Heathrow airport ground staff given ultimatum: Accept pay cuts or face redundancy

Margot Miller

Frontline staff at Britain’s Heathrow Airport have been told they face the stark choice of either accepting pay cuts of between 15 and 20 percent or suffering job losses. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, these savage ultimatums have become the new normal in industrial relations.

On September 2, Heathrow issued formal section 188 notices, which means that after a 45-day consultation period the company can fire and rehire its workforce on company terms. This will affect half the airport’s ground staff of 4,700, including engineers and security workers. Demands also include the end of the workers’ final salary pension scheme.

Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd is owned by shareholders including Spanish multinational Ferrovial, Qatar Holdings, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, the UK Universities Superannuation Scheme and Alinda Capital. The company says it will “guarantee a job” for whomever wishes to remain. Staff, however, could lose up to £10,000 a year. How far Heathrow is prepared to go in cutting pay is indicated by a comment in the Independent, which report of management’s plans, “No one’s salary will fall below the London Living Wage, it said.” The London Living Wage is set at just £10.75.

British Airways planes at London Heathrow Airport (Photo: Ken Iwelumo/Wikipedia)

Heathrow is London’s busiest airport, but with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic travel and tourism ground almost to a standstill.

A spokesperson for Heathrow stated, “COVID-19 has decimated the aviation industry, which has led to an unprecedented drop in passenger numbers at Heathrow, costing the airport over £1bn since the start of March. Provisional traffic figures for August show passenger numbers remain 82 percent down on last year and we must urgently adapt to this new reality.”

In March, one runway and two terminals were closed, and most flights were grounded. Most workers were retained at that point under the government’s job furlough scheme, which ends in November. In June, the company launched a voluntary redundancy scheme, after slashing managerial roles by a third.

Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost across the travel and tourism industries in the recent period. This trend began before the pandemic, which has acted to accelerate efforts to cut costs in an increasingly competitive global market.

The threat to jobs and pay cuts at Heathrow follows the recent announcement at Gatwick, London’s other main airport, of its intention to make a quarter of its workforce redundant. This amounts to 600 ground staff posts after a reduction in passenger numbers for August of 80 percent.

Gatwick, which is owned by VINCI Airports and Global Infrastructure Partners, announced 200 job losses in March and took out a £300 million bank loan, but later said it needed to reduce costs further. Chief Executive Stewart Wingate blamed the cuts on the “devastating impact” of the coronavirus on the airline and travel industries. At the moment, with 80 percent of the Gatwick staff on the government furlough scheme, only the north terminal is in operation.

In every case, the role of the trade unions is to push through redundancies and facilitate concessions, so long as they receive a place at the negotiating table.

Heathrow had been in negotiations with the Unite union for four months before the latest announcement. Unite official Wayne King said the airport’s plans would “further undermine confidence in the industry… Our members have worked tirelessly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.” Appealing to Heathrow management to continue “already difficult negotiations” he added, “To conduct industrial relations via the media in such a brutish manner is designed to create fear and panic in a group of key workers.”

The central pre-occupation of the union bureaucracy is not the interests of workers but to defend the interests of the aviation industry, the auto industry, the aerospace industry, etc. King added: “At a time when Unite is working hard to persuade the government to follow the lead of other European nations and provide specific financial support to the aviation sector to ensure that the industry and workers can survive the pandemic and thrive in the future …”

Unite regional manager, Jamie Major, said of the Gatwick job losses, “This is a bitter blow for the workers and once again highlights the chronic failure of the government to support the aviation sector, despite promises way back in March that it would do so.”

Offering to help facilitate the attacks, he continued, “Unite will be entering into formal negotiations with Gatwick Airport to ensure that redundancies are minimised and that all redundancy procedures are fair and fully transparent.”

Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) foisted a sell-out on pilots at British Airways (BA). The union recommended its members accept a deal in which 270 of BA’s 4,300 pilots would lose their jobs. The pay of the remaining workforce will be slashed immediately by 20 percent and fall to an 8 percent cut in two years and only return to where it is now at some undefined future point.

BA has also issued an ultimatum to cabin crew and ground staff to either accept redundancy, or a wage cut and inferior terms and conditions. According to Unite, some workers could face cuts in pay of up to 43 percent.

Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey pleaded with BA chief executive Alex Cruz to work with Unite to ensure the continued profitability for the company. In mid-August, Cruz hailed the announced “significant progress” in talks with the unions. This is as more than 6,500 staff have already lost their jobs, including 4,500 cabin crew based at Heathrow and Gatwick, as the company seeks 12,000 redundancies.

Like other airlines internationally, BA, with the backing of the unions, is using the pandemic to justify long-planned cuts in jobs, pay and conditions, to gain the edge against international competitors.

Just weeks before, BALPA reached an agreement with Ryanair involving a 20 percent pay cut beginning in July. The sell-out deal means pilots have to work to more flexible rota and leave arrangements, to the detriment of their well-being. Again, pay cuts are supposed to be gradually restored over four years. BALPA sold the pay cuts on the basis of saving 260 pilot jobs. However, 70 of these posts are still under threat if Ryanair closes its bases at Leeds/Bradford, Prestwick, Bournemouth and Southend as proposed.

In addition to slashing their workers’ jobs and pay, the airlines are agitating for a reckless opening-up of international travel to facilitate their return to profit-making.

The air transport industry has not seen the recovery in passenger traffic it hoped for since lockdown ended, aggravated by the government’s imposition of 14-day quarantine measures for travellers returning from virus “hotspots.” This has deterred potential holidaymakers from making bookings, leading to flights being cancelled during the peak summer holiday season.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Heathrow Airport Chief Executive John Holland-Kaye urged the government to introduce swab testing for coronavirus of incoming passengers as an alternative to quarantining. An enthusiastic backer of the criminally irresponsible back to work drive, Holland-Kaye warns that UK business is in danger of falling behind its rivals.

“This [swab testing at airports] is starting to get their [Germany and France’s] economies moving again and, in fact, both Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle airports carried more passengers over the last few months than Heathrow,” he said.

The interests of airline workers are diametrically opposed to those of the airline owners and chief executives, whose only interest in running these companies is the extraction of profit—whatever the costs to their employees. Unite, Balpa and the rest of the trade unions have proved again and again that they stand on the side of the employers.

Workers must break from these rotten organisations and form independent rank-and-file committees, in alliance with airline workers internationally, to fight back against the onslaught on their livelihoods and safety.

COVID-19 outbreaks spread within a week of England and Wales schools reopening

Tony Robson

It has taken less than a week for the Johnson government’s criminal reopening of schools in England and Wales to place the lives of educators, children, and the wider community in danger.

