Sri Lankan government lifts limited lockdown despite rising infections

W.A. Sunil

On Monday the Sri Lankan government lifted the limited lockdown imposed on the Western Province, despite a surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, the government has continued a police curfew in 23 police divisions in the Western province and many other areas throughout the country.

As of Wednesday evening, according to the grossly understated official statistics, the number of COVID-19 cases in the country surpassed 15,000 and the death toll was 46. From January to September, the number of people infected was 3,500. However, from the beginning of October, the number has increased dramatically by more than 10,000, while the death toll has risen by 33, or more than tripled.

Soldiers checking a worker before he boards a train in Colombo (Credit: WSWS)

Justifying the decision to drop the limited lockdown, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse declared that the government had opted for “carrying our normal activities while controlling the disease.” Speaking to the Task Force on COVID-19 Prevention, he added that the pandemic was a “health issue” and the responsibility for “protecting people against the virus and steering the country forward lies with the health sector and the government.”

In effect, the government is telling people that they have to live with the surging virus and accept it as “new normal.” Rajapakse is echoing the homicidal policy of the ruling classes internationally. Though the virus is a biological phenomenon, the medical crisis caused by the pandemic, which has exposed the failure of capitalism, is primarily a political issue.

Governments have run down the health system over the past four decades in the interests of profits of the financial elite and big corporations. By forcing workers back to work to defend the same profit interests, the ruling classes have allowed the virus to run rampant globally.

The number of cases globally has risen to more than 50 million and the death toll is nearing 1.3 million. Sri Lanka’s immediate neighbour, India, yesterday reported the number of infected persons as 8.5 million and a death toll of over 127,000.

Rajapakse attacked the media and the public for forgetting the so-called “successful containment of the virus,” blaming them for the current situation. He claimed that the government was spending 60 million rupees ($US33,000) daily on testing and declared that it was the responsibility of the people to “comprehend this situation.”

In reality, the government’s spending on testing is small compared to its assistance to big business, including a moratorium on loan repayments. Over the past six months the Central Bank has released 178 billion rupees to major companies.

The very limited number of cases and deaths recorded in Sri Lanka is related to the low rate of testing. Some COVID-19 infections have only been identified after the death of the individuals at home. Cases are now being reported from homes for the elderly, hospitals, prisons, plantations, remote villages, police barracks and their training colleges. Many work places have also reported infections.

Medical experts have criticised the shift by health authorities to Rapid Antigen Detecting Testing (RADT), saying it will not yield accurate results. Presiding over a cash-strapped government, Rajapakse has instructed health authorities to import RADT kits because of their low cost.

Rajapakse hypocritically praised health workers and the public health system for controlling the pandemic. However, anger among these front line workers is increasing over the lack of proper health facilities, non-payment for their difficult overtime work, lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing.

On November 5 and 6 at Homagama hospital in the Colombo suburbs, hundreds of health workers protested demanding adequate PPE and tests.

On October 31, nurses and other staff held a protest action at the Matara general hospital in the island’s south, demanding their stipulated break after six days of heavy work. One nurse said: “We also need a break. We need to look after the needs of our family at home. Employees are not ready to accept oppressive conditions in silence.”

The government has ordered heads of public institutions to minimise staffing when recalling personnel back to work. According to a circular issued by the presidential secretary, P.B. Jayasundara, only 20 percent of staff will be called back to work at public institutions in “alert districts.”

The government is seeking to exploit the health crisis to accelerate the economic reform agenda ordered by the International Monetary Fund, which has repeatedly demanded the downsizing of the state sector.

Already the labor ministry has closed its offices in Sri Lankan embassies abroad. Its Foreign Employment Bureau, which provides service for more than a million migrant workers, has announced a scheme whereby 50 percent of its staff will work from home at half of their monthly salary.

There are many signs of growing workers’ opposition against the government and companies.

On October 29, the Brandix garment factory located at the Koggala Free Trade Zone was forced to close down when one worker was found to be infected by COVID-19 when she was taken to hospital with another sick colleague. The factory was closed for two weeks to allow 1,500 workers to quarantine.

However, two days later the management, with the support of the police, broke quarantine regulations and recalled workers to work. One worker told the WSWS that half of the employees did not return and unrest was developing against the callous actions of the company and the police.

Brandix is one of the largest garment companies in Sri Lanka, producing apparel for the US and EU corporations. It has many factories and employs around 50,000. In early October, more than 1,000 infected workers were found at its Minuwangoda factory when the state authorities were compelled to carry out testing.

In the last week of October, MAS Holdings-owned Bodyline garment factory at Horana, which employs about 6,000 workers, was compelled to close down when dozens of workers were found to be infected. The MAS is another giant company which employs 99,000 workers in 15 countries.

The trade unions are working hand-in-hand with the government to implement its measures and suppress the opposition of workers.

Last week hundreds of Katunayake Free Trade Zone (KFTZ) workers, who were in quarantine, were rounded up and brought back to their hostels by the military. This was decided by the Task Force at the National Operations Centre for Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak supposedly so as to free quarantine centres for other patients.

As the workers’ unrest was growing, as they had not been provided with foods and other necessities, the Free Trade Zones and General Services Employees Union immediately intervened to deflect the anger. The union’s joint secretary Anton Marcus wrote a letter to the KFTZ coordinating officer appointed by the president to KFTZ, Rear Admiral Hewage, appealing for relief.

The appointment of military officers such as Hewage is part of Rajapakse’s militarisation of his administration amid fears in ruling circles of social unrest among workers. The trade unions have demonstrated their willingness to collaborate with the government and the military which will be used to suppress the working class.

