Bipartisan congressional group reveals threadbare stimulus plan

Jacob Crosse

On Monday, Republican and Democratic congressional members of the Problem Solvers Caucus released further details on the so-called “emergency relief framework” that was unveiled two weeks ago, with the full text of the bill slated to be released on Wednesday.

At a time when some 54 million people are food insecure, catastrophic job losses continue to climb, with over 1.3 million state and federal first-time applicants last week, and millions of people are behind on rent and mortgages, with between 2.4 and 5 million households facing eviction January 2021, according to Syracuse University professor Gretchen Purser, the so-called “emergency” relief is woefully inadequate to deal with the present crisis.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer at the Capitol (Credit: Flickr.com/AFGE)

The insulting measures were described at various points by multimillionaire politicians Joe Manchin, (D-W. Va.) Mark Warner (D-Va.) Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) as a “gift,” a “Christmas miracle” and a “ray of hope” to the population, with Manchin remarking that “cooperation and bipartisanship are alive and well in Washington.”

While there are plenty of “gifts” to businesses and banks in the proposed legislation, for students, jobless workers, and those facing eviction and their families, the bill provides lackluster support, if anything at all.

Due to alleged disagreements between the big-business parties, the $908 billion package has been split into two separate bills, a smaller $160 billion bill which includes funding for state, local and tribal governments as well as a coveted “liability shield” that would relieve business of responsibility for any COVID-19-related injuries suffered by workers or patrons.

The sweeping language provided in previous iterations of the liability shield, and what appears to be in the new bill, would give companies a blank check to continue forcing workers to toil in dangerous, coronavirus-infested workplaces as long as the employer could prove they were “trying” to be “generally following applicable government standards and guidance.”

US “government standards and guidance” throughout the pandemic have been criminally insufficient, leading to over 305,000 deaths since February 6, or approximately one COVID-19 fatality every 40 seconds. It would also shield for-profit nursing homes that have been home to thousands of preventable deaths. The liability shield would last for approximately two years, a reduction from the five years in previous iterations of the bill.

Of the $160 billion allocated for state, local and tribal funding, approximately $91.2 billion would be for the states, $60.8 billion for counties and municipalities, with roughly $8 billion for tribal governments. Each state would get a minimum of $500 million. However, none of the funds could be used to pay for worker pension programs.

The second bill is a $748 billion package featuring $300 billion for the Small Business Administration (SBA), including a reported $288 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP has been a financial windfall for the well-off, politically connected, and large Wall Street banks, which, according to a recent investigation by the Miami Herald, have collected over $18 billion in fees. JPMorgan Chase leads all banks in profiting off the PPP, with over $1 billion generated in fees from PPP loans.

Should the second bill come to pass, it is nowhere near enough to address the catastrophic social, economic and medical crisis befalling the population, reflecting the ongoing indifference of the ruling class to the suffering of millions of workers and their families.

Funding for the $748 billion bill could be pulled from previously passed CARES Act legislation, which, according to testimony from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last month, would amount to approximately $580 billion, meaning less than $200 billion of the bill is actually “new” funding.

After $300 billion is allocated to the SBA, the remaining $448 billion in the bill is to be split among unemployment benefits, education, food assistance, healthcare provider relief, rental assistance, substance abuse prevention, broadband internet, transportation, testing, tracing and vaccine distribution.

For unemployed workers, the miserly federal unemployment benefits are to be extended for only 16 weeks at $300 a week, less than half of what was included in the CARES Act. While there have been “rumors” from anonymous congressional aides of a stimulus payment being added to the larger bill, at the present it does not contain $1,200 direct payments to people like the previous $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed nearly 9 months ago.

Of the $82 billion directed towards education, $54 billion is allotted for K-12 funding, with $20 billion dedicated to higher education. A summary of the “Bipartisan Emergency COVID Relief Act of 2020” notes that “targeted aid” will also be given to private and religious schools as well out of the education funding. The distribution of these funds is a key element in the ruling class “back to school” drive, which President-elect Joe Biden has promised to initiate within the first 100 days of his administration.

