacks. Only 12 people survived the disaster and five remain missing, presumed dead. Most of the estate workers came from families that originally migrated from Tamil Nadu and had been living in the area for three generations.

Rescue and search operations were suspended after three weeks due to rising water levels in a nearby river. Several victims are believed to have been washed away.

The landslides occurred at around 2 a.m. The area, which is part of the Eravikulam National Park lacks decent road access. Munnar, the nearest town, is some 30 kilometres away.

Workers were only allowed to live in the national park because of the presence of plantations. The estates are owned by the Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company, which took over from Tata Tea Limited, when the latter withdrew from most of its plantations in Munnar to focus on the growth of its branded tea business.

Nearly 12,000 people are employed by Kanan Devan Hills, which has seven tea estates, covering an area of 24,000 hectares, and 16 tea manufacturing units with an annual production of 22 million kilograms.

While preliminary analysis of the disaster points to the heavy rain in the area, landslides are not simply a natural calamity. Government authorities have failed to provide the most basic public infrastructure to the region even though Munnar is Kerala’s premium hill station and tourist spot. A general hospital, owned by Tata, is the only medical facility in the area. The nearest specialist hospital, the Government Medical College Hospital, is in Kottayam around 136 kilometres away.

Rescue operation teams, moreover, were not able to quickly reach the area because the temporary Periavarai Bridge, which is the only way to get to the scene of the disaster, had been washed away by the heavy rain. The permanent bridge collapsed two years ago and a new bridge was under construction. Rescue vehicles and ambulances had to wait for hours until the temporary bridge was repaired.

Kerala’s Left Democratic Front (LDF) state government, which is led by the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist)-CPM, blamed poor access to the area for rescue operation delays. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, a CPM leader, blamed the lack of adequate electricity, telecommunications and roads to the region while taking no responsibility for his government’s refusal to provide this basic infrastructure.

According to media reports, the area had no electricity for more than four days before the calamity. Questioned about this, Kerala State Electricity Board authorities attempted to wash their hands of any responsibility by declaring that power supplies to the area were under the control of the Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company.

Along with the grossly inadequate infrastructure, the poverty-stricken estate employees face disastrous working and living conditions, which they fought to change for many years.

In 2015, nearly 300,000 plantation workers at state-owned and private tea and rubber estates in Kerala began indefinite state-wide strike action demanding higher wages and better conditions. The plantation unions called the stoppage not to mobilise workers in an independent struggle to challenge the employers and the state government, but to dissipate workers’ mounting hostility towards the unions and their collaboration with estate management.

The walkout was a response to widespread popular support for a militant nine-day strike by about 6,000, mainly women workers in Munnar from the Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company the previous September. The Munnar workers, who rebelled against their unions attacking, barring officials from their meetings, demanded a 500-rupee daily wage (less than $US7 per day) and a 20 percent bonus.

After winning the state elections in May 2016, CPM Chief Minister Vijayan visited Munnar and told the estate workers that their wages would be increased to 500-rupees per day. It remains another broken pledge.

In an attempt to contain mounting working-class anger over last month’s landslide disaster, Vijayan announced a 500,000-rupee payment to the surviving families. Given his government’s previous failure to deliver on official promises, even this meagre amount is unlikely to be delivered.

The opposition, Congress-led United Democratic Front, which has also headed numerous Kerala state governments, is equally responsible for the terrible conditions facing plantation workers and the latest disaster.

German court sentences members of leftist Turkish party to prison

Justus Leicht

In late July, following proceedings lasting more than four years, a clearly political trial has ended with heavy prison sentences for 10 members of the Maoist TKP/ML (Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist). The sentences were passed by the Munich Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht). The entire trial was a scandal and demonstrates the extent to which German political and legal authorities are prepared to ignore basic democratic norms.

The defendants, including German citizens and a number of asylum seekers whose asylum applications in Germany had been accepted, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two years and nine months to six years and six months.

The harshest punishment was meted out to Müslüm Elma, who was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on charges of being a TKP/ML “ring leader.” After more than five years in prison on remand, the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) revoked its arrest warrant against him in what amounts to a travesty of justice. During the course of the trial the court had persistently refused to release him from remand custody.

Elma had already spent 22 years in prison in Turkey for his activities in the TKP/ML. He was tortured there under the rule of the 1980 military coup regime and was then given political asylum in Germany due to this political persecution.

In total, the 10 accused received more than 40 years in prison. None of them was accused of acts of violence or any other criminal act in Germany. The charges related only to their membership in the TKP/ML, which in turn is not classified as a terrorist or criminal organisation in Germany. The group is not banned in Germany and does not appear on any international terrorist list, including that of the European Union, which has a long list of alleged terror organisations based on the political criteria determined by individual EU governments.

The TKP/ML is considered a terrorist organisation only in Turkey, where it is engaged in a hopeless guerrilla war with the reactionary Turkish state. In neighbouring Syria, the organisation combats Turkish-backed Islamist militias such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). However, none of the 10 accused have been charged with involvement in any type of violence. The indictment was directed solely at membership or “ring-leadership” in a “terrorist organisation abroad,” according to paragraph 129b of the German Criminal Code.

Section 129 of the Criminal Code, i.e., the law that prohibits membership in criminal organisations, has not been primarily directed against so-called “organised crime,” which could be described as “apolitical,” such as drug and human trafficking. Section 129 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) received its present name and basic structure (with minor subsequent amendments) in the context of the 1st Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1951, which was used to prosecute Communists in post war Germany.

The memorandum to the 1951 government draft stated: “The modern state needs new protective regulations to advance its line of defence and prevent enemies of the state under the mask of non-violence from obtaining power by fraud.” Under the SPD-led federal government of Helmut Schmidt, this legislation was supplemented in 1976 by paragraph 129a StGB (Terrorist Associations). In 2002, the SPD-Green government led by Gerhard Schröder introduced paragraph 129b StGB, which was decisive in prosecuting the TKP/ML. This extension of the law had already been discussed at EU level in 1999 and was enforced after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

In all three legal forms, membership in an association, including “its purposes or activities”—according to the text of the law—is punishable when there is evidence of “intention” to commit a crime. Whether an individual is involved in committing an offence (or had already committed one) is irrelevant. Thus, the term “organisational offence”—irrespective of whether it has a political background or not—means that it is not deeds, but rather standpoints or mere intentions to commit an act, which can be punished. Since it is not a question of participation in concrete crimes at home or abroad, the paragraphs have been used primarily for investigative purposes and intimidation.