Australian government slashes JobSeeker to force more workers into low-paid jobs

Mike Head

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was blatant on Tuesday when he announced that his government’s JobSeeker payments for unemployed workers would be cut by another $100 a fortnight from the end of December.

“We cannot allow the lifeline that has been extended to also now hold Australia back as we move into the next phases of recovery,” Morrison said. In other words, the “lifeline” that has kept some 1.5 million workers from outright destitution during the worst recession since the 1930s Great Depression must be withdrawn for the sake of the supposed “recovery.”

Workers queuing outside a Sydney Centrelink office earlier this year (Credit: WSWS)

By doing so, the government is intensifying its efforts to fully “reopen the economy,” despite the worsening global COVID-19 resurgence, by herding millions of jobless workers into low-paid work on poor conditions in order to boost profits.

Even according to the forecasts of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the official understated unemployment rate will still be around 8 percent, or nearly 1.1 million workers, in March. And that does not include the more than 4 million workers who remain on JobKeeper wage subsidies, which are due to be scrapped in March.

Having already reduced its temporary dole “coronavirus supplement” from $550 a fortnight in March to $250 in September, the government intends to slash it to $150. It is also leaving open the option of removing it altogether at the end of March, reverting to the pre-pandemic starvation level of $40 a day.

For now, the government is reducing the allowance to what is itself a poverty rate of around $715 a fortnight for single adults—just $10.70 a day above the pre-pandemic level.

It is doing so with the essential backing of the Labor Party opposition, which has committed to pass the necessary legislation as quickly as possible. Labor has suggested only keeping some unspecified, reduced “coronavirus supplement” beyond March, offering that as a better means of achieving a “recovery.”

Labor’s stated concern is not for the jobless workers who face impoverishment, especially as moratoriums on mortgage repayments and rental evictions are already being wound back. Its sole criticism of the government is that it is prematurely ending “stimulus” measures that have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into corporate pockets since March.

At a media briefing on Tuesday, Labor leader Anthony Albanese refused to answer a journalist’s question about what level of JobSeeker Labor wanted after March. Instead, he asked why the government was “cutting things right now.” He said: “Now is not the time to be withdrawing support from the economy.”

Once again, as it demonstrated in voting for the government’s October 6 budget—which handed $50 billion in tax cuts to high-income recipients—Labor has no disagreement with using the mass unemployment and acute social distress triggered by the pandemic to further restructure economic and social relations in the interests of the capitalist class.

There was no criticism by Labor of Morrison’s other declaration at his media conference on Tuesday. Flanked by Families and Social Services Minister Anne Ruston, he boasted that the government had already stepped up its “mutual obligation” measures to cut jobless workers off payments if they allegedly failed to look hard enough for work or did not accept a job offer.

In just one month, the government has suspended JobSeeker payments to more than a quarter of a million people, and has enforced outright cancellations, for breaching its rules, which require recipients to apply for at least eight jobs a month, regardless of whether any jobs exist in their field or not.

“There have been close to 260,000 suspensions, and for the 4th August to the 31st of October there have been 242 payment cancellations,” Morrison emphasised. “So the mutual obligation requirements are there and we are serious about them.”

Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) chief executive Cassandra Goldie described the coronavirus supplement’s reduction to $150 a fortnight as “a crushing blow” for unemployed workers. “A permanent ongoing solution is to fix the adequacy of people’s incomes.”

Goldie dismissed as a “distraction,” Morrison’s claim that employers were struggling to hire workers, saying Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data showed 12 people looking for every job vacancy, or for more hours.

For all the government’s efforts to talk up the prospects of “recovery” and restoring business and consumer “confidence,” the latest payroll data from the ABS revealed a new drop in employment last month.

The ABS’s Head of Labour Statistics Bjorn Jarvris said in a media release: “Nationally, payroll jobs fell for the second fortnight in a row, and were 4.4 percent lower than mid-March. This fall includes a flattening in payroll jobs for the most recent week.”

Over the month to October 17, payroll jobs fell by 1.7 percent across Australia. They dropped in each state and territory, not just Victoria, where the state Labor government is still in the process of lifting lockdown restrictions to meet the demands of big business.

Significantly, however, there was a sharp rise in the number of payroll jobs worked by teenagers—up by 10.1 percent since March 14. By far the biggest rise was in the retail industry, with a 20 percent jump in teenage employment. This indicates that employers are replacing older, better-paid workers with low-paid, short-term and insecure teenagers, especially in the notorious “gig economy.”

At the end of September, when the JobSeeker benefits were reduced from $600 a week to just over $400, JobKeeper wage allotments were also cut, from $750 a week to the minimum wage level of $650.

Modelling produced at the Australian National University (ANU) estimated that 740,000 more people were thrown into poverty—even by a conservative measure—through these cuts. As a result, almost 16 percent of the population, or more than 4 million people, were living in poverty.

According to the modelling, the number of people in poverty, after housing costs are included, would rise to 5.8 million, or about a quarter of the population, if the JobSeeker supplements and JobKeeper wage subsidies were eliminated in March.

The situation could be even worse because the resurging pandemic in the United States and Europe is likely to deepen the global crash. Citing a “downside risk to the outlook” due to the situation in Europe, the Reserve Bank last week cut official interest rates to near zero, and vowed not to lift them for three years. It also formally joined other central banks internationally in pumping billions of dollars into the financial markets via “quantitative easing.”

Under the cynical slogan of “creating jobs,” both the Liberal-National Coalition and the trade union-backed Labor Party are handing billions more dollars to big business and the wealthiest layers of society, while coercing workers into low-paid employment in order to drive up corporate profits.