Funds to actually fight the virus and distribute the vaccine total about $48 billion, with $35 billion going to health care providers, $2.6 billion allocated to the Centers for Disease Control vaccine distribution and infrastructure. Another $3.4 billion would be provided in the form of “grants” to cities and states for storing and transporting the vaccine with another $7 billion allocated to states for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

The package extends the federal eviction moratorium, but only until the end of January 2021, leaving it up to the incoming administration to enact an executive order to extend it at the end of the month if another deal is not reached in time. In leaked audio reported by the Intercept last week, Biden shot down proposals from supporters in a closed-door meeting requesting that he use the executive branch to carry out limited criminal justice reform, citing his alleged respect for “the Constitution.”

The $25 billion allotted for rental assistance comes with strings attached, including the stipulation that someone cannot receive more than 12 months’ worth of assistance. Considering that some 10 million jobs have yet to return since March, and for those workers who have found work, it has generally been for fewer hours and less pay, millions of people will likely require more than 12 months of assistance.

London becomes epicentre of pandemic in the UK

Robert Stevens

London, the capital and most populated area in the UK with nearly 9 million residents, is now the epicentre of the pandemic.

Every one of London’s 32 boroughs is seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases. In the week to December 9, London recorded 242 cases per 100,000 people—the highest rate of any region in England. This represented a 40.5 jump in cases on the previous week. One London borough, Havering, recorded the fifth highest rate of all new COVID-19 cases in England. There are more than 2,000 patients with Covid in London’s hospitals--up from just over 1,000 a month ago.

On Monday, Conservative Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that London, much of the adjacent county of Essex, and some of Hertfordshire, will be placed under the highest Tier 3 restriction level from midnight today. The Daily Telegraph cited a health ministry source who said that the latest data on infections in London was “terrifying,” and significantly worse than those of northern cities Liverpool and Manchester when they entered the highest tier. How catastrophic is the spread of the virus in the capital is clear in that Greater London’s population is over 3 times as large as Greater Manchester’s.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking on Monday at the government's Covid-19 Press Conference inside No10 Downing Street (credit: picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street--FlickR)

The engulfing of London’s population by the virus is the direct consequence of the government’s homicidal herd immunity policy. On December 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended a month-long national, albeit limited, lockdown, which did not include workplaces, schools or colleges, and brought in its ineffectual Tier system to “save Christmas”, i.e., the profits of the corporations at what is normally their busiest time of the year. This was accompanied by the criminal move, in the middle of a pandemic, to allow all shops nationally to open for 24 hours a day in December and January .

Shoppers were encouraged to flood the high streets, with the pro-Labour Party Daily Mirror's front page, “Go shop for Britain," typical. Encouraged by government propaganda and the media, for weeks London’s main shopping streets and shopping centres have been teeming with people packed together like sardines. London’s shops are national and international destinations. Nothing has been put in place to curtail the influx into London during the holiday season, enabling the disease to spread like wildfire and not just in the capital.

Keeping schools open since their re-opening in September, has had even more devastating consequences. Despite it being confirmed within days of this decision that schools were the cause of up to 50 percent of coronavirus infections in communities, they were kept open for the sole purpose of ensuring that parents were able to go to work.

After months of lies that schools were “Covid-safe” zones, the situation in London has blown these claims apart. On Sunday, the Royal Borough of Greenwich in the south east of the capital announced it was closing all its schools from the end of day on Monday and moving classes online. In an open letter the Greenwich’s Labour Party council leader Danny Thorpe declared that he had been briefed by “Public Health England that the pandemic in Greenwich is now showing signs that we are in a period of exponential growth that demands immediate action.” In just this one borough 90 schools, tens of thousands of children, and hundreds of thousands of people in their families are affected.

Greenwich’s infection rate shot up by 48.6 percent, from 151.4 per 100,000 to 225 cases per 100,000 people in the first week of December.

Greenwich is only the 14th worse borough in London for COVID infections. Havering, in the east of the city, recorded 1,314 new cases to December 9 and has over double the cases of Greenwich, with 470.8 per 100,000 people. Five London boroughs—Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Barking and Dagenham, Enfield, and Newham—are all in the top 25 areas with the highest rates in England.

On Monday, another London council, Islington, announced that it would close all the schools within its boundaries from the end of Tuesday and continue online learning until January 11. Islington Council leader Richard Watts, also Labour, said, "There is a serious and very worrying rise in coronavirus across London, with cases doubling every few days.”

Essex County Council announced that nearly all secondary schools in Basildon, just 26 miles from the capital, have moved to full remote education.