If, as in this case, the “offence” (i.e., mere membership) relates to an organisation outside the jurisdiction of the EU, the law stipulates that the German Ministry of Justice must authorise prosecution. Such an authorisation was apparently given over four years ago by then Minister of Justice and current Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD).

The concrete accusations made by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which the court followed, were essentially that the defendants had recruited members in Germany, and had organised propaganda events and fund-raising campaigns, i.e., had used legal means to support an organisation legally recognised in Germany.

The German domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) which monitors the TKP/ML as “Turkish left-wing extremists,” also admits that it was unaware of any “appeals for the use of force or carrying out of violent acts in Germany.” Likewise, there were “no indications that this practice would change in future.” Instead, the Verfassungsschutz accuses the organisation of “striving for a violent overthrow” of the government in Turkey and committing attacks accordingly.

The defence team for the accused TKP/ML members described the trial as “a piece of work commissioned” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is establishing an authoritarian regime in Turkey and increasingly using violence to prosecute opposition forces. The defence also challenged the German Ministry of Justice’s authority to prosecute and demanded the trial be halted at its outset.

In fact, paragraph 129b of the German Criminal Code states that the ministry, when deciding on authorisation, must take into account “whether the efforts of the organisation are directed against the basic values of a state order that respects human dignity or against the peaceful coexistence of peoples and, after weighing all the circumstances, appears punishable.” On this basis, the authority to prosecute should never have been granted in the first place.

In 2016, the same court had already made a ruling declaring that it did not matter whether the Turkish state committed human rights violations or—as in Syria—supported Islamist terrorist groups.

The court also denied that the authorisation by the ministry to prosecute was arbitrary. It admitted that there was no such authorisation in the case of the “Free Syrian Army,” which also fights for the violent overthrow of a state order using force. But, the court reasoned, this was happening in another country, in Syria. At the same time, the ministry had also given authority to prosecute the DHKP-C, a leftist guerrilla group also operating in Turkey.

In fact, the arbitrary nature of the court’s rulings is particularly evident here. Whether or not an organisation is prosecuted as terrorist depends, according to the court, not on the nature of its methods, but rather whether it seeks to overthrow a state which is an ally of Germany. The TKP/ML acts in Syria as a de facto agency of US imperialism. It works together in Syria with the Kurdish-dominated YPG (People’s Defence Units), which in turn has long collaborated closely with the US military.

It is more or less undisputed that in the course of the prosecution the Federal Prosecutor’s Office also used extensive material it received from Turkish authorities and that Turkish spies had illegally collected such evidence in Germany. Although the Attorney General is investigating the espionage activities of the Turkish secret service (MIT) in a number of other cases, the court presented a letter from “Police General Directorate Istanbul,” openly admitting to acts of spying.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, the letter declared that as a “result of the compilation of secret service information” about the defendants’ milieu, it had been discovered that “in Germany there is a cadre of about 700 to 800 people and this number increases to 2,000 at organised events. When the court handed down its verdict, however, it claimed that the “evidence” from Turkey “played almost no role.”

The entire trial recalled the methods used by an authoritarian regime. The defendants had spent several years in pre-trial detention, on occasion under extremely repressive conditions. They were isolated, were only allowed to speak with their lawyers through glass partitions, and their correspondence with defence attorneys was monitored.

In her closing remarks, one of the defendants, a doctor, Dilay Banu Büyükavci, compared the trial to that of the NSU terrorist Beate Zschäpe, who appeared before the same court.

Public prosecutor Heise had repeatedly claimed “this is a criminal trial and not a political trial,” Büyükavci said, “but all the measures we have been subjected to demonstrate the opposite.” While she had been subjected to isolation and other measures, Zschäpe, who “killed 10 people, robbed a bank and planned bomb attacks, and was thus accused of attempted murder, did not have to endure the type of special measures imposed on me.”

The same applies to the defendants accused of membership in the neo-Nazi Old School Society. Among its activities the Old School Society had hoarded large quantities of explosives and planned attacks on homes for asylum seekers. Its “ringleaders” were also sentenced by the Munich Higher Regional Court to between four and a half and five years in prison, i.e., considerably less time than Müslüm Elma, whose only “crime” was leading an organisation that was legal in Germany.

The verdict amounts to a persecution of opinions (Gesinnungsjustiz), an arbitrary means of intimidation aimed at influencing foreign and domestic politics. The message sent is that anyone who is left-wing and/or opposes a regime allied with Germany can be imprisoned in Germany for years, even if he or she resorted to entirely legal means within an organization that is legal in Germany. The preparations for a right-wing, authoritarian regime in Germany are rapidly developing.

The defenders of the TKP/ML members have announced they plan to appeal the verdict.

Coronavirus assistance for university students in Germany—a calculated fraud

Lisa Lachlan

A law passed by the German parliament on May 7 promising support for students and the sciences during the coronavirus pandemic has proven to be a “calculated fraud,” as correctly assessed by the World Socialist Web Site on June 13. It is in fact a blatant attempt to make students pay for the crisis.

Since June, angry and indignant posts have been mounting on social media from students accusing the government of ignorance and inaction, disregarding the needs of roughly a million students in need of assistance.

Students demonstrate on June 8th in Bonn for greater assistance

Most of the criticism is directed toward the so-called “stop-gap aid,” stipulated in the law to be paid from an “emergency fund” of €100 million. Students who lost their jobs during the months of March, April and May because of the pandemic and who are facing existential need can apply for a subsidy of €100 to at most €500 for the months of June, July and August. The applications must be submitted to each university’s Studentenwerk, state-run non-profit organisations for student affairs at German universities.