There is virtually no part of the UK that has been left unscathed, with teachers and pupils testing positive in both primary and secondary school settings. On Monday, the Department of Education confirmed at least 60 outbreaks.

Schools in Scotland returned three weeks earlier, leading to outbreaks that were a warning of what was to come that went unheeded. According to the campaign group Boycott Return To Unsafe Schools (BRTUS) reported outbreaks at schools across the UK (England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland) stood at 173 for the period from August 12, 2020 to September 7, 2020. BRTUS started to compile a database during the national lockdown when schools were open only to the children of key workers and then covering the period from June 1 when schools were partially reopened. The cases of school-related COVID-19 outbreaks even with limited numbers present and where social distancing applied went largely unreported officially and by the media.

The growing list of affected schools includes Castle Rock secondary school in Coalville, Leicestershire, visited by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on August 26. Johnson was filmed sitting relaxed on the floor of the school gym next to children to instil the idea that schools were “COVID secure.” After one staff member tested positive, six tutor groups and two PE classes were instructed on Monday to stay at home and await further guidance.

Last week, with re-openings commencing in England and Wales, the propaganda offensive went into overdrive to overcome widely expressed scepticism that measures were in place to protect children and staff. Their mistrust was also founded on the Johnson government’s long record of criminality, which has resulted in the UK having a higher per capita death rate than the US and the worst excess death rate in Europe. Among the preventable deaths have been tens of thousands of the most vulnerable in care homes across the UK.

The defence of the indefensible school re-openings also involved a sordid campaign of emotional blackmail choreographed by the TV media to inundate the public with the images of children naturally relieved and happy to be ending a long period of isolation. This was cynically used to delegitimise opposition to unsafe school re-openings on the grounds that such sentiments were antithetical to the well-being and educational needs of children.

Even as new outbreaks emerge, the guidance of Public Health England and its counterpart in Wales regarding schools with cases of COVID-19 has been to oppose any systematic containment measures—in line with broader government policy.

The number of schools that have been closed due to outbreaks are in the minority. The 60 reported outbreaks in England and Wales include the Samuel Ward Academy in Haverhill, in Suffolk, where five teachers had tested positive for the virus, and two secondary schools. This included Trinity Church of England in Lewisham, South London, which had delayed its re-opening until September 7 after a teacher tested positive.

However, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire—the fourth largest city in England—none of the five schools where outbreaks have been identified have closed. Rather, children and staff of the respective year “bubbles” to which the individual who has tested positive belongs have been sent home to isolate for 14 days. This is the case at Hillsborough Primary School and Chaucer Secondary School in the Parsons Cross area of the city, which are run by Tapton Academy Trust. Abbeyfield Primary in Pitsmoor has reported a child testing positive with only pupils and staff in that year group sent home to self-isolate.

The two other schools affected in the city are King Edward VII, with a child in Year 8 and one in Year 11 testing positive, and a fee-paying private school, Birkdale, in which a sixth form student tested positive. Only the year groups concerned have gone into self-isolation. This leaves thousands of school children and education staff in settings which are anything but “COVID secure.”

According to the Guardian, an estimated 200 students and 21 staff in Liverpool are self-isolating after five schools in the city reported positive cases. The same holds true for other areas in the north and the Midlands, including Middlesbrough, Bradford, Leeds, Lancashire, Manchester, and Nottingham, as well as Leicester.

The concept of “year bubbles”—officially of up to 240 pupils—cannot prevent transmission. It is a policy premised on the acceptance that schools do not have adequate facilities to ensure social distancing and designed to prevent the closure of schools when the inevitable occurs and a staff member or pupil is infected. It is a policy not of containment but controlled spread—of herd immunity.

The term “government safety guidelines” should by now be viewed as an oxymoron. A prime minister who has likened the government’s local lockdowns in response to the upsurge of a deadly virus to the arcade game “Whack-a-Mole” does not deserve to be taken seriously, other than as a threat to public health. He oozes contempt for the working class, which has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic both in terms of illness and death.

The profit and death calculus of capitalism means that no extra funding is to be provided that would enable containment measures or disrupt the production of profits. Parents are to be forced back to work in unsafe environments and schools are to function as glorified child-minding services in which the spread of the virus is not prevented, but only “managed.” It is noteworthy that the return to school coincided with a second government propaganda offensive calling workers back to their offices.

The response of the education unions to the crisis that teachers, school staff, parents and their children have been plunged into has underlined their refusal to wage any kind of opposition.

Kevin Courtney, the supposedly “left” joint secretary of the National Education Union, has couched his comments since the reopening purely within the framework of managing the “disruption” caused—not stopping the spread of the virus and the threat to life. It was on this basis that he made a lame appeal for additional funds.

“This should include employing more teachers and looking for additional space to seek to minimise disruption as well as ensuring IT access for children and young people who need it when they have to be at home,” he said.

At no point are the government or the interests of the wealthy elite it serves to be challenged by the unions, even when they produce a homicidal policy. The unions have no independent standpoint based upon the interests of the working class.

This underscores the importance of the Education Rank and File Safety Committee launched by the Socialist Equality Party last Saturday in an online forum to open up a new path of struggle.

The Committee’s appeal states: “The catastrophic impact of the pandemic is fundamentally a social and political issue, not simply a medical one. The technology and medical expertise exist to contain the virus, but under capitalism everything is subordinated to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite. The demands advanced by the SEP are not based on what the corporations and the politicians claim is affordable, but what is necessary to protect the lives and well-being of children, teachers and educators, and the entire working class.”

Saudi regime declares Khashoggi assassination case “closed forever” after sham verdict

Bill Van Auken

In the consummation of a judicial travesty, a Saudi court Monday announced the commutation of five death sentences previously handed down in connection with grisly October 2, 2018 assassination of dissident journalist and former regime insider Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. Instead, the five who were sentence to die were given 20-year prison sentences, while three others were sentenced to between seven and ten years.

The Saudi prosecutor’s office issued a statement saying that the announcement of the sentences “closes the case forever.”

This is despite the fact that no one who ordered and directed the assassination—including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the oil kingdom’s de facto ruler—has been held accountable. The entire trial was held in secret, with both the press and the public barred, and now not even the names of those sentenced have been made public.

Presumably the eight who are being sent to prison were members of the 15-member death squad sent to Istanbul to murder Khashoggi, though there is no way to know if even this is true. This squad included Saudi intelligence operatives and military officers, bin Salman’s chief bodyguard and a forensics specialist who came equipped with a bone saw.

The commutation of the death sentences came after Khashoggi’s sons said in May that they had “pardoned” his killers, a statement apparently secured through a combination of the monarchy’s threats and bribes.