These measures are too little, too late. It is proven that the Tier system is inadequate to contain the virus. Under Tier 3, all shops are still able to remain open, with only pubs, restaurants and cafes having to close (except for takeaway services). Indoor entertainment venues such as cinemas, theatres and bowling alleys also close. Hancock confirmed that there is still no ban on people coming to London for pre-Christmas shopping, as he only advised that outside Tier 3 should not come to London for shopping.

The government is refusing to accept the move by the London councils to close schools. On Monday, Regional Schools Commissioner Claire Burton wrote to Greenwich and Islington councils threatening that, under schedule 17 of the Coronavirus Act 2020, the government “could make a direction to require schools to enable all pupils to attend full-time… I would ask you to reconsider your position immediately and retract your message to schools.”

The government has already used the extraordinary powers it has under the Coronavirus Act—that it passed in March and renewed in September with Labour backing—to ensure that schools were kept open in the north east of England.

Of all the UK’s cities the contrast between the richest and poorest is the starkest in London. Entire streets and gated communities are comprised of houses and mansions worth tens of millions, located just a stone’s throw from areas marked by entrenched poverty.

The central concerns of the Tories and Labour Party throughout the pandemic has been to ensure the profit interests of the capitalist class. In the lead-up to Hancock’s decision, former Tory leader and London MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, denounced to the Daily Mail any suggestion that London could be put into the highest tier as an “unmitigated disaster”. He insisted, “London is the powerhouse of the UK economy, we must not be moved into Tier Three”. Attacking the move in parliament after Hancock announced the measure, Felicity Buchan, Tory MP for Kensington, one of the most socially polarized areas on the planet and the location of the Grenfell Tower inferno, said in like fashion, “Whether this House likes it not, central London is the powerhouse of our national economy".

The main concern of Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan ahead of Hancock’s announcement was not for the safety of millions of people, but that the impending move to Tier 3 was "catastrophic to our hospitality, to our culture and to retail."

Khan has played a criminal role in the spread of coronavirus. Speaking to LBC radio Monday he said that the move to Tier 3 was a “blunt instrument” as the main sources of infections were not hospitality venues, but schools and colleges (he never mentioned workplaces). Earlier Monday, Khan and Georgia Gould, the chair of London Councils, wrote to Johnson calling for the closure from Tuesday of secondary schools, sixth forms, and further education colleges, and an expansion of community testing. “The biggest spread of the virus in the capital is within education settings and specifically amongst the 10-19 year old age group.”

Khan conceals the fact that he was instrumental in backing the government and opposition Labour Party’s back to school order in September. This led to over 250,000 school children in London being sent back to the classrooms, vastly increasing the spread of the virus.

London is the new epicentre of the virus, but it continues to spread nationally. Another 232 deaths were recorded yesterday with cases of COVID-19 increasing 14 percent in the last week. In the week to December 9, 208 out of 315 local authority areas recorded a week-on-week increase. With London’s population under Tier 3, this means that 34 million people will be in that tier and 21.5 million in tier two.

These appalling figures could be the tip of the iceberg, with Hancock announcing in parliament that a new variant of COVID-19 has been discovered that “may be associated with the fastest spread in the south-east of England.” He stated that “initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variants. We’ve currently identified over 1,000 cases with this variant, predominantly in the south of England, although cases have been identified in nearly 60 different local authority areas, and numbers are increasing rapidly.”

New data expose catastrophe of Turkey’s “herd immunity” policy

Barış Demir

The record COVID-19 case numbers in Turkey reflect the results of the murderous “herd immunity” policy of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, supported by the parliamentary opposition parties and trade unions. It shows that government “restrictions” on movement during the pandemic only aim to control the anger of the working class, not to halt the spread of the disease.

With nearly 30,000 daily cases, Turkey is in third place in the world after the United States and Brazil and now has risen to first place in Europe. The number of daily deaths—over 200 in recent days—is the highest since March 11, when the first case was detected in Turkey.

Until recently, the Turkish government has refused to announce real data over the pandemic so as to force workers back to work and contain public anger, making an arbitrary, unscientific distinction between “cases” and “patients.”

However, growing popular outrage against inadequate restrictions and figures announced by the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) and other institutions have forced the government to announce daily and total cases. On November 25, the Health Ministry announced 28,351 daily cases. The day before, it had announced only 7,381 “patients.”