Students who lost their jobs before March and were unable to find new employment because of the lockdown are automatically excluded from funding, regardless of whether or not they are threatened by existential need. Likewise excluded are students whose bank accounts contained more than €500.

In a June 16 tweet, one student commented: “In Germany you are considered poor with an income of 781 Euro per month. Unless you are studying, then [Education Minister] Anja Karliczek says that with 500 Euro in the bank you are so rich that you can’t get state support.”

It is entirely clear that topping up accounts capped at €599 changes nothing in the existential situation confronting many students.

“In almost no university town can you make ends meet with that. Then there are the costs from the previous months. And the assistance is only for June, July and August. The Corona crisis, on the other hand, has no end in sight,” commented Amanda Steinmaus, executive member of the fzs (Free Association of Student Bodies), on the organisation’s website on July 2.

That alone would explain the anger and disgust of many students. On the one hand, the €100 million in “stop-gap aid” provided by the federal government is a pitiful sum that could support at most 66,666 students for three months at €500 per month. In June alone, 82,000 applications were submitted to the emergency aid fund.

The level of need, as Steinmaus made clear, lies well above that: “According to a survey, a million students during the Corona crisis are in serious financial need.”

The application process is handled by each university’s student union and is a huge administrative act. Just for software with which students can apply for the stop-gap aid, the Ministry of Education paid €325,027.

An additional €25 processing fee is applied to every application. Because a separate application is required for each month of support, the administrative costs are trebled. Disbursements only reach students after long waiting periods. The first applications were processed on June 29.

Soon after the application process started, it became clear that the intention of the federal government was not to help students out of a financial emergency with stop-gap aid. Of around 82,000 applications, roughly half were rejected. One common reason given for the rejection was that the pandemic could not be blamed since the student’s employment had been terminated before March, or students were given the automatic response that the application was rejected due to illegibility or incomplete documentation.

There are increasing reports in social media from students whose applications were rejected although their accounts were negative or under €10 and without further indication of which documents were illegible or incorrect.

“I myself meticulously and completely scanned in documents for hours. The Studentenwerk and the hotline of the ministry of education wouldn’t tell me why I was rejected…,” complained one student on social media.

In the meanwhile, it has become known that the application software has had problems uploading and opening the required documents. Roughly half of the rejected applications are affected by this issue. Despite the faulty software, students receiving rejection notices cannot submit further documents and as such lose their right to any aid.

Moreover, the application system does not allow changes to information provided in the previous month’s application, meaning that a rejection in June almost automatically results in a rejection in July.

This is a deliberate failure to provide assistance on the part of the federal government. In this way, the government is squeezing more money out of the working class to finance bank rescues, the artificial inflation of the stock market and massive armament programmes.

In light of this, it borders on audacity that Education Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU) explained the high rejection rate by claiming that many students might possibly have withdrawn their application for stop-gap aid because they no longer need the money.

Exactly the opposite is the case. At the end of July, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW—a significant German, state-owned development bank) reported receiving 22,000 new applications for student loans totaling €641.6 million since May.

This will have devastating consequences for many students since the “interest-free” loans for students, which in addition to the €100 million “stop-gap aid” represent the heart of the “emergency aid” for students, are essentially normal KfW loans that have existed in their current form since 2006 and have to be repaid with high interest.

Here, too, it becomes clear that Karliczek is not interested in helping students, but rather in building up student loans as an alternative to BAföG (subsidised government loans for students) in the long term. As in the United States, students will then start their careers with a huge mountain of debt.

In the last eight years, the number of students who are supported by BAföG has decreased by 26 percent. In 2019, around 489,300 students received these subsidised student loans, that is 17 percent of all students. In 2012, it was around 671,000 or 26 percent.

The systematic nature of the cost reductions implemented in recent years is becoming apparent to millions of people in the course of the COVID-19 crisis and palpable for those directly affected. It is a fatal mistake to believe that appeals to the federal government can change its ruthless policy. As the current situation shows, the federal government has not made BAföG quickly and unbureaucratically available to students in need, even though the annual BAföG budget has not been exhausted. The fzs notes that the BAföG fund currently contains €900 million that are being withheld from students.

Many students in need will be forced to drop out of their studies in the coming semester in order to apply for basic security [ Grundsicherung ], since students are not entitled to Hartz IV unemployment benefits. Early dropout figures are already available for Berlin. According to the Senate Chancellery, there were around 4,600 dropouts in 2019. In 2020, there have already been 5500, around 20 percent more than in the previous year

As in all areas of society, the coronavirus pandemic exposes the reality of social inequality at Germany’s universities. It is the result of the same policies that are jeopardising the lives of millions of people to harvest profits from the economy and accelerate the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of society.

Students must see the blatant attacks on equal access to education in relation to the criminal reopening of schools, massive job cuts in the auto, aviation and other industries, and the hasty and irresponsible resumption of production that are endangering the lives of millions of people. Students and workers must combine their protest with the struggle for an international socialist perspective.

Quebec teachers denounce unions for their complicity in reckless school reopening

Louis Girard

Millions of students across Canada are going back to school this week and next, returning to unsafe and overcrowded classrooms as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the country and internationally.

The back-to-school drive has one overriding aim: to force working parents to return to work so they can resume generating massive profits for big business. It is being jointly orchestrated by the provincial governments—Liberal, Conservative, Coalition Avenir Quebec, and NDP—and by the Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal government.

Among its most ardent promoters is Quebec Premier François Legault and his CAQ (Coalition for Quebec’s Future) government. Legault has refused to offer worried parents the alternative of e-learning, insisting it be reserved only for children with a doctor-certified medical condition.

After a spike in COVID-19 cases this week, including at many newly reopened schools, Legault blamed the public for ignoring social-distancing rules and vowed to keep the schools open even as teachers and students fall sick. "Above all, I do not want to close the schools," he declared.

In Quebec, the epicenter of the pandemic in Canada, the Ministry of Health is refusing to provide official updates on school-related COVID-19 cases. But according to data compiled by a Montreal father on the covidecolesquebec.org website, more than 30 schools in the province have already had at least one positive case.