Turkish bugs planted in the consulate recorded Khashoggi’s horrific last moments after he entered the consulate for the purpose of obtaining divorce papers so he could marry his Turkish fiancée. This included his being physically subdued, injected with a drug and then suffocated. The tapes, provided to the CIA as well as UN human rights investigators, included the Saudi forensic expert telling his cohorts, “I often play music when I’m cutting cadavers. Sometimes I have a coffee and a cigar at hand.” He added, “It is the first time in my life that I’ve had to cut pieces on the ground—even if you are a butcher and want to cut, he hangs the animal up to do it.”

None of this stopped the sham court in Riyadh from ruling that Khashoggi’s killing was not premeditated.

Exonerated at the outset of the trial were two Saudi officials who are known to have played leading roles in the murder operation. Saud al-Qahtani, formerly bin Salman’s most influential adviser, was identified as the ringleader in Khashoggi’s killing by the CIA, which established that he had exchanged 11 text messages with the Crown Prince immediately before and after the murder. Turkish intelligence, meanwhile, reported that al-Qahtani made a Skype call to the Istanbul consulate in which he insulted Khashoggi and ordered the death squad to “bring me the head of the dog.” The Saudi prosecutor said al-Qahtani “was not charged because of lack of evidence against him.”

Also cleared was Ahmed al-Assiri, a former deputy head of intelligence, who was initially charged with giving the order to dispatch the squad to Istanbul. The prosecutor found that this “was not proved.”

The principal culprit who was never brought into the dock was Prince bin Salman himself. The CIA issued a finding that concluded with “medium to high confidence” that the prince, who rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist, had ordered the killing.

Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings who investigated the Khashoggi case, also issued an investigative report in June 2019 that found “credible evidence” that the prince and other senior Saudi officials were responsible for the killing. She tweeted on Monday that the verdicts “carry no legal or moral legitimacy,” and that the trial was “neither fair, nor just, or transparent.” She added that “the responsibility of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not even been addressed.”

Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, denounced the Saudi court’s ruling Monday as a “complete mockery of justice.” The prosecutor’s closing of the case “forever,” she added, left the essential facts of Khashoggi’s murder hidden. “Who planned it, where is the body?” she asked. “These are the most important questions that remain totally unanswered.”

Turkey also condemned the verdict, with a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saying that the final verdict “fell short of meeting the expectations of Turkey and the international community.”

Ankara is holding a separate trial and has indicted 20 Saudi citizens on murder charges, though none of them are in Turkish custody.

While the US government issued no immediate reaction to the new verdicts, when the initial verdicts, including the five death sentences, were handed down in December, a State Department official called them “an important step in holding those responsible for the terrible crime accountable.”

The muted or non-existent response of Washington and other Western capitals, as well as of the major media, to the travesty in Saudi Arabia stands in stark contrast to their frenzied reaction to the non-fatal poisoning last month of the right-wing Russian politician Alexei Navalny. While in the first case there is ample evidence that the Saudi regime and its chief, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were directly responsible for the brazen murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi, who was at the time working as a columnist for the Washington Post, no sanctions whatsoever have been imposed on the monarchical regime. In the case of Navalny, who was not killed, Western politicians and media immediately declared, without presenting a shred of evidence, that President Vladimir Putin ordered the poisoning and are demanding sanctions against and confrontation with Russia.

The source of this discrepancy is clear. Saudi Arabia has served as a lynchpin of reaction and US imperialist domination in the Arab world, under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, for three-quarters of a century. It is now an ally of both the US and Israel in an anti-Iranian axis that is pushing the region toward a catastrophic new war. It is also the number one market for US arms exports, with Trump using his first trip abroad as president to fly to the kingdom and sign a weapons deal touted as worth $110 billion.

Washington turns a blind eye not only to the Saudi regime’s responsibility for the Khashoggi assassination, but to even more grotesque crimes, including the mass beheading of the regime’s opponents, including children. Meanwhile, both the Obama and Trump administrations have provided indispensable support for Riyadh’s near-genocidal war against Yemen, which has directly claimed over 100,000 lives, while bringing fully half of the country’s 28 million people to the brink of starvation.

Nonetheless, the assassination of Khashoggi, who only fled Saudi Arabia after Prince Mohammed bin Salman began a purge in 2017 of prominent businessmen and even members of the royal family, had an undeniable political significance. The World Socialist Web Site stated in the immediate aftermath of his killing and dismemberment that it was: “emblematic of a sinister shift in world politics, in which such heinous crimes are becoming more and more common and accepted. It recalls the conditions that existed in the darkest days of the 1930s, when fascist and Stalinist death squads hunted down and murdered socialists and other opponents of Hitler and Stalin throughout Europe.”

The acceptance of this crime has only deepened with the passage of two years. Riyadh has been chosen to host the G20 summit in November, when every major capitalist leader in the world will clasp the bloody hand and accept the hospitality of the royal assassin Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. All of them are prepared to carry out such crimes, and worse, against the working class and socialist opponents of the capitalist system.

Wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos surpasses $200 billion

Tom Carter

On August 26, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, crossed over $200 billion ($200,000,000,000).

The net worth of this individual human being is now roughly equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of the entire nation of Greece ($218 billion), which in turn represents the collective labor of millions of workers over an entire year. For comparison, the Ukraine has a GDP of $131 billion, Hungary has a GDP of $157 billion, and Sri Lanka has a GDP of $89 billion.

The personal wealth of Bezos is also higher than the entire government budgets of Austria ($201.9 billion, according to 2017 figures), Turkey ($190.4 billion), Argentina ($161 billion), Israel ($102 billion), and Poland ($102 billion).

The scale of Bezos’s wealth is not even the most startling fact—what is most striking is the speed with which he has accumulated it. Since the start of the year, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos has increased his wealth by about $87 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By comparison, this is on the scale of the entire national budgets of Iran ($86 billion), Iraq ($76 billion), New Zealand ($72 billion), and Egypt ($63 billion).

The wealth that Bezos has appropriated in eight months—$87 billion—exceeds the total combined annual national budgets of Libya (roughly $22.3 billion), Armenia ($2.9 billion), North Korea ($3.3 billion), Afghanistan ($6.6 billion), Georgia ($4.8 billion), El Salvador ($6.8 billion), Honduras ($5.1 billion), Turkmenistan ($4.7 billion), Zimbabwe ($4.8 billion), Nicaragua ($4.1 billion), Uganda ($5.3 billion), and Cambodia ($4.7 billion), and Jordan ($11.8 billion).

With wealth on this scale, Bezos has taken a large bite out of the total resources available to human civilization on Planet Earth. He is not just a country unto himself—he is many countries. The sum of $202 billion is the equivalent of the combined national budgets of 118 entire countries. This is a personal fortune unprecedented in modern history.