Trump packs Pentagon with right-wing loyalists

Bill Van Auken

Among the most ominous actions taken by the Trump White House as it seeks to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election is a wholesale shakeup of the top civilian leadership of the Pentagon.

President Donald Trump is keenly aware that his attempt to pull off an extra-constitutional coup and remain in the White House cannot be accomplished without resort to extreme repression against an inevitable popular eruption against such a coup. To this end, he is placing a gang of extreme right-wing ideologues and loyalists in key positions.

The Pentagon (Wikimedia Commons)

The purge began on Monday with the summary sacking—by tweet—of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, which reportedly took the entire uniformed command of the US military by surprise. Even more shocking to the military brass was Esper’s replacement.

The new “acting” Pentagon chief will be Christopher Miller, a 30-year Special Forces operative and retired colonel with no experience in the upper echelons of the military command. Trump has deliberately cultivated support within the 70,000-strong Special Forces, including through war crimes pardons, with the aim of transforming this quasi-independent force into his praetorian guard.

Miller is viewed within the military brass as wholly unprepared to assume the post of defense secretary. His main qualification is his unreserved support for Trump, demonstrated while serving on the National Security Council at the White House, and his willingness to use military repression against domestic protesters.

Before assuming his previous position as director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), he testified at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would not oppose the NCTC sharing intelligence on US citizens with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of suppressing protests.

Esper’s ouster was followed on Tuesday by the resignation of the third-ranking official at the Pentagon, James Anderson, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and his replacement by retired general and Fox News commentator Anthony Tata. Trump nominated Tata for the post last August, but was forced to rescind the appointment after the Senate canceled confirmation hearings in the face of Tata’s record of referring to former president Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader,” a “Manchurian candidate” and a Muslim. Tata was then installed at the Pentagon in a made-up position as an assistant to Anderson. Now, an Islamophobic fascist occupies the No. 3 post in the US war machine.

In his resignation letter, Anderson wrote, “Now, as ever, our long-term success depends on adhering to the US Constitution all public servants swear to support and defend.” In reporting on the resignation, Breaking Defense noted, “Such sentences are not boilerplate in a senior official’s resignation letter and this was clearly designed to send a message.” Indeed, Esper included almost identical language in his last message to the military, praising it for “remaining apolitical, and for honoring your oath to the Constitution.”

Trump’s determination to rid himself of Esper stems from the events of early June, in which the White House deployed federal security forces and sought to put US troops on the streets to suppress the mass protests triggered by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Esper publicly opposed Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy US troops throughout the country to put down the protests. He declared that such action could be only a “last resort and only in the most urgent and dire situations.” He added, “We are not in one of those situations now.”

This opposition from an official whose subservience to the White House had earned him the nickname “Yesper” reflected grave concerns that such a domestic deployment was not necessary and could tear the military apart. Trump was reportedly infuriated by Esper’s statement and was determined from then on to replace him with someone who would not oppose his attempts to use the military in pursuit of a presidential dictatorship.

An indication of the vindictive purge atmosphere at the Pentagon was provided by the Republican columnist Bill Kristol. Citing conversations with senior military officials, Kristol reported: “When Jim Anderson was fired yesterday as Acting Undersecretary for Policy, he was given a ‘clap-out’ as he left the building. The WH called to request the names of any political appointees who joined in so they could be fired.”

Two other appointments of Trump loyalists to top positions indicate the scope of the extreme right-wing political takeover of the Pentagon. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Joseph Kernan, a retired three-star Navy admiral, was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a 34-year-old right-wing operative who gained positions in the military and intelligence apparatus based on his political connections with Trump’s former adviser Stephen Bannon and ex-National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, as well as with Jared Kushner. He proved himself to Trump by leaking secret CIA documents that were supposed to prove government spying on the Trump campaign to California Republican Representative Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and member of Trump’s transition team.

The fourth appointment was that of Kash Patel, who is replacing Jen Stewart as chief of staff of the defense secretary. Patel, a former staff member of Nunes, had previously been named to a position created especially for him on the National Security Council. Trump referred to him as a “Ukraine policy specialist,” and he was widely suspected of being part of the effort to pressure the Ukrainian government for damaging information about Joe Biden.

On Wednesday, the new acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, announced his first major appointment, naming retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor as his senior adviser. A frequent Fox News commentator, Macgregor has denounced the European Union and Germany for welcoming “unwanted Muslim invaders,” who, he claimed, had the “the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic state.” He has also derided attempts in Germany to deal with the crimes of the Nazis as part of a “sick mentality” and called for the imposition of martial law on the US-Mexico border. As a deliberate provocation, Trump tried to nominate the colonel as ambassador to Berlin.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has very close relations with the national security apparatus, cited speculation in the Pentagon command that Trump might be installing his handpicked loyalists to carry out accelerated troop withdrawals during his last days in office. He added, however, “A darker possibility is that Trump wants a Pentagon chief who can order the military to take steps that might help keep him in power because of an election result that he claims is fraudulent.”

William Cohen, former secretary of defense and Republican senator, told CNN that the administration’s shakeup at the Pentagon was “more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy.” Similarly, CNN cited an unnamed senior defense official as saying: “This is scary, it’s very unsettling. These are dictator moves.”

The placing of key levers of power within the massive US military apparatus in the hands of a cabal of fascistic Trump loyalists poses immense dangers to the working class in the United States and all over the world. With 68 days left until Inauguration Day, Trump’s tightened political grip over the Pentagon can be used to launch acts of military aggression and manufacture the pretext for a declaration of martial law and the suspension of constitutional and democratic rights.