Across the province, workers, parents and medical experts have expressed deep concern about the government’s school reopening plans:

• A group of parents has sent a formal notice to the Ministry of Education to demand the implementation of online school learning. Politimi Karounis, a member of this group, said he has received thousands of messages from parents who are concerned about their children going back to school.
  
• Sarah Gibson, a mother of two teenage girls in a Montreal suburb, launched a petition to demand the plan be revised to provide an online-learning option, reduce class sizes, and incorporate other science-based safety measures. To date more than 30,000 people have signed the online petition. Refuting the government's lies, the text accompanying the petition states that it is "increasingly clear that children are as contagious as adults." The text draws attention to airborne transmission, in the presence of often antiquated ventilation systems, as an important vector for the spread of the virus. And it stresses the need for regular testing of students and school staff.
  
• A group of 150 doctors, epidemiologists and other scientists have signed an open letter to the Legault government denouncing the reopening of schools. "The current back-to-school plan in Quebec needs to better consider all the available scientific evidence to prevent outbreaks in schools, to avoid jeopardizing the safety of our children, teachers and parents, as well as, to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) in our community," the letter states.

In Quebec, as in the rest of Canada, the trade unions have been working for decades with the ruling class to impose capitalist austerity. Today they are fully collaborating in the back-to-work campaign, merely making timid criticisms of the premature return to school in order to camouflage their collaboration with the authorities.

But workers, in all fields of activity and on an international scale, are beginning to draw lessons from the treacherous role of the unions.

Comments posted to social media by Quebec teachers underscore that they are searching for an alternative to the union bureaucracy, which has no intention of protecting the health and safety of education workers. Particularly significant are the trenchant criticisms of the Autonomous Federation of Teachers (FAE/Fédération autonome de l'enseignement), a union that claims to be “more militant.”

These include the following comments, each from a different teacher.

• “I thought my union was mobilized, but I was wrong! There is no ventilation system in our schools, no reduction in [pupil-to-teacher] ratios, no visors, no Plexiglas, no windowless classrooms, and on top of that, at the secondary level we have to disinfect ourselves every time we arrive in a new classroom.”
  
• “Our unions... Forget it! We have to mobilize ourselves and then kick them out!”
  
• “I've always been the first one to defend the FAE, but I don't understand... High school teachers will be teaching in windowless, poorly ventilated environments... I'm speechless and very disappointed!”
  
• “It’s not a matter of demanding answers, what we need is action! We have been denouncing this problem for the past six months right here in connection with Covid and we ask you not to let the government expose us to this additional danger. The new school year has already begun and all I still see is a ‘wait for some to die’ attitude.”

The Socialist Equality Party insists that the only way to stop the homicidal reopening of schools, and save lives, is for the working class to take matters into its own hands through the establishment of safety committees made up of rank-and-file workers, independent of and opposed to the pro-capitalist unions.

Such rank-and-file committees must demand the immediate closure of schools until the pandemic is contained, as well as a massive increase in public education funding to ensure that all students have access to online education and necessary support services, including mental health, special education and food security.

The ruling elite will inevitably claim there is “no money” to implement these demands. Workers must respond by showing that resources are plentiful, but they are being diverted to further enrich the corporate-financial aristocracy. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government, Bank of Canada, and other government agencies have funneled hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds into the financial markets, banks, and big business to ensure the investments and profits of the rich and super-rich.

The fight against the reckless and premature reopening of schools must be combined with the political mobilization of the working class and the preparation of a counteroffensive in defense of human lives. That is why rank-and-file safety committees in schools must make a broad appeal to all workers–educators, school bus drivers, custodians, maintenance and other support staff, as well as construction, health care, logistics, food, retail and restaurant workers.

In the United States, where thousands of infections among teachers and students have been reported across the country since schools reopened in late July, several groups of teachers have taken the decision to establish rank-and-file safety committees.

Former Australian PM Tony Abbott: Let the elderly die for corporate profits

Oscar Grenfell

In an address to the British Policy Exchange think tank earlier this week, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott branded any measures to tackle the spread of COVID-19 as a “health dictatorship” and called for the elderly to be left to die from the virus.

Abbott, who held the highest political office in Australia between 2013 and 2015, sketched out a homicidal program that would not have been out of place in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Its essence was a call for governments to explicitly adopt a policy that would lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and to remove any obstacles to corporate profit-making activities.

The former PM gave unvarnished expression to the socially-criminal response to the pandemic by governments internationally. He nevertheless complained that not enough politicians were “thinking like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about the level of deaths we might have to live with.”

Abbott cited figures, for which he provided no evidence, claiming that the Australian government was spending up to $200,000 to prolong the life of each elderly COVID-19 patient by as little as a year. The clear implication was that such basic health care was not a good investment. He repeated the familiar refrain of capitalist politicians throughout the pandemic, warning that the cure could not be worse than the disease.

Abbott delivering his address to the Policy Exchange think tank (Photo: Screenshot from Policy Exchange video of the event)

Abbott couched his reactionary proposals in pseudo-philosophical musings: “In this climate of fear it was hard for governments to ask ‘how much is a life worth?’ Because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course.”

In this case, letting “nature take its course” means subjecting the elderly, and other vulnerable individuals considered surplus to the requirements of big business, to an agonising death by denying them medical treatment.

Abbott was very explicit about the purpose of his statements. It was above all necessary, he insisted, for workers to return fully to their places of employment.

Abbott warned of “People once sturdily self-reliant looking to the government more than ever for support and sustenance, a something-for-nothing mindset, reinforced amongst young people spared the need of searching for jobs.” This, he said, risked “establishing a new normal,” where ordinary people expected governments to assist them.

In other words, the main issue is for workers to be on the job, so that surplus value can be pumped out of them, regardless of the danger to their lives. Even minimal unemployment benefits must be wound back, as part of a broader austerity offensive against the working class.

Abbott attempted to justify his proposals by concluding: “Fear of falling sick is stopping us from feeling fully alive.”