The comedian John Oliver once described the wealth accumulated by Bezos as a “computer glitch in capitalism.” In one sense, this quip captures the irrationality associated with the incomprehensible number of zeros that have been added to his account, as if by some sort of programming error at the bank. But it is not the case that the Bezos’s wealth is developing outside or in opposition to the foreseeable operation of capitalism in the current epoch. On the contrary, his obscene levels of wealth are a particularly concentrated expression of those processes.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the world’s 500 richest people have accumulated an additional $809 billion so far this year, increasing their total wealth by around 14 percent. This includes Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk, whose worth topped $100 billion on Friday. By comparison, the entire military budget of Russia, which is so often accused of “meddling” and “interfering” with US interests, is around $50 billion.

“The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism,” Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), at a time when the revenues of the giant conglomerates were measured in the mere millions of dollars. Amazon’s total market capitalization is now $1.703 trillion.

Analyzing the latest statistics on the emergence and concentration of monopolies in 1916, Lenin wrote that “a very important feature of capitalism in its highest stage of development is so-called combination of production, that is to say, the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry, which either represent the consecutive stages in the processing of raw materials (for example, the smelting of iron ore into pig-iron, the conversion of pig-iron into steel, and then, perhaps, the manufacture of steel goods)—or are auxiliary to one another (for example, the utilisation of scrap, or of by-products, the manufacture of packing materials, etc.).”

Amazon is an expression of this process of “combination” on a scale unimaginable in Lenin’s time. “Amazon has been obsessed with vertical integration since its inception,” wrote Enrique Dans, professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, in a blog post. “After establishing very high levels of operational efficiency in its warehouses, Amazon then offered companies the chance to store their products there, as well as using the company’s picking and packing services. Finally, Amazon began…developing its own fleets of vans and personnel. Offering its own logistics services is simply another logical step in Amazon’s vertical integration process.” As of December 2019, Amazon Logistics was already set to surpass delivery volume of FedEx and UPS by 2022.

In addition to Amazon Logistics, the Bezos-Amazon conglomerate, via numerous subsidiaries, has already extended its tentacles into maritime shipping, comic books, the Washington Post, voice-recognizing appliances, fitness watches, cloud storage, health care, banking, communications satellites, home automation, video games, and grocery stores.

Amazon has also been integrating itself into the state apparatus, accepting a $600 million contract from the Central Intelligence Agency, a $10 billion contract from the Department of Defense, and supplying facial recognition software (Amazon Rekognition) to police.

This process of monopolization and “combination” has placed Amazon in a position to leverage huge gains from the overall devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The huge increase in Bezos’s wealth during the pandemic is bound up with the surge in the value of Amazon stock, of which he owns around 54 million shares. At the end of July, in particular, Amazon’s stock skyrocketed after the company reported second quarter results showing soaring cash flow, sales, and income.

During the second quarter of 2020—representing April, May, and June—Amazon reported an increase of net sales of 40 percent, to $88.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with $63.4 billion in second quarter 2019.

The company’s operating income swelled to $5.8 billion, compared with operating income of $3.1 billion over the same period in 2019, and net income increased to $5.2 billion ($10.30 per share), compared with net income of $2.6 billion ($5.22 per share) the same period in 2019.

This is the same period—April, May, and June 2020— that corresponded to a historic catastrophe in the United States and around the world, as work ground to a halt amid the pandemic, hundreds of thousands became ill and tens of thousands lost their lives. Meanwhile, tens of millions lost their jobs, and countless small enterprises were bankrupted. As a primary means of safely obtaining essential goods during the pandemic as they sheltered in their homes, tens of millions of people turned to Amazon.

While many workplaces closed their doors during the pandemic, Amazon insisted on operating at full speed without regard for the pandemic. When it came to personal protective and safety equipment, Bezos told Amazon workers they would have to “wait our turn.” When tens of thousands of workers refused to show up to the warehouses and risk infection, Amazon announced it would simply hire 175,000 more workers (upon which Bezos congratulated himself as a “job creator”).

As of June 22, as the close of the immensely profitably second quarter approached, former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp had counted 1,573 reported COVID-19 cases among Amazon workers. However, since Amazon refused to disclose the actual number of infections, she told the World Socialist Web Site: “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

It is now clearer than ever why Amazon kept workers at their stations during the pandemic without adequate safety measures, even while workers became seriously ill and lost their lives, and even as workers’ anger exploded in protests and walkouts.

Amazon’s CEO, and all of the Wall Street elites whose fingers were in the pie, made a lot of money. Moreover, amid the smoking ruins of the world economy, Amazon now surveys the scene and sees boundless opportunities for further profit. Opportunities loom in every direction. Bloated with cash, it is poised to conquer new territory, crushing weakened and smaller competitors under its weight.

This state of affairs is not lost on Wall Street, as investors swarm to buy Amazon stock, driving the price (and Bezos’s own personal wealth) higher and higher. The dizzying rise in the stock price took it from just over $3,000 a share by the end of July up to $3,400 by the end of August.

This is not some kind of aberration within an otherwise healthy capitalist system; it is capitalism itself, in its final period of decline. Or as Lenin put it: “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”

The Democratic Party—one of the twin parties of the financial oligarchy that promotes militarism and war—is not a vehicle for opposition to capitalism or its particular expression in Amazon and Bezos. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, to cite just one example, raised significant sums for his campaign at a fundraiser in Seattle in November of last year co-hosted by Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky. Tickets ranged between $1,000 and $2,800 per person.

The piling up of obscene fortunes by the world’s top 500 billionaires in the midst of a global pandemic is a prelude to the social revolution of the proletariat around the world, who will not tolerate indefinitely the homicidal and incompetent policies of the financial oligarchy. Workers in every workplace, school, and industry must form squads and battalions of the rank-and-file, including at Amazon itself, to resist deadly working conditions, fight for collective workers’ control, and carry forward the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

“Pandemic be damned”: Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans list reveals billionaire bonanza

Kevin Reed

The American business magazine Forbes published its 39th annual list of the 400 richest people in the country on Tuesday, celebrating the parasitic elite’s total wealth expansion by $240 billion to a record $3.2 trillion over the past year.

While millions of working-class families in the US are facing unemployment, economic ruin, eviction and hunger arising from the deep economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, Forbes introduces its top billionaires list with “Pandemic be damned.” Noting that the stock market has “defied the virus,” Forbes editors write, “Even in these trying times mega-fortunes are still being minted.”