Biden and the Democratic Party have treated the wholesale purge at the Pentagon as a “national security” problem, suggesting that the greatest worry is that Trump’s reshuffling of senior officials will weaken US imperialism vis-à-vis Russia and China. Above all, they are determined to conceal that Trump’s actions pose a serious threat to what remains of democratic rights and forms of rule in the United States.

Far more than the threat of a coup and dictatorship, the Democratic Party, representing the interests of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, fears an eruption of popular protest and mass resistance from below against Trump and his co-conspirators.

Trump, Republicans continue campaign to overturn election

Patrick Martin

Democratic President-elect Joe Biden increased his overall lead in the popular vote to more than five million Wednesday, with 77.4 million votes, the most ever won by a US presidential candidate, compared to 72.3 million votes for President Donald Trump.

Biden’s percentage of the popular vote reached 50.8 percent, as more votes were counted in the heavily Democratic West Coast states, which allow late-arriving mail ballots as long as they were postmarked by November 3. His share of the popular vote is the highest for any candidate challenging an incumbent president since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 landslide victory over Herbert Hoover, exceeding that of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (50.7 percent).

In this Nov. 2, 2020, file photo, a county worker collects mail-in ballots in a drive-thru mail-in ballot drop off area at the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

The former vice president maintained his leads in four closely contested states, with his margins actually increasing to 14,112 in Georgia, 36,726 in Nevada and 50,215 in Pennsylvania. Biden’s lead in Arizona fell to 12,813, but nearly every ballot has been counted there and both Fox News and the Associated Press “called” the state for the Democrat on election night.

Victory in those four states would give Biden 306 electoral votes, compared to 232 for Trump, when the Electoral College assembles in various state capitals on December 14. That assumes Trump maintains his 70,000-vote lead in the remaining “uncalled” state, North Carolina, which is awaiting the counting of tens of thousands of provisional, mail-in and military ballots.

The scale of Biden’s popular vote victory and his comfortable margin in the Electoral College—the same 306 electoral votes that Trump called a “landslide” when he hit that mark in 2016—only underscore the extraordinarily anti-democratic and ominous character of Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election. This intransigence has been backed by the vast majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, who have refused to acknowledge that Biden is president-elect.

Vote-counting, recanvassing and litigation continued in all the closely contested states Wednesday, with the Trump campaign failing to make any gains on the legal front. By one tabulation, Trump’s advocates were 0 for 10 in court decisions and had so far been unable to convince a single judge to delay the certification of the results.

In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, rejected demands from the state’s two Republican senators that he resign for alleged faulty oversight of the voting, in which both Republican incumbents were forced into a January 5 runoff against Democratic challengers. Raffensperger said there would be a hand recount of the more than five million votes cast in the state, affecting both the presidential race and the two Senate contests.

In Arizona, the state attorney general, Republican Mark Brnovich, said Trump was “very, very unlikely” to win enough of the remaining uncounted ballots to overcome Biden’s lead. “It does appear Joe Biden will win Arizona,” he told Fox Business, saying there was no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities in the voting or the vote-counting.

In Michigan, Republican challenges to vote-counting in suburban Oakland County, which Biden carried by a wide margin, were thrown out Tuesday. Overall, Trump’s defeat in the state, by a sizeable 146,000 votes, came from a swing against him among white working class voters, particularly in the Wayne, Oakland and Macomb County suburbs, compared to 2016.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign went to federal court seeking to bar the state from certifying Biden’s victory in Michigan. The resort to federal rather than state courts is significant, since it indicates an intention to begin a chain of legal appeals that would take the issue to the US Supreme Court, where Trump has appointed three of the nine justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed and sworn in just before the election.

In the most critical state, Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes put Biden over the top in the Electoral College, a Republican lawsuit was heard in Montgomery County, in the Philadelphia suburbs, which went heavily for Biden. The hearing included the following remarkable exchange in court, between Judge Richard P. Haaz and Trump campaign lawyer Jonathan S. Goldstein, over 592 mail ballots being challenged by the Republicans.

THE COURT: I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer. Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?

MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.

THE COURT: Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots?

MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.

On Monday, the most sensational allegation of Trump’s supporters in Pennsylvania, about systematic mail-ballot vote fraud in Erie collapsed when a postal worker who had come forward as a purported whistleblower admitted that his claims of ballot-stuffing were fabricated. The postal worker had received $130,000 in donations from right-wing sources before he made his admission. Senator Lindsey Graham, Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had all cited this false account as the basis for charges of vote fraud.

It is increasingly clear that the purpose of the flurry of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign is not to actually shift the results of the vote-counting, since there is no evidence of fraud and the number of ballots in question is too small to affect the outcome. The aim is to discredit the vote-counting as a pretext for Republican-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona to step in and name slates of pro-Trump electors, rather than the pro-Biden electors chosen by the voters.

There is tight timetable for Trump and his co-conspirators to engineer such an electoral coup in Michigan. Most Michigan counties have completed their mandatory recanvass of the balloting, and the state is on track to meet its November 17 deadline for certification of the vote. That would be followed by Biden electors assembling in the state capital, Lansing, to cast the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Not counting the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, Biden would have 227 electoral votes and Trump 232, creating an illusion of parity. Actually, Biden is leading in all six states by a combined total of 280,000 votes.

Trump needs to block the certification of Biden’s victory in at least four of these states in order to keep him below 270 in the Electoral College, or engineer the outright hijacking of electoral votes by the state legislatures, which are Republican-controlled in all but Nevada.

At least one state representative in Wisconsin, Republican Joe Sanfelippo, has endorsed the selection of Trump delegates for the Electoral College, setting aside the popular vote. He has been appointed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to a committee that is investigating the election results.