The limited media commentary on Abbott’s speech has focused on the undeniable right-wing proclivities of the former Liberal Party politician. He was a protégé of B.A. Santamaria, a reactionary ideologue who helped split Australia’s pro-capitalist Labor Party in the 1950s, declaring that it had been over-run by communists. Abbott’s entire political career has been associated with nationalist militarism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and anti-communism.

Others have noted the apparent hypocrisy of Abbott, a fervent Catholic who has invoked the “sanctity of life” to oppose abortion and euthanasia, coming out in favour of what amounts to state-enforced “euthanasia.” It is hardly a revelation, however, that Abbott, like his colleagues in official politics, secular and religious alike, worships first of all at the altar of profit.

Much of the coverage has missed the main point. What Abbott was outlining has already been carried out by capitalist governments around the world, including in Britain, the US and Australia, whether they are led by establishment parties of the “right” or the supposed “left.”

Abbott, who is in line to become a trade envoy for the British government, has been promoted by that country’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The British government responded to the pandemic by adopting a policy of “herd immunity,” allowing COVID-19 to spread unchecked throughout the country, because of the impact on big business that lockdown measures would have. This included a mass culling of the elderly in aged-care homes, which Abbott now lauds and promotes.

The WSWS, moreover, has previously documented the fact that the Policy Exchange think tank where Abbott spoke is the scene of high-level discussions of the British state and the Conservative Party, along with its US ally.

It is notable that Abbott has come under fire from Britain’s “liberal” press, including the Guardian, who have denounced his putative position as a trade envoy.

Demonstrating the selfish concerns of the upper-middle class, they have passed over Abbott’s homicidal speech, instead condemning his record of misogyny and homophobia as incompatible with their fixation on individual identity. By this they have signaled that they have no fundamental opposition to the policy of “herd immunity.”

The implications of Abbott’s speech for domestic Australian politics have also received scant attention.

The entire Australian establishment, including the official media, the governing federal Liberal-Nationals and Labor opposition, and the various state administrations, have centred their response to the pandemic on the same back-to-work and “reopening of the economy” campaigns that have been carried out by their counterparts internationally.

While they did not explicitly adopt the program of “herd immunity,” all Australian governments, Liberal-National and Labor alike, rejected expert medical advice in April which called for a policy aimed at eliminating coronavirus transmission. This, they claimed, would be too costly.

The financial press published “death calculi,” along the lines of Abbott’s speech, weighing the cost of treatment against its impact on profits, and invariably concluding that the latter would need to take priority.

As has happened elsewhere, the premature lifting of lockdown measures beginning in May has resulted in a new surge of the pandemic, centred in the state of Victoria. There, the state Labor government of Premier Daniel Andrews rejected calls from epidemiologists for immediate workplace and school shutdowns as daily case numbers soared.

Mass outbreaks have occurred in aged-care homes. This is the direct outcome of the corporatisation of the sector by federal governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, over decades. Minimal health precautions were rejected by many of the private operators, while staff are primarily low-paid casuals without any medical expertise.

State Labor authorities prevented the hospitalisation of residents infected with COVID-19, instead consigning them to treatment that amounts to palliative care. Thousands have been infected and hundreds have tragically died.

It was only when Victoria’s hospital system threatened to be completely overwhelmed that Andrews implemented “Stage Four” restrictions, involving the closure of Melbourne’s retail sector, the resumption of online learning and some restrictions on other workplaces.

Those “Stage Four” measures are set to elapse in less than a fortnight. Abbott’s speech was a carefully-timed intervention. The former PM retains close ties to the federal Liberal-National government and the Murdoch press: the forces spearheading a stepped-up campaign for the lifting of virtually all remaining COVID-19 restrictions.

It was hardly a coincidence that the day before Abbott’s speech, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gave a series of interviews demanding that lockdown measures be overturned in Victoria, to provide businesses with “certainty.”

Signalling yet again the bipartisan character of the pro-business response to the pandemic, Andrews immediately promised to present a “road map” out of the restrictions this Sunday. Being worked out in secret with the representatives of ten industry groups, it will undoubtedly involve the sort of workplace and school reopenings that resulted in the last resurgence of the virus.

School and college outbreaks make Iowa the US COVID-19 hotspot

Benjamin Mateus

Iowa has become typical of the front line of the pandemic—a tempest brewing, with cases soaring while the political and corporate establishment turn a blind eye to the devastating public health crisis and initiate policies that will make it even worse by intensifying the back-to-school and back-to-work campaign.

With over 67,000 cumulative cases, the seven-day average for COVID-19 cases in Iowa has been steadily climbing. However, the tracking of cases has been mired in willful and calculated ineptitude. With a positivity rate of 18.5 percent, it is a clear indication that the number of cases throughout the state is far higher than reported by authorities. As of September 2, there have been 1,126 total deaths attributed to the infection in a state with a population of only 3.2 million.

Fort Dodge, Iowa (Credit: snyder-associates.com)

Local news reported yesterday that a special education teacher from Des Moines Public Schools died from complications of COVID-19 infection. The teacher, yet to be identified, worked at Ruby Van Meter School for the intellectually disabled. It remains unclear where the teacher contracted the virus. However, Governor Kim Reynolds is demanding that districts open schools for 50 percent in-person instruction, regardless of the deadliness of the infection, with utter disregard for the lives of the communities being put at risk.

On a per-capita basis, Iowa leads with the highest number of COVID-19 cases of any state in the country. With 232 new cases per 100,000 population, it is almost triple the national average of 88 per 100,000. According to the federal coronavirus task force, “community transmission continues to be high in rural and urban counties across Iowa, with the increasing transmission in the major university towns. Mask mandates must be in place to decrease transmission.” Additional recommendations included the closing of bars and restaurants across 61 counties, which Governor Reynolds has chosen to disregard publicly, limiting the shutdown to major towns.

After the July days when COVID-19 cases peaked at more than 70,000 per day in the United States, predominately across the sunbelt states, by August, there were indications that the virus was surging into rural Midwest and Great Plains states. Presently, the seven-day moving average across the US has gradually declined and settled to approximately 42,500 daily cases. Similarly, since the end of July, about 1,000 people are succumbing to COVID-19 each day. The United States will surpass the 200,000-fatality milestone by mid-month.