Topping the Forbes list for the third year in a row is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $179 billion. Up from $114 billion in 2019—an increase of 57 percent—Bezos’s increase in personal wealth of $65 billion in one year is greater than the individual wealth of all but eight others at the top of the list.

Along with Bezos, the top ten richest Americans include: Bill Gates (Microsoft, $111 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, $85 billion), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway, $73.5 billion), Larry Ellison (Oracle, $72 billion), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft, $69 billion), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, $68 billion), Larry Page (Google, $67.5 billion), Sergey Brin (Google, $65.7 billion) and Alice Walton (Walmart, $62.3 billion).

With the exception of Warren Buffett, whose net worth dropped by $7.3 billion over the past year, the other nine of the top ten richest billionaires increased their wealth by a total of $194 billion. This means that 80 percent of the increases in the top 400 wealthiest fortunes went to nine of the ten richest individuals.

Forbes began the repugnant business of hailing the accumulation of personal capitalist wealth in 1982. This was during the decade that began with the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as President and when the ruling elite went on the offensive against every gain made by the working class since the 1930s. Since that time, a massive intensification of the exploitation of the working class and transfer of wealth to the financial oligarchy has taken place.

Providing something of a picture of just how far the social counterrevolution of the past four decades has penetrated American society, in 1982 there were 13 billionaires in the Forbes 400, and someone with a fortune of $75 million could secure a spot on the list.

In what passes for analysis, Forbes provides additional details about the “mega-fortunes” being “minted” by this year’s list makers. “We welcome 18 new members to the ranks, who made their piles in everything from electric trucks to the now-ubiquitous Zoom. Plus, there are 9 returnees—former 400 members who fell off the list and have made a comeback.”

Attempting to inject some semblance of reality into their report, the Forbes editors add, “Two from last year’s list died, and 25 dropped off as their fortunes fell; 10 of those setbacks were directly attributable to the Covid crisis.” Although it does not mention the President specifically, the report shows that Donald Trump’s fortune fell by $600 million to $2.5 billion, dropping him from number 275 to 339 on the list.

Forbes explains the methodology behind their net worth calculations in “how we crunch the numbers.” Here, editor Jennifer Wang writes: “Uncovering their fortunes required us to pore over thousands of SEC documents, court records, probate records and news articles. We took into account all types of assets: stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art, yachts, planes, ranches, vineyards, jewelry, car collections and more. We factored in debt and charitable giving. While some billionaires provided documentation for their private assets and companies, others were less forthcoming.”

In short, given that the financial elite specializes in concealing the full extent of their wealth, the net worth given in the Forbes 400 are no doubt below the real amounts of wealth owned.

The Forbes 400 list also includes some qualifying data points such as the age, sex, industry, state where they are located, the corporate source of their wealth, a philanthropy score and something called the “self-made score.” The last of these has a scale from “1: Inherited fortune but not working to increase it” to 10: “Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles.” Media mogul Oprah Winfrey, who came in with a net worth of $2.6 at number 327 on the list, has a self-made score of ten along with investor and philanthropist George Soros (#56 at $8.6 billion).

What the Forbes report leaves out, of course, is any reference to the role that the US government has played in the colossal escalation of Wall Street wealth during the coronavirus pandemic. With the passage of the misnamed CARES Act, supported with a near-unanimous vote by both Democrats and Republicans—Congress and the White House began injecting massive amounts of cash from the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve into the coffers of corporate America, the stock market and the pockets of the super-rich.

The richest have seen their wealth rise while tens of millions of workers lost their jobs and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by an annualized rate of 34.3 percent during the coronavirus economic shutdown in the second quarter of 2020, the lowest on record. Meanwhile, the $600 federal supplement to unemployment payments which had provided a lifeline to those put out of work by coronavirus restrictions has been cut off since the end of July, plunging millions into misery or forcing them to return to work under unsafe conditions.

While effective analogies illustrating the scale of the wealth accumulation of the super-rich and the degree of inequality that exists in the US are very hard to come by, a look at the joint wealth of Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott is instructive. Adding Scott’s net worth ($57 billion) to that of Bezos, the two would have a combined wealth of $236 billion.

First of all, recent reports show that 40 percent of Americans have a negative net worth. This means that their debts, such as loans, credit cards and student debt, are greater than their assets, such as a car or a house or savings in a bank account. Still, the median net worth of American families—the point at which 50 percent are below and 50 percent are above this value—is $97,300. This means that the former Bezos family has a net worth that is equal to 2.4 million times that of a median family’s net worth.

Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million

Jacob Crosse

A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war.

The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.

Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.

The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The two countries with the highest number of displaced persons were Iraq and Syria, whose populations have suffered for decades under US-led regime-change operations and military occupations initiated by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population.

The authors were careful to note that they only counted Syrian refugees and displaced persons post-2014, even though US-funded and supplied terrorist groups such as the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the Islamic State and other Islamist groupings began operations against the Syrian government as early as 2011. If the figures were to include the previous three years, the estimates exceed 11 million.

Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.

Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.

While orders of a magnitude lower, an estimated 6,100 US military personnel and contractors have also died since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. If one were to include US deaths from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and the dozens of African countries the US military has been waging secretive covert wars for years, the death toll rises to roughly 15,000.

Mentally and physically broken from the trauma of war, hundreds of thousands of US veterans have returned with horrific physical and mental wounds, from amputations and burns to post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries. As of 2018, 1.7 million veterans have reported a disability connected to their deployment.

The horrific numbers are a damning indictment of the capitalist system, the source of imperialist war and conflict. Since the fall of the USSR in 1990-1991, the US ruling class has embarked on an endless effort to reverse through military means the protracted erosion of its dominant global economic position and stave off any challenges to American hegemony in Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific.

Despite President Donald Trump’s recent statements in which he attempted to posture as an opponent of the “top people in the Pentagon” who just “fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs...stay happy,” the report illustrates that far from ending the illegal US wars or cutting back on military spending, the Trump administration has continued the aggressive regime-change operations, began under the Obama-Biden administration, in Libya and Syria, and accelerated bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Somalia.

In addition to unending wars in central Asia, Trump has broadened the scope of the “war on terror” to include large swaths of Africa with over 6,000 troops spread out over 22 countries. In all, some 80 countries are now occupied by over 800 US bases, airfields, black sites and private military watch posts, costing over $50 billion a year to maintain.

Trump has also continued the US military occupation of the Philippines, specifically the southern islands of Mindanao, where up to 6,000 US special forces and “military advisers” have engaged in a four-decade-long campaign to root out “terrorists” and “counterinsurgents.” In 2017, US forces fought alongside the Philippine military, providing weapons, training and aerial reconnaissance, leading to the destruction of the historic city of Marawi, displacing nearly 200,000 people.