A group of Pennsylvania state representatives have backed a similar effort to steal that state’s electoral votes, or at least delay certification of a Biden victory, required by November 23, but the Republican leader of the state Senate has so far disavowed it. That is why Trump recently tweeted about the need to elect a new leadership for the Republican caucus in the Pennsylvania legislature.

In both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the state legislatures would have to defy state laws that award the state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most support from state voters.

As Trump and the Republican Party are well aware, their greatest asset is the cowardice and duplicity of their political opponents, Biden and the Democratic Party. Biden is doing everything in his power to downplay the dictatorial character of Trump’s moves, dismiss the danger to democratic rights, and politically disarm the population.

As the Socialist Equality Party (US) Political Committee explained in its statement (“Stop Trump’s conspiracy to nullify the 2020 elections!”) posted Wednesday on the World Socialist Web Site:

The only viable response to the conspiracy being hatched in the White House is the demand for the immediate removal of Trump, Pence and their co-conspirators.

This demand can be realized only through the independent intervention of the working class and the struggle to organize a nationwide political strike.

Trudeau leads Canadian establishment in hailing Biden's election victory

Roger Jordan

Canada’s ruling elite is elated with the Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the US presidential election.

The Trudeau Liberal government, much of the Conservative opposition, and most of big business and the corporate-controlled media are eager to see the back of Trump. This is because they view Trump as a liability to the common interests of North America’s twin imperialist powers, including Canada’s long-standing military-strategic partnership with Washington; and because they fear that his rampage against the working class, wanton indifference to the mass suffering causes by the COVID-19 pandemic, and coup plotting will trigger a social explosion that would quickly spill across the Canada-US border.

Justin Trudeau (Credit: Twitter)

They calculate that a Biden-led Democratic administration, should it come to office in January, will be better able to divert, defuse, and politically suppress mounting social opposition, and will pursue a more consistent and thought-out world strategy, enabling the US and Canada to more effectively advance their imperialist interests and ambitions, including through heightened aggression and war.

The Trudeau government gleefully boasted Monday that the Prime Minister was the “first world leader” to speak with Biden following his victory speech Saturday evening. Underscoring the Trudeau government’s hope that a Democratic administration in Washington will facilitate the pursuit of Canadian imperialism’s predatory interests around the world, the Ottawa press release reporting the call said that the pair had discussed “trade, energy, NATO, anti-black racism, and China’s arbitrary detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.”

Kovrig and Spavor were arrested by Beijing after Canada seized Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, in December 2018 at the behest of the Trump administration. Wanzhou remains under house arrest in Vancouver awaiting the outcome of a judicial hearing, in which Ottawa is arguing she should be deported to the US on spurious charges of breaking Washington’s punitive sanctions against Iran.

Federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was also quick to send his congratulations to Biden following the US television networks’ declaration Saturday that he had won the election. “Canada and the US have a historic alliance,” he tweeted. “Canada’s Conservatives will always work with the US to advance our common values and close economic ties.”

Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne spoke with similar enthusiasm Sunday about the prospects for a close partnership with a Biden administration. Invoking Canada-US collaboration in a series of bloody military conflicts over the years, stretching back to the two world wars of the last century, he told CBC, “We’ve seen for more than a century now this close relationship between our two countries. And we can be a force for good in the world.”

These honeyed phrases will sound like a cruel joke to the millions of people across the Middle East and Central Asia who have experienced death and destruction on a truly staggering scale over the past two decades in brutal US-led wars of aggression in which Canada has played an important role. From Afghanistan to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, Canadian and US forces are responsible for the deaths of millions, the forcing of millions more from their homes, and the destruction of entire societies. During the time Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Canadian troops were involved, alongside their US counterparts, uninterruptedly in aggression and war—all waged in the name of “democracy,” “human rights,” and doing “good in the world.”

During the past four years, the Trudeau government proved more than willing to collaborate with Trump on some of his most right-wing and reactionary initiatives, including his vicious witch-hunting of immigrants and refugees, and the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement to consolidate a US-dominated trade-war bloc against China and other international rivals.

Champagne paid tribute to this close cooperation in his Sunday interview, when he declared that Canadian officials would not rush to have meetings with Biden and his aides, because it is necessary to be “gracious” to the outgoing administration. Political niceties aside, the real reason for Champagne’s caution is bound up with the fact that Trump has refused to concede the election and is taking steps, with the support of the vast majority of the Republicans, to overturn the election and remain in power.

While Trump had, and still has, support among a minority faction of Canada’s ruling elite, the dominant faction strongly supported the right-wing campaign the Democrats mounted against him in league with sections of the US military-intelligence apparatus focusing on questions of foreign policy, not his real crimes against the American people. This included their denunciations of Trump for allegedly being too soft towards Russia, and ineffective in establishing an international coalition of “democracies” to confront China economically and militarily.

That said, it is widely recognized in Canadian ruling circles that even if Biden comes to power, the United States will remain mired in political and economic crisis, rooted in the vast erosion in the world position of Washington and Wall Street; and that if the Canada-US military-strategic partnership is to retain its effectiveness, Canadian imperialism will have to invest more militarily and politically.

The Democrats’ combination of a more aggressive foreign policy with reactionary identity politics is well suited to Trudeau and his Liberals. They will seek to use it to legitimize a further growth of the Canadian war machine, including the modernization of NORAD. While claiming to pursue a “feminist foreign policy” and fight “anti-black racism,” the Trudeau government, during its five years in office, has initiated plans to boost military spending by more than 70 percent by 2026; deported thousands of impoverished refugees to the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa; and further integrated Canada’s military into Washington’s military-strategic offensives against China and Russia, and in the oil rich Middle East.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland gave an initial indication of the type of political rhetoric that will be used to conceal the continuation and intensification of these reactionary policies in the years to come with a eulogy to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Freeland hailed this right-wing ex-chief California prosecutor as an “inspiration to women, girls and people of colour.”