At a candid moment that put her in bad stead with the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, warned early in August, “to everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus. If you’re in multigenerational households, and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or your city, you need to consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your households with comorbidities.”

Specifically, rural regions in states like Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota are being identified as new hot spots. Still, due to a lack of infrastructure and accurate reporting, the scope of the outbreaks remains challenging to estimate. The positivity rate for these states ranges from 13.6 to 22.2 percent, indicating a significant unidentified community transmission.

Meatpacking plants are notorious for COVID-19 infections, and Iowa counties with the highest rates of infections are also home to these economic centers of rural food processing. Workers in these plants and their families are facing the difficult decision to send their children to school.

Dr. Megan Srinivas, an infectious disease specialist from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the Daily Nonpareil, a local newspaper that serves Council Bluffs, Iowa and the southwest counties, “meatpacking plants present a unique challenge to fighting any pandemic including COVID-19. Plants represent a mixing pot. COVID-19 doesn’t recognize county lines, and carpooling across counties is commonplace for these workers.”

Despite the attempt by the media to racialize the pandemic, more conscientious researchers are identifying the connection between socioeconomic index and rates of COVID-19 infection. These plants are run by the labor power of migrants and refugees—African and Central American workers—a high-risk population already given the predilection with poverty and health comorbidities of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. These same low-income laborers live in multigenerational families who depend on the paychecks that keep the lights on at night.

The vulnerability of these areas is compounded by the returning university students who will usually double the population of small towns and cities during the academic year. These students also provide critical economic stimulus to small businesses and commerce that barely eke out a living and have faced significant financial hardship during the last seven months of the pandemic.

Many of the state’s many small colleges are in proximity to the meatpacking and processing plants. Prestige Foods sits on 160 acres of Iowa farmland with over five miles of conveyor belts, 100,000 square feet of kill floor, and 20,000 square feet of freezers. Waterloo-Cedar Falls metro area is also home to a Tyson Fresh Meats plant. The Waterloo, Fort Dodge, and Eagle Grove school districts are home to several small communities in driving vicinity.

Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City—accounting for almost 70,000 university students—are within an hour or two of each other, creating a vibrant network of communities perfect for a highly contagious pathogen.

According to the Iowa public health department, Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa, was on a seven-day streak of triple-digit increase of new cases. Since the first day of classes on August 24, there have been at least 1,142 cases of COVID-19 just at the university, including 220 new cases last Wednesday alone. University officials have set aside close to 300 rooms at residence halls for quarantine and isolation purposes. Protests and sickouts have ensued with students challenging the university’s deadly decisions to hold in-person classes.

Story County, home to Iowa State University, has a positivity rate of more than 41 percent. As of August 31, an additional 503 people tested positive. Black Hawk County, home to the University of Northern Iowa, ranks fourth out of 99 counties with the highest COVID-19 cases.

What is happening in Iowa is only the worst example of a nationwide process which has seen many other states and universities become flashpoints over the last month, from the University of North Carolina to Notre Dame to the University of Alabama and numerous colleges in Arizona. Some 25,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported at colleges and universities across 37 states.

The leading US epidemiologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, publicly urged university officials not to send infected students home. “Keep them at the university in a place that’s sequestered enough from other students. But don’t have them go home, because they could be spreading it in their home state,” he told NBC’s Today show on Wednesday. It begs the question, “why were they placed in this predicament in the first place?”

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told Bloomberg, “It’s going to be kind of this rolling fire, with certain flare-ups that occur in different parts of the country at different times. This is a virus that’s established itself into the population.” This assessment is true as far as it goes, but virus conflagration is by political choice and not by mere accident or incompetence.

That is why Dr. Scott Atlas has gained the ear of President Trump, who normally scorns the advice of scientists. Dr. Atlas’s credentials, unfortunately, do not include the study of infectious diseases or public health, which accounts for his popularity at the White House.

A senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, Dr. Atlas has been pressing to institute a broad policy of herd immunity disguised hypocritically as a policy focused on protecting a small population of at-risk individuals to minimize the risk to the rest of the population. “Once you get to a certain number—we use the word herd—once you get to a certain number, it’s going to go away,” Trump told Fox News on Monday.

This means a murderous pogrom in which state officials decry the impossibility of mandates, dashboards and statistics are manipulated, medical and public health guidelines change to suit political expediency, all in the name of the financial markets that have seen a return to their pre-pandemic highs. Every effort to save lives, protect communities, and create a cohesive response to COVID-19 is thwarted, and in this regard, the drive to open schools is the reverse of the lockdowns that prevented so many infections and saved countless thousands of lives.

Threat of a US-led military intervention in Venezuela grows as Guaidó’s coalition splits

Andrea Lobo

As the December 6 legislative elections approach in Venezuela, the Trump administration is escalating its threats of military aggression to overthrow the government of President Nicolas Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

This danger has been increased by the deepening domestic political crisis in the US in the lead-up to the November presidential elections. Meanwhile, appeals by Maduro for a rapprochement with Washington and the Venezuelan right have only emboldened imperialism.

Divisions within Venezuela’s US-backed right-wing opposition, moreover, have only made the situation more explosive. Juan Guaidó—recognized as the “interim president” by Washington, the European Union and their allies—could lose control of his main political platform, the National Assembly, after the December elections.

While Guaidó is boycotting the elections, Maduro has raised the stakes in this regard by announcing that the PSUV-controlled National Constituent Assembly—created in 2017 to sideline the opposition-controlled National Assembly—would cease to operate next year.

Exasperated by the failure of Guaidó to instigate a military overthrow of Maduro, and fearful of growing mass opposition from below, Guaidó’s coalition is breaking apart. Last weekend, the former vice-presidential candidate María Corina Machado broke with Guaidó for even negotiating with the Maduro government and not pursuing “a unity to oust Maduro and his regime in the shortest time possible through a national and international operation.” She has long been a creature of US intelligence and an advocate of a US military invasion.