Since assuming the presidency, Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has “replenished” the US’s “depleted” military under his watch. With the help of the Democrats in Congress, Trump has increased the US military budget each year in office, including signing a monstrous $738 billion budget for fiscal year 2020, a 5.3 percent increase over the previous year. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that arm sales revenues for the top five US war profiteers, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, increased by 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

While the Trump administration has refused to publish a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, US Central Command declared earlier this year that US warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019, more than any other year since 2006. Since Trump came into office, Afghanistan, with an estimated 5.3 million displaced since 2001, has seen over 20,000 US bombs dropped on the country, including the criminal deployment of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (video), the most destructive bomb used in combat since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, capitalism has turned entire regions of the globe into a foul prison, with millions of refugees forced to live in squalid refugee camps, rife with disease and exploitation. The vast majority of those fleeing evictions, death threats, and ethnic cleansing, perpetuated by US-fueled sectarian violence in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia, are not soldiers or “radical terrorists,” but young jobless men, single mothers, and unaccompanied children.

Global travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced those fleeing US-instigated conflict to seek refuge within their own country, resulting in millions of internally displaced persons. Based on their conservative estimate of the 37 million total displaced, the authors estimate eight million people have been forced to flee across international borders as refugees and asylum seekers, equivalent to the entire population of Virginia, while 29 million, more than the entire state of Texas, have been internally displaced.

Thousands have died attempting to flee war zones as the imperialist powers in Europe and America wage proxy wars throughout Africa and Asia in order to secure markets and resources for exploitation. The European Union has adopted a policy of mass murder, refusing to accept refugees fleeing from Libya and Syria across the Mediterranean Sea, leading to over 20,000 drowning deaths between 2014-2020, according to statista.com.

A Democratic administration led by former Vice President Joe Biden would not reverse these horrific trends. As former Obama administration officials repeated throughout the Democratic convention last month—which featured a bevy of neoconservative war criminals responsible for the destruction of Iraq and nearly two-decades-long occupation of Afghanistan—a Biden administration, no less than Trump, would increase US military aggression, leading to millions more dead and displaced.

While the human cost of the so-called “war on terror” is incalculable, the material cost to the US population is astronomical, with Brown University estimating the cost of the wars exceeding over $6.4 trillion as of November 2019. To put that in perspective, the US government spent roughly $260 billion to provide 13 weeks of enhanced unemployment benefits to roughly 30 million people, allowing millions of people to feed and clothe their families, while staying home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. $6.4 trillion would equate to roughly 320 weeks of $600 weekly payments, or over 6 years’ worth.

The US government’s switch in 2018 from the “war on terror” to “great power conflict” portends an even more massive and deadly conflagration that will lead to the displacement and deaths of hundreds of millions of people. The ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and the global order, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, a trigger event in world history, poses starkly and urgently the question of building a massive anti-war, anti-capitalist and socialist leadership in the working class, capable of leading an international movement to put an end to imperialist war.

Western US ravaged by catastrophic fires, record heat

Rafael Azul

Fires are raging across the US west coast states and in the Canadian province of British Columbia, triggered by a combination of lightning storms, high winds and extreme heat.

On Monday, a wind-driven fire destroyed the community of Malden, Washington, home to 200 people. About 100 homes, nearly every house in the town, along with the downtown area, was consumed by flames. The fire station, post office, city hall, the municipal library and other downtown structures were destroyed.

“The scale of this disaster really can’t be expressed in words,” Whitman County Sheriff Brett Myers said in a statement. “The fire will be extinguished, but a community has been changed for a lifetime. I just hope we don’t find the fire took more than homes and buildings. I pray everyone got out in time.” As of Tuesday, there were no reports of fatalities or injuries.

Elsewhere in Washington, and the neighboring state of Oregon, blackouts affected nearly 250,000 households, as trees, knocked down by the high winds, toppled electrical cables.

Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz tweeted that “we’re still seeing new fire starts in every corner of the state.”

East of Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, a wildfire swept through the communities of Blue River and Vida on Monday. Hundreds were evacuated, and 150 homes were burnt, and at least one person was reported killed. Both communities were reported to be a “total loss,” according to report by local news station KVAL.

Evacuations also took place east of Salem, the state capital, where residents were evacuated from many of the small communities in the foothills of the Cascade Range. The air above the city of Portland was covered by a thick layer of smoke and ash. Residents with respiratory problems were strongly advised to stay in their homes.

As of Tuesday, the Doctor Creek wildfire in southeast British Columbia, not far from the Idaho-Montana border, had burned 7,937 hectares (19,613 acres) and was out of control. High winds and steep terrain make this wildfire difficult to control.

Further south, California is experiencing its most intense fire season on record this year. Over two million acres (800,000 hectares) of forests and fields have burnt. On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for multiple counties.

In the Central Valley near the city of Fresno, Pacific Gas and Electric cut off power to more than 170,000 people. High heat and very dry conditions on the ground are feeding wildfires across the region, many of them out of control. Over 1000 fires are burning in California, caused by a series of intense lightning storms; high heat and strong winds forced the Forest Service to close eight national forests.

A fire truck drives along Highway 168 while battling the Creek Fire in the Shaver Lake community of Fresno County, Calif., on Monday, Sept. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Hikers and campers near Fresno were trapped by the fires and had to be rescued by helicopters. The Creek Fire in Huntington Lake northwest of Fresno is zero percent contained and is burning near a hydroelectric plant.

Meanwhile, to the west, the Dolan Fire, which is burning south of the coastal city of Big Sur, grew from 2,300 acres to 34,175 acres, according to the U.S. Forest Service. It has yet to be fully contained.

In the vicinity of Los Angeles, the Forest Service announced the closure of several national forests threatened by the Bobcat Fire. The Bobcat and the El Dorado fire, in Southern California’s San Bernardino County, have each consumed more than 8,000 acres. Forest Service officials do not expect to fully contain the Bobcat fire until October 15.

The current devastation dwarfs California’s previous record fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. The fires have increasingly become more numerous and destructive as a result of global warming. Increasingly, the fire season, formerly an autumn phenomenon, has extended into the summer, where it now combines with extreme heat, wind conditions and drier vegetation. In addition, autumn rains begin later than average.

According to a study titled “Climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California,” published last month, “state-wide increases in autumn temperature (~1 °C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (~30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%).” The study gives strong evidence that continued global warming will “amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather” and calls for a global solution “consistent” with the United Nations Paris Agreement.

At the time, signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to hold global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Except for some cosmetic measures, this “promise” was never seriously followed through. Since the agreement was signed, global temperatures have increased by more than 1.5°C. From the moment it was signed, the Paris Agreement became a dead letter. The repudiation of the agreement last November by President Donald Trump was the last nail in its coffin.