Sources: Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Last updated: December 13, 2020

On December 10, the Health Ministry also announced that there had been 1,748,567 total cases since the pandemic began. Case and death figures are still not reliable, however, and are likely underestimates.

One of the world’s biggest cover-ups over the pandemic has taken place in Turkey as part of the criminal “herd immunity” policy implemented by governments all over the world in the interests of the financial aristocracy.

Turkish Medical Association (TTB) Chair Prof. Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı stated that the Health Ministry’s latest figures are not completely transparent: “The table mentions 20 million tests. We know that the positivity rates, which were around 10 percent in March and April, have increased to 30 percent since mid-November. ... [I]f there is a 15 percent average test positivity, the number of cases should be 3 million.” Experts also pointed out that it is unrealistic to record one-third of all cases in the last few weeks.

The Science Academy’s web site Sarkac.org reported that from March 12 to December 2 a total of 13.857 excess deaths occurred in Istanbul, compared to the 2015–19 average, based on Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality data. This number was almost equal to the number of total COVID-19 deaths (14,129) across Turkey announced by the Health Ministry. The number of deaths from COVID-19 in Istanbul has not been reported by the Health Ministry since October 25.

Head of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Cemeteries Department Dr. Ayhan Koç asked the following about rising deaths: “While there is an average of 200 funerals as daily every year, how did the number of funerals reach 400 in November this year, how will we explain this?” He added, “11,500 people lost their lives per month; the average of November of the previous years was 6,000. The excess 5,500 deaths compared to the previous years in November 2020 should also explain the doubling of funerals as well.”

Moreover, according to data from 20 municipalities accounting for 48 percent of Turkey’s population (nearly 41 million of 83 million people), the total death toll from infectious diseases was 21,084 as of November 23. However, Health Ministry figures on the same day gave only 12,511 official COVID-19 deaths for all of Turkey.

Last month, the Erdoğan government announced a nationwide curfew only for weekend nights; then the curfews were extended to weekdays, running from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Education is continuing online until the end of the year. Working hours for shopping centers, markets, barbers and hairdressers are limited to between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. And restaurants and cafés are open only for takeaway and deliveries.

The banner reads “Enough is enough! Full lockdown is essential to stop deaths!” Doctors of the Istanbul Medical Chamber stand in homage to Dr. M. Mustafa Kartal who died of COVID-19, December 11, 2020, Istanbul. [Credit: Istanbul Medical Chamber

These measures, however, do not, aim to contain the pandemic and save lives. On the contrary, they aim to contain growing opposition in the working class to the government’s response and lies over the pandemic. The government’s priority was summed up by Erdoğan. He said the curfew had to be implemented “so as not to disrupt supply and production chains in the country.”

That is, the government is prioritizing capitalist profits over human lives. As a result of these token restrictions, there has been no serious decrease in the pandemic in Turkey.

The same reactionary calculations are apparent in the government’s vaccine policy. Turkey has a population of more than 83 million, but Health Minister Fahrettin Koca recently said that the first batch of 20 million doses from the Chinese-developed CoronaVac vaccine will be received in December and January. The second batch of 10 million doses will arrive in February. Since two doses will be used per person, sufficient vaccination will not take place in a short time.

Millions of people will be denied a vaccine for months, but Koca could not deny that the vaccine brought from China was privately purchased by wealthy people.

All over the world, experts warn that COVID-19 will continue to be a danger for a long time and it is necessary to take full lockdown measures to avert hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths before the vaccinations can take effect.

Moreover, Turkey’s health care system is on the verge of collapse. In a recent statement, the TTB’s Central Council stated: “In many metropolitan cities, information from hospital administrators, local administrators, medical chambers, health and labor-occupational organizations are shared with the public. They say that public hospitals are full and that there is no space in intensive care units due to the increasing number of patients.”

The total number of health care workers testing positive exceeds 120,000, and 249 health workers have lost their lives as of Monday. Every day four or five of them die. While there was no improvement in working conditions for health workers, the government ignored their demands for COVID-19 to be considered an occupational disease.

The danger of a social explosion is so great that even the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) recently called for at least a 14-day lockdown. In fact, the CHP and its allies have only raised tactical criticisms against the government and did not oppose the financial aristocracy’s “herd immunity” policy. Moreover, in the face of increasing public anger, especially among health care workers over the collapse of the health system, trade union confederations including Türk-İş, Hak-İş, DİSK