These sentiments were echoed by New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh and Green Party leader Annamie Paul. Singh enthused that Harris has “sparked the imagination for generations of young women to come.” Singh, whose NDP has propped up the Liberal minority government during the pandemic as it bailed out the banks and financial oligarchy with over $650 billion in financial aid, resorted to the vapid slogan of the late NDP leader Jack Layton in a bid to convince people that the declaration of Biden’s victory changes everything. “As the Trump Presidency comes to an end I’m reminded of Jack’s final words‚ ‘Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair.’ So let us be loving, hopeful & optimistic. And we’ll change the world’,” he tweeted.

This is all hogwash. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly insisted, Trump did not emerge from the depths of hell, but merely expresses in the most crude, finished form the depravity and criminality of the American capitalist class and its social order. It reveals a great deal about the inanity and unseriousness of Singh and the NDP’s politics that at the very point where he informs his supporters that a Biden presidency can “change the world,” Biden’s deliberate and systematic downplaying of Trump’s coup plotting is creating the best conditions for the fascistic occupant of the White House to nullify the vote and cling to power.

Even if Biden manages to accede to the presidency on January 20, his government will be one of stepped-up austerity for the working class, attacks on democratic rights, and a further eruption of US militarism and war around the world.

Whatever their disagreements with the current American president, the main concern and fear of the Trudeau government and the Canadian ruling elite has never been Trump, but the potential emergence of a mass working class movement in opposition to the growth of social inequality, police violence, and his disastrous handling of the pandemic. Workers and young people will not forget that when Trump first indicated his coup plans by trying to illegally deploy the military last June to crush the mass protests triggered by the police killing of George Floyd, Trudeau refused to condemn his flagrantly anti-democratic actions.

Throughout the election campaign and in the days immediately following the vote, Trudeau and other leading ministers insisted that Ottawa would cooperate with whomever emerged victorious, Trump included. Trudeau studiously avoided making any comment on Trump’s explicit preparations to launch a presidential coup, and stated merely that his government was prepared for “disruptions” following the election. Unlike political leaders in Europe, who for their own reasons have criticized Trump’s refusal to concede defeat, Trudeau and other government members continue to avoid all comment on the matter.

This approach enjoys the full backing of big business, whose principal goal remains ensuring unhindered access to the US market, which continues to account for three-quarters of all Canadian exports. Reiterating the Globe and Mail’s infamous call, in response to Trump’s 2016 election and his trade war threats, for Ottawa to ensure that Canada is “behind Trump’s walls,” Mark Agnew, senior director of international policy for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, argued last week that Canada’s focus must remain on market access no matter who occupies the White House. Pointing to Biden’s “Buy American” commitments, Agnew stated, “Canada needs to make the case for the role we play in America’s economic security, and why North America should be treated as a region when thinking about supply chain security.”

Orchestra, opera musicians face severe pay cuts, furloughs, uncertainty in the midst of the pandemic

David Walsh

The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on artistic and cultural life. As the WSWS has repeatedly argued, however, the pandemic acts in many regards as an accelerant or amplifier, speeding up processes already under way. This is also true in the cultural sphere.

In the US, for example, the management of various orchestras, operas, museums and other institutions and cultural organizations are taking full advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to press forward with their demands as part of an offensive for pay and other cuts that has under way for more than a decade.

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall (home of the San Francisco Symphony)

As long ago as 2010, the WSWS reported that pay cuts had already been “imposed at symphony orchestras in Phoenix, Houston, Cincinnati, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Atlanta, Virginia, North Carolina and Utah, among other cities and states.” Orchestras in Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere have since faced major attacks—prior to the coronavirus outbreak.

In the current crisis, musicians and others no doubt hope that with the end of the pandemic what has been given up will be restored. That remains to be seen, but it is certain that nothing will be regained without an enormous struggle, with far-reaching political and social implications. Management may well side with Lady Macbeth, who reasoned that “what’s done cannot be undone.”

The musicians of the San Francisco Symphony are among the most recent to become victims of the combined effect of the pandemic and management action. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that the musicians would “take a 30 percent pay cut for the remainder of 2020 under the terms of a newly ratified contract revision” that went into effect October 18.

Management reported November 2 that the symphony had recorded a “cumulative revenue loss of $40 million by the end of the 2020-21 season as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” All of the orchestra’s live performances through the end of the calendar year have been canceled.

The Chronicle and symphony management take for granted that the musicians should see their living standards slashed. The San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors, however, is not some anonymous institution carrying out unavoidable measures in an impartial, godlike manner. It is composed in large measure of extremely affluent individuals, a good number of whom could afford to make up the revenue loss out of their own pockets, and not notice the difference.

Picking out symphony board members almost at random, one comes across enormous wealth. One of the members, for example, is Gordon P. Getty, of the Getty oil family, among the wealthiest individuals in the US, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. Another board member is Gregory E. Johnson, of Franklin Resources, perennially on the list of most highly compensated executives, whose total compensation was $10.4 million in 2019. John D. Goldman, multimillionaire insurance executive and major donor to the Democratic Party, sits on the board as well.