Across the world, any measure to reduce or resolve the climate change crisis that in any way threatens capitalist profits is rejected by the financial aristocracy and the fossil fuel industries, as California, the West Coast and the world head to a major environmental catastrophe.

Moreover, it is impossible to address or resolve a problem of international scope within the limited framework of national politics. Any attempt of capitalist nations to implement a worldwide plan has failed to produce any result as every country has sought to limit its own costs and obligations at the expense of others.

The West Coast fires and all the other effects of global warming are revolutionary questions. Their resolution requires the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a world socialist society committed to human needs above profits.

Republicans, Democrats block restoration of jobless aid

Barry Grey

As the Senate returned from its nearly month-long recess on Tuesday, there was little prospect that Congress would provide any significant relief for the tens of millions of workers who lost their $600 weekly federal jobless benefit when it was allowed to expire on July 31.

The ending of that lifeline plunged millions of working class families into desperate financial straights. The economy is still short 11 million jobs from the level of employment in February, and more than 30 million unemployed workers continue to receive government aid.

As of this week, only 19 states will be providing the temporary $300-per-week benefit authorized by President Trump in an executive order last month. The program is financed by Federal Emergency Relief Agency funds that are expected to run out in about five weeks.

The Aspen Institute reported last month that 30-40 million people in the US were at risk of being evicted in the coming months. The Hamilton Project reported even before the cutoff of jobless aid that more than 20 percent of all US households and over 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 13 were experiencing food insecurity.

State and local governments face a collective $500 billion budget deficit, and are preparing massive layoffs and cuts to education, health care, food assistance, public transit, firefighting and pensions.

While Republicans and Democrats rushed to pass the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by a near-unanimous vote in last March’s CARES Act, neither party is in any great hurry to enact legislation to address the worst social crisis since the Great Depression.

They have a common interest in using the threat of destitution and homelessness to pressure workers into returning to COVID-19-infected factories and teachers to unsafe schools in order to “reopen the economy,” i.e., resume the pumping out of profits to back up the massive debt incurred in the bailout of the corporate-financial oligarchy. This homicidal policy is being spearheaded by the Trump administration, but it has the full support of the Democrats, who are implementing it at the state and local level.

Amid mutual mudslinging, both parties are posturing as advocates for laid off workers and blaming the other for obstructionism. This is political theater to disarm and deceive workers who are seething with anger over the mounting wealth at the top and indifference to death and poverty for the masses. Not a single prominent Democrat, including presidential candidate Joe Biden, has called for an increase in taxes on the rich or a rescinding of the corporate bailout to fund desperately needed emergency social measures.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a new pandemic relief bill and said there would be a vote on the Senate floor as early as this week. The $500 billion measure is only half as large as the abortive $1 trillion HEALS Act he proposed in July. There are questions as to whether it can garner a 51-vote majority from Senate Republicans, let alone obtain the 60 votes needed to override a filibuster.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer issued a joint statement saying the Republican plan “doesn’t come close to addressing the problems and is headed nowhere.” They are continuing to promote a $2.2 trillion Democratic proposal, a markdown from the $3.2 trillion HEROES Act passed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in May. The House is slated to return from its summer break next Monday.

The Republican Senate bill includes a federal unemployment supplement of $300 per week, half the benefit that expired six weeks ago, to last through the end of the year. It also includes more than $250 billion in additional small business loans, $105 billion to reopen the schools, $16 billion for coronavirus testing and tracing, $31 billion for vaccine development and distribution, $20 billion for farm assistance, $10 billion for child care support and $10 billion for the US Postal Service.

It also includes legal immunity for businesses from potential suits from workers impacted by unsafe conditions during the pandemic and a two-year “school choice” tax credit to promote private schools at the expense of the public education system.

The Republican proposal, backed by the Trump White House, does not include a second cash stipend to families or any funding to aid near-bankrupt state and city governments.

On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reported that in discussions with House Speaker Pelosi, the two had agreed to pass a “clean” bill to continue funding the federal government when the current fiscal year ends on September 30. This signifies that the Democrats will not attempt to use the expiration of funding to put pressure on the Republicans to agree to provide significant aid to state and local governments, a full restoration of the $600 jobless benefit, money for food assistance and other provisions they claim to be fighting for.

Whatever their secondary, tactical differences with the social policy of Trump and the Republicans, the Democrats are committed to a policy of austerity and intensified attacks on working class living standards. In New York State, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening to cut $8.2 billion in grants to local governments, noting that such a measure has “no precedent in modern times.” He said further that the cuts would “hit nearly every activity funded by state government,” including special education, child health care, substance-abuse programs and mass transit.

States are cutting back on their pension contributions and their outlays for Medicaid. Colorado, headed by Democratic Governor Jared Polis, is increasing co-payments that Medicaid recipients must pay for doctor visits, pharmaceuticals and medical transport.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, says he will send school districts in the state $12.5 billion in IOUs in lieu if cash to keep their schools running.

The real position of the Democratic Party was spelled out Tuesday in an editorial in the New York Times on New York City’s $5 billion budget shortfall. The editorial is an unvarnished demand, in behalf of Wall Street, that Democratic Mayor de Blasio adopt a program of “tough” budget and job cuts before seeking a loan to cover the deficit.

“Before Mr. de Blasio adds billions to the city’s debt sheet—or lays off thousands of workers—he needs to find savings,” the newspaper declares. He will have to “make unpopular decisions and demand serious cost-saving measures from nearly every city agency and, crucially, the municipal unions,” which will have to “share in the sacrifice.”

This includes “a far stricter hiring freeze” to eliminate thousands of city jobs through attrition. The alternative, the Times suggests, is to turn the city’s finances over to the state Financial Control Board, the unelected Wall Street-controlled agency that was set up to impose mass layoffs and sweeping cuts in social services when the city faced bankruptcy in the mid-1970s.

India now second only to US in number of COVID-19 cases, yet continues to expand “reopening”

Deepal Jayasekera

After recording over 90,000 new infections on Monday, India surpassed Brazil as the country with the second highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world.

Despite the calamitous situation, which includes approximately 1,000 daily deaths, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the various state governments are pushing ahead with the reopening of the economy. This includes the state governments led or supported by the opposition Congress Party and various regional and caste-ist parties, and their Stalinist collaborators in the CPM and CPI.

According to figures released by India’s Ministry of Health, the country reported a new single day world record for new infections with 90,802 Monday, pushing India’s official total above 4.2 million. For about a month, India has reported the highest number of daily cases in the world. The death toll has climbed to 71,642.

A doctor speaks with a COVID-19 positive patient at an isolation center in Mumbai, India. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

The pace at which the virus is spreading has dramatically accelerated over the past month. Whereas around 55,000 new daily cases were being recorded in the first week of August, India is now averaging well in excess of 80,000 new cases per day. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in India has doubled from 2 million to more than 4 million within just one month. It took just 13 days for infections to increase by one million, from 3 million on August 22 to 4 million on September 4.

Horrific as these figures are, they are a substantial underestimation of the true scale of the crisis. Virtually all experts agree that due to a miserably low-testing rate, only a fraction of COVID-19 infections are being identified. Some have even suggested that India has already surpassed the United States to become the worst impacted country in the world.

Dr. Ramanan Laxinarayan, a public health researcher and director of the Washington-based Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) told CBS News: “It's only a matter of time before India crosses (the) US. We are talking about reported infections, and given the low levels of testing, it is certainly possible that actual infections in India have already exceeded those in the U.S.” He added that “seroprevelance” screening of blood samples “indicate that there have been at least 100 million infections” in India.

The callous and criminal policies of the Modi government at the center and the various state governments have produced enormous social suffering in addition to the health catastrophe.

Modi’s ill-conceived and ill-prepared coronavirus national lockdown, which was implemented on March 25 with less than four hours’ notice, was a total failure. The Indian ruling elite refused to use the time bought by the lockdown to implement a comprehensive system of mass testing and contact tracing, or to pour resources into the country’s chronically under-resourced public health care system.

Moreover, the BJP government provided the tens of millions of impoverished workers who lost their jobs overnight due to the lockdown no more than famine-style relief programs, resulting in widespread destitution, homelessness, and hunger. The lockdown and the government’s refusal to provide social support has produced an unprecedented economic collapse. In the quarter ending in June, India’s GDP declined by 23.9 percent, the largest recorded drop among major economies.

The ruling class subsequently exploited this social misery to push workers back on the job, so that the extraction of profit through sweatshop exploitation could resume. The BJP government started sanctioning the removal of lockdown restrictions on export industries and other industrial concerns in late April. This quickly led to a spike in infections.

The virus has now spread throughout the country, entrenching itself in poor neighbourhoods in many major cities and in rural areas, where health care facilities are non-existent. It has even reached the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are located more than 1,000 kilometers from the mainland.

The surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths has caused no let-up or even pause in the drive of the Modi government and its state counterparts to reopen the economy. Putting profits before human lives, they are pursuing “herd immunity”—a homicidal policy in which the authorities allow the virus to run rampant until it expends itself by infecting the overwhelming majority of the population.

Most businesses have now been allowed to reopen. Social distancing and other elementary preventive measures, which were always impossible for the tens of millions of urban poor who live five or more to a room and without access to proper sanitation, have been largely abandoned. Markets in towns and cities across the country are once again teeming with people, increasing the risk of a further acceleration of infections.

As per the fourth phase of the Modi government’s “Unlockdown,” on Monday, the same day as India set a new world record for daily infections, subway train networks resumed in the national capital, Delhi, and in more than ten other cities, ending a five-month shutdown. With large numbers of people crammed into poorly-ventilated subways, infections and deaths are certain to increase sharply.

The reopening of the Delhi Metro, the country’s largest rapid transport system, is particularly reckless given the volume of passengers and the recent uptick in coronavirus cases in the capital. Before its forced closure in March, it carried an average of 2.7 million passengers daily in packed trains. The Yellow Line, which was first to reopen, runs between north Delhi and the satellite city of Gurgaon, an industrial and IT hub in the northern Indian state of Haryana. This is the busiest route, connecting 37 stations and carrying around 1.45 million passengers daily.

In another example of the ruling elite’s indifference to the threat posed by the deadly virus to working people, the National Testing Agency (NTA), a central government agency, is going ahead with university entrance examinations in major cities throughout the country. Protests by angry students, many of whom have to travel significant distances to participate, were ignored. The Supreme Court, siding with the Modi government’s decision, dismissed an appeal filed on behalf of students on August 17. The Court claimed that failing to hold the exams would put students’ careers “in peril.” It added: “Life should move on even in COVID-19 times.” This is entirely in keeping with the mantra of the Modi government and its state counterparts. They all insist that businesses must reopen and workers be forced to toil in unsafe conditions, so that life can return to “normal,” i.e. the ruling class can continue to enrich itself.

Like their counterparts around the world, the Modi government and India’s capitalist elite as a whole, have seized upon the pandemic to shift bourgeois politics further right. In Modi’s own words, his government is pushing ahead with a “quantum jump” in economic reforms, i.e. pro-investor policies to attract global capital. The “reforms” include stepped up privatisations, drastic changes to labor laws so that employers can “hire and fire” workers at will, the relaxation of regulations on the use of land for corporate development, and harsher austerity measures.

To divert the mounting social anger towards its policies in a reactionary direction, Modi is also whipping up a bellicose Indian nationalism by intensifying India’s border conflict with China. In this, he has been encouraged by US imperialism, which views India as a crucial partner in its economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing.

On Monday, tensions between India and China escalated yet again when shots were fired during a dispute between Indian and Chinese troops over where the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto border between the two countries, lies. Each side accused the other of firing the first shot. Although several dozen Indian and Chinese soldiers died in a clash fought with rods and knives on a Himalayan ridge in June, this marked the first time that there had been an exchange of live fire between the two sides in 45 years.

So acute has become the danger of a military conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers that even sections of India’s mainstream media that have been urging New Delhi to resist Chinese “aggression” are now expressing alarm. “We are on the verge of entering a dangerous escalation matrix that could lead to full-blown war,” declared an editorial in the Times of India. “If that happens, it would be a catastrophe.”

In opposition to the Modi government’s right-wing policies, growing numbers of workers have participated in strikes and other protests in recent weeks. Anger has been especially directed at planned privatisations and the authorities’ failure to supply adequate personal protective equipment for health-care and other frontline workers during the pandemic.

The only way that the relentless spread of the coronavirus can be stopped, working people shielded from the pandemic’s ruinous economic fallout, and the Indian ruling elite’s incendiary alliance with US imperialism and stoking of military conflict can be successfully opposed is if the working class constitutes itself as an independent political force. It must rally the rural poor and other toilers behind it in the fight for a workers’ government and socialism.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained in its statement, “For international working class action against the COVID-19 pandemic!”:

“Control over the response to the pandemic must be taken out of the hands of the capitalist class. Mass action by the working class, coordinated on an international scale, is necessary to bring the pandemic under control and save millions of lives that are now at risk. The fight against the pandemic is not only, or even primarily, a medical issue. It is, above all, a matter of social and political struggle.”