Then, on Wednesday, former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles announced that his Justice First Party, one of the three larger opposition parties, will participate in the legislative elections, declaring: “We are not going to hand over the National Assembly to Maduro as a gift.”

Capriles is believed to have negotiated the pardoning of 110 opposition figures, some in prison and others in exile. This followed an initial pardoning of legislator Juan Requesens, accused of participating in a failed drone assassination attempt against Maduro in August 2018.

Another figure pardoned was Freddy Guevara, an opposition politician who was granted asylum in the Chilean embassy in November 2017, shortly after he proclaimed the goal of “the Chilean arrangement with what happened to Allende and Chile’s reconstruction afterwards,” i.e., a CIA-orchestrated coup to murder Maduro and install a fascist military dictatorship modeled on that of Augusto Pinochet.

Most media outlets claim that these pardons are nothing more than an appeal to sections of the opposition to participate in the December elections and undermine the efforts by Washington to delegitimize it. However, this assumes that Maduro is some implacable foe of US imperialism.

On the contrary, the Maduro government, as a representative of a section of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, which is entirely dependent on US and European markets and capital, has repeatedly sought a deal. Earlier this year, Maduro said to the Washington Post that “a bonanza could be waiting for U.S. oil companies” if Trump lifted sanctions and recognized his government.

Maduro—and Hugo Chávez before him—speaks for a faction of the ruling elite that hopes to use its suppression of the class struggle and close economic ties with other major economies like Russia, China and Iran, in order to secure concessions from US and European capital.

The pardons constitute the latest olive branch extended by Maduro to Washington as desperation grows in Caracas from the deepening economic and social crisis, worsened by US oil sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The virus is spreading out of control across Venezuela. The government is reporting widespread “community transmission” and more than 1,000 new cases daily, reaching a total of 48,883 infections. The government has recognized 398 COVID-19 deaths, while sources tied to Guaidó claim the death toll is 778.

The health care system was already collapsing before the pandemic. US sanctions had deprived Venezuela of the dollars needed for essential imports like medicines and medical equipment, adding to years of social austerity by the Maduro government and the migration of the majority of doctors, according to medical associations.

In response to growing class tensions, Caracas has turned increasingly to brutal repression and attacks against democratic rights to quell opposition from the working class.

Repressive operations involving agents of the Special Action Forces (FAES) was confirmed by the Attorney General Tarek William Saab himself when he charged two FAES officials with the killing of two journalists during a raid on a local station of Guacamaya TV in the Zulia state. While Saab sought to present the killers as rogues and “infiltrators,” there are numerous other reports of extrajudicial killings of journalists and protesters in slums.

All appeals to Washington, however, have only led to more aggressive preparations and actual attempts to overthrow Maduro via military intervention. The pandemic crisis has only increased US concerns that its geopolitical rivals, chiefly China, are increasing their influence in Latin America at the expense of US imperialism.

The Pentagon is currently overseeing the largest US military deployment in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama, sending dozens of warships, helicopters, patrol aircraft and thousands of troops to the Caribbean in a supposed “anti-drug” mission after falsely claiming that Venezuela bore major responsibility for the flow of narcotics to the US.

On August 28, Rear Adm. Andrew Tiongson, the US Southern Command’s director of operations, said in a press conference that the deployment in the Caribbean seeks to oppose “criminal opportunists who have no regard for human life and are intent on making a profit off their poisonous and illicit trade.” This is nonsense. The bulk of drug trafficking from Latin America to the US passes through the territories of Colombia and Central America, ruled by right-wing governments aligned with Washington.

Tiongson then added cryptically: “And we, and we have also just, we want to always support what the Venezuelan people need, which is their right in their democratic government to be installed. So, we are watching that closely and, again, that is part of our fight, if you will.”

On August 17, Colombian president Iván Duque, Trump’s closest ally in the region, announced together with US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Southern Command chief, Adm. Craig Faller, a $5 billion “Colombia Grows” initiative, centered on opposing “drug trafficking.” Duque, whose government is facing a deep political crisis, specifically referred to “ending the usurpation of power in Venezuela.”

Since the announcement, Duque has bypassed opposition in the Colombian Supreme Court and Congress to authorize the presence of US troops in the country, which was followed by the return of a team of US Security Force Assistance Brigades.

The US-financed Plan Colombia to support the Colombian ruling elite’s war against peasants, guerrillas and, ostensibly, drug cartels has resulted in a dramatic increase in cocaine trafficking, more than 7 million internally displaced people, countless massacres by the military and paramilitary forces, and an estimated 8 million hectares of land stolen from peasants and concentrated in the hands of landowners that constitute a major constituency of the Duque government.

Among other ominous signs of a foreign intervention, Adm. Remigio Ceballes, commander of the National Armed Forces of Venezuela, stated on August 22, that “International intelligence organizations allied with Venezuela have informed us that Colombia is preparing an aggression.” Then, La Política Online indicated that Mexican military sources have suggested that 9,500 US troops will be redeployed from Germany for operations in Latin America.

Support for US aggression against Venezuela is bipartisan. At a July 27 hearing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “Our policy is not to negotiate anything but [Maduro’s] departure.” The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, replied, “There is bipartisan support for the policy toward Venezuela, but its focus has left millions of Venezuelans suffering.”

If anything, the Democrats are demanding a more aggressive confrontation globally against Russia and China. On Wednesday, Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden told NBC that “Cuba along with Russia and China has contributed to the political impasse in Venezuela as well. What’s the president doing?” He added: “Nicolas Maduro has gotten stronger … The country is no closer to a free election.”

India sets world record for daily coronavirus infections

Wasantha Rupasinghe

India reported a disastrous 83,883 new COVID-19 infections on Thursday—the highest daily total of any country since the pandemic began. When taken together with a death toll increasing by approximately 1,000 per day, it is manifestly evident that the Indian ruling elite has failed abysmally to contain the pandemic.

The ill-prepared, ten-week nationwide lockdown imposed by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, beginning on March 25, had devastating social consequences for hundreds of millions of workers and their families, while failing to halt the pandemic’s spread. This was above all because the ruling elite failed to use the time gained by the lockdown to invest in the country’s chronically underfunded health care system, and establish a strong network of testing and contact tracing to combat the virus. Additionally, it refused to provide and organize anything beyond token financial and social support to impoverished workers and rural toilers.