Michael Anders, also on the Board of Governors, is the founder of Iconiq Capital, referred to in the media as the “family office of tech billionaires,” including most prominently Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. John S. Chen, who was rewarded by BlackBerry in 2018 with a five-year contract including compensation valued at close $150 million in total, is also on the symphony’s board, along with Kausik Rajgopal, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the prominent management consulting firm, and Max Levchin, Ukrainian-born American software engineer and businessman, with an estimated worth of $300 million.

Meanwhile, the financial bloodletting for the artists continues. In September, the members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra had a 50 percent salary cut imposed on them under the terms of a contract modification. The opera’s General Director Matthew Shilvock gushed that the organization was “profoundly grateful to the Orchestra for its partnership in facing this pandemic.”

Percussionist Patti Niemi (Photo credit–San Francisco Symphony)

However, according to the Chronicle, percussionist Patti Niemi, speaking for the musicians, commented that the latter “faced a grim choice between ratifying the agreement and losing their income and health benefits entirely.” Niemi noted that the musicians “had been hoping to collaborate” and come up with an agreement that only covered the period during which they were not performing, “But suddenly there was this pivot to issues like the orchestral vacancies that are unrelated to COVID.” She pointed out, furthermore, that management “also objected to a contract provision that would restore the salary cuts if ticket sales rebound in 2022-23.”

Dozens of orchestras exacted major pay cuts and furloughs in March and April, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony and many smaller ensembles. Some have come back for more.

The members of the Philadelphia Orchestra approved a deal in mid-October that reduced their compensation to 75 percent of normal pay retroactively to September 12 and through the middle of March 2021.

Members of New York’s famed Metropolitan Opera orchestra have been without any income since the onset of the pandemic. On Facebook in mid-October, the musicians asserted they were “the only world-class orchestra in America furloughed with no pay since 1 April.”

The Facebook post explains that already some 30 percent “of the orchestra members have been faced with moving outside of the #NewYorkCity area with many more families being forced to make challenging decisions each day due to the lack of economic compensation from the Metropolitan Opera and the lack of economic support from the Federal Government.” The Met musicians point out that the opera company’s “global reputation and the cultural landscape of New York City would be devastated by the loss of artists of this calibre. The social, educational, and economic impact these musicians have on their communities is immeasurable.”

Met orchestra musicians on NBC News

Met management counters by arguing that the opera “has been paying 100 percent of the cost of health care since the pandemic began and has also offered financial assistance from now until the summer as part of long-term contract proposals.”

The third horn of the Met’s orchestra, Brad Gemeinhardt, in a Zoom call from Michigan, told NBC News bluntly that “I would call this an enormous crisis in the artistic world in New York.”

Met orchestra principal flute Chelsea Knox told Classic FM: “I gave birth during the final performance at The Met on 11 March, 2020. I had only just received tenure for my job in the spring of 2019 and for me the Met Orchestra is my dream job.” When the pandemic hit, she explains, Knox and her husband, also a musician, “were suddenly faced with leaving our apartment and moving in with my parents to sort out our plan going forward as a family.”

“Emotionally the loss of identity has been as challenging as the loss of income,” Knox observes. “I expected new motherhood to be life altering, but being isolated with a baby and with no performances scheduled for the next year it has been hard to find balance. I’m not sure what my future as a musician looks like right now.”

This is an increasingly universal experience.

Thousands protest in Peru against impeachment, pandemic and economic implosion

Rafael Azul

Wednesday was the third day of mass protests across Peru. Thousands mobilized in protests against the political, economic and health crises racking this South American country. The demonstrators were met with water cannon and police repression.

On Monday, November 9, Peru’s Congress removed President Martín Vizcarra from office. The next day Vizcarra was replaced by Manuel Merino, president of the Congress. Demonstrations took place in various cities in opposition to Vizcarra’s ouster. As president until elections are held on April 11, 2021, Merino is also continuing to preside over congress.

Protesters confront riot police in Lima

Merino is the third president in the span of one presidential term; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Vizcarra’s predecessor, was elected in 2016.

Merino defended the congressional action, defining it as a “process of democratic transition” to defend the Peruvian nation and declaring that the assembly’s votes “were not purchased” and followed due process.

Vizcarra had been impeached for “permanent moral incapacity.” It was alleged that he had received bribes connected to construction projects in 2011-2014, when Vizcarra was governor of the southern province of Moquegua. The accusations are based upon plea bargains by other defendants, without any trial or even investigation having taken place.

Vizcarra’s removal resulted from the legislature’s second impeachment attempt. An impeachment attempt two months ago, allegedly for “influence peddling,” did not obtain the required two-thirds vote of the legislature.

The US State Department indicated that US officials were “following events closely.”

“We look to Peruvian institutions to uphold the constitution and the rule of law,” a spokesman declared. “We note that national elections are scheduled for April. As a region of democracy and prosperity, we call on Peruvians to continue to pursue their political ends via a peaceful, lawful, democratic process.”

Ironically and hypocritically, the statement came on the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a State Department news conference that there would be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” backing the attempt by the White House to overturn the results of the US presidential elections.

The State Department’s declaration had more to do with its desire to quell the popular reaction to Vizcarra’s removal than with any genuine defense of the democratic process.

In Lima, Peru’s capital, the decision to replace Vizcarra with Merino brought many people into the streets. On Monday night and Tuesday, crowds marched and rallied to protest the Merino’s appointment. A Tuesday protest march along the streets of downtown Lima was blocked from reaching the Congress building. In the course of ten hours of protests, dozens were arrested and several were injured by the police.

Protests are also taking place in the cities of Ayacucho, Cusco, Trujillo, Piura and Iquitos, centers of mining and industry.

While Vizcarra has denied all the accusations against him, political corruption has been endemic in Peru’s ruling elites. Vizcarra himself became president upon the resignation of President Kuczynski because of corruption charges in March 2018 involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Nearly every living Peruvian ex-president has been implicated in corruption probes.

Vizcarra’s removal was carried out by all the political parties represented in the legislature. Sixty-eight out of those who voted (out of 130 legislators) have themselves been accused of corrupt practices and are barred from running again for office.

Vizcarra’s removal and the appointment of Merino have taken place in the context of a deepening social and economic crisis. In addition to its government being racked by accusations of corruption, Peru is an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the highest per capita COVID-19 mortality rate in the Americas.

While the Peruvian politicians continue to enrich themselves through service to the country’s financial oligarchy and foreign capital, Peru implodes. By August of this year, Peru’s gross domestic product had declined 30 percent; unemployment is 40 percent higher than in 2019. Many companies have declared bankruptcy and Peru’s economy has yet to bottom out.

Tourism has contracted by 90 percent, construction by 67 percent and mining by 37 percent.

Like his predecessor, Vizcarra ruled as an enemy of the working class and agent of the mining cartels. In June, following three months of lockdown, without having stopped the coronavirus and under pressure from the ruling class, Vizcarra opened the economy, with devastating effects. Hospitals have run out of resources; the rate of new cases and deaths continues to accelerate. A regime headed by Merino will only deepen the attacks on the Peruvian working class.

West Virginia Kroger workers reject sellout agreement, vote overwhelmingly to strike

Zac Thorton

In West Virginia, workers for the grocery and retail giant, Kroger, have resoundingly rejected a pro-company sellout agreement which sought to impose higher health care costs and eliminate or reduce certain benefits for senior employees. In addition, workers have signaled their determination to defend their interests by voting overwhelmingly for strike action.

The proposed contract, which covers the Charleston-area Kroger stores, was rejected 1,551–130. The current contract, which was ratified in 2017, expired on August 29, but has been extended indefinitely while the company and the union continue to negotiate.

Under the proposed agreement, Kroger would place a cap on the amount of money it contributes to health care benefits, placing more of the burden on its employees. Beginning in 2021, this cap would be 10 percent, and by 2023 it would be lowered to 8 percent.

According to the Herald-Dispatch, Paula Ginnett, president of Kroger’s Mid-Atlantic division which oversees West Virginia, said that the proposal “included a $20 million wage investment that would allow associates to grow their hourly pay. Some associates, she said, could improve their rate by up to $4.65 per hour depending upon their position during the life of the next contract.” The reality is that the company’s increased pay offering will hardly alter the fact that Kroger workers receive poverty wages.

For the average full-time Kroger worker, the current contract lists starting pay as a meager $8.75 per hour, with increases every six months, capping out at $15.26 after 72 months. Under the proposed agreement, pay increases would take place on a yearly basis (referred to in the contract as “levels” numbering 1–4, with 4 being the maximum). For new hires on or after Nov. 1, 2020, starting pay would be $10 per hour. By 2023, a level 4 worker will cap out at $15 per hour. If they are “red circled,” they will cap out at $16.16 per hour. In the end, these small pay increases will be unable to offset the increased health care costs.

The move by Kroger to increase health care costs for its workers, under conditions of a global pandemic which has claimed the lives of over 230,000 people in the US alone, is an outright provocation. To date, West Virginia has over 30,000 total cases and 553 deaths. Now with the reopening of schools and the continuous erosion of basic safety measures, cases in the state have begun to surge.

Kanawha County, where Charleston, the state capital and largest city is located, accounts for the majority of the state’s cases, with over 4,000, and the highest total deaths with 117. Nearby Logan County has the second highest, with 48 deaths.

The union representing West Virginia Kroger workers is the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400. Fearing an explosion of working class anger in response to the company’s efforts to attack workers’ living standards, the union was forced to hold a strike authorization vote in order to save face in the eyes of its membership, as well as to buy more time to conspire with the company on a new sellout agreement.

Despite workers voting 1,490–199 in favor of strike action, the union will do everything possible to avoid a strike. This was pointed out by Kroger Mid-Atlantic Corporate Affairs Manager Allison McGee, who said, “Associates are continuing to report to work as scheduled. A strike authorization doesn’t mean a strike. At this point, the union has not called for a work stoppage.”

The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to James, a worker in Virginia for the supermarket chain Giant, who is also a member of UFCW Local 400. James was angered by the effort to attack Kroger workers’ health care, commenting, “They [Kroger] can afford anything. It’s had record profits during the pandemic.”

James stated that, after having his hazard pay eliminated while the pandemic still raged, he and other employees had received a mere $150 “bonus” from the corporation. “Even this was taxed,” he said, noting that when all was said and done, he only received $108. “Now they want to come after [workers’] health care? F––– that! We should all be on strike over this outrageous attack.”

The WSWS also spoke with a Kroger worker in Nashville, Tennessee. He remarked, “It’s awful, however, it isn’t surprising. Kroger isn’t known for its compassion, at least not among its employees. Some companies try to be profitable by making their employees proud to work for them (or so I’ve heard). Kroger is more thuggish about it, for lack of a better word.”

In order to defend their interests, the workers in West Virginia must take matters out of the hands of the pro-company UFCW and into their own. Throughout the pandemic, the union has done nothing to safeguard the lives of grocery workers, who, as genuinely essential workers, have been forced to remain on the job throughout the pandemic. It was not until the workers themselves started to take action that the companies began providing personal protective equipment and sanitation products. The Socialist Equality Party encourages all workers to form independent rank-and-file safety committees to protect their lives and defend their interests.