The central and state governments subsequently exploited the social crisis to launch a back-to-work campaign that began in late April and went into high gear at the start of June, so as to enable big business to resume raking in large profits.

The return to work has triggered a sharp and ever-expanding rise in infections, with the number of confirmed cases rising by almost 500,000 in June, 1.1 million in July, and just shy of 2 million in August.

Even as the spread of the virus continues to accelerate, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government have made it clear there will not be another countrywide lockdown. In fact, the government is continuing to ease restrictions.

Last week it unveiled its Unlock 4.0 plan, which is now being implemented with the support of the state governments. Under Unlock 4.0, poorly ventilated subway trains will be permitted to run for the first time since March starting from September 7. As of September 21, sports, social, and cultural gatherings with a maximum of 100 attendees will be allowed. The guidelines issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs say that states are no longer permitted to impose lockdowns outside of containment zones without the Centre's permission, a provision that all but rules out widespread lockdowns ever being re-imposed. In addition, state governments are prohibited from sealing their borders.

As governments move to abandon the last remnants of any public health restrictions, active coronavirus infections across India have risen above 800,000. According to official figures, which are widely considered to be a vast underestimation, 68,584 Indians have died from the virus. On Thursday, the authorities reported 1,043 deaths in the preceding 24 hours.

In August alone, India reported close to 2 million COVID-19 cases, which is the highest number any country has recorded during any month since the pandemic erupted in China last January. August also saw a surge in death from the virus with 28,859 fatalities, a 50 percent jump from the previous month's toll.

Like the Trump administration, Indian authorities have tried to explain away the exponential growth in COVID-19 cases by attributing it to increased testing. While it is true India has dramatically scaled up its testing over the past two months, its testing rate still remains one of the lowest in the world. As of September 1, India had performed a mere 32.13 tests per one thousand people. This is less than half the rate of South Africa, and eight times lower than the US.

Medical experts have repeatedly stressed that the official figures only provide a pale reflection of the pandemic’s true impact. In an interview with the website Wire, Professor Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, noted on Monday that the true number of infections could be as high as 30 million. "We are only picking up about 70,000-80,000 or 15 percent of that and missing 85 percent,” he commented. In the “days and weeks ahead” the “number of infections is going to rise.”

Pointing to “India's under-investment in its health system for decades,” Professor Jha added, “The cost of that is really catching up to us. We don’t have primary care … (due to) inadequate investment from the government. ... And the cost of that will be borne by the people.”

Successive governments, including those led by the Congress Party and supported by India’s twin Stalinist parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Party of India, limited health care spending to 1.5 percent of GDP or less.

The entire ruling elite has now embraced the murderous policy of “herd immunity,” which allows the virus to spread unchecked with the claim that eventually it will exhaust itself by running out of people to infect. Advocates of this policy, including senior government advisors, have openly admitted that this will result in a death toll in the millions. However, the ruling class considers this a price worth paying to protect the profits and wealth of India’s billionaires and corporate elite.

The virus has spread so widely that infections have even been detected on the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands (A&N), which are located over 1,000 kilometres from the mainland. At least 10 infections have been recorded among members of local tribes, who live in extreme poverty and isolation and are thus very vulnerable to the virus.

The pandemic has also put millions of patients at risk who suffer from other major diseases, like diabetes and heart conditions. Sameer Gupta, an interventional cardiologist at the Metro Hospitals and Heart Institute in Delhi, told the IndiaSpend website on August 26 that COVID-19 is damaging patients’ hearts, and those with a pre-existing heart condition are especially at risk of succumbing to the disease. He also stressed that “recovered” COVID-19 patients are returning to hospitals with stress cardiomyopathy—a temporary weakening of the heart muscle—and myocarditis, a weakness of the heart muscle due to inflammation.

The ruling class, however, is much more concerned by the threat to their wealth from the deepening economic crisis, which Modi is proposing to overcome by implementing a fresh wave of investor-friendly “reforms,” including the gutting of labour laws and a fire-sale of public sector enterprises. Data released by the National Statistical Office (NSO) on August 31 showed that India’s GDP fell by 23.9 percent in the April-June quarter. This was the largest decline of any major economy, according to Bloomberg.

India’s 28 state governments have slashed spending and, as their financial positions worsen, many are delaying paying state government workers. According to one estimate, the shortfall in revenue from the Goods and Service Tax (GST) has reached 2.35 trillion rupees ($US 32.18 billion). In a calculated move designed to enforce spending cuts, the BJP government has withheld paying the states their designated share of GST revenues and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has told them to make up for the shortfalls by borrowing from the Reserve Bank of India under its “special borrowing window.”

Several states, including many led by the opposition parties, have rejected the government’s proposal, urging the central government to borrow the money and pass it on to the states. However this dispute is resolved, the revenue shortfall will result in increased burdens being placed on the workers and rural toilers through intensified austerity measures.

Conditions for the vast majority of workers are already disastrous. Immediately after Modi declared the COVID-19 lockdown in March, more than 100 million workers in the so-called informal sector, mostly migrant workers from far-away rural districts, lost their jobs overnight. Many relied on food handouts from charities to survive because the government provided them with little more than famine rations.

Workers employed on a permanent basis have also not been spared. New data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent body that measures and tracks economic indicators, estimated that 18.9 million permanent jobs were lost between April and July.

Despite the escalating social disaster produced by the spreading of the virus throughout the country, India’s mainstream media is giving it little attention. Instead, it has focused on the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput, a famous Bollywood actor, which took place in mid-June. Media outlets have also intensified their efforts to whip up a bellicose Indian nationalist atmosphere over the ongoing India-China tensions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto border between the two countries.

The corporate media’s indifference to the mass suffering and death is in line with the callous and ignorant attitude of the Indian ruling class as a whole. This is true not only of Modi’s ruling Hindu supremacist BJP but also of the opposition parties, including Congress and the various regional and caste-based bourgeois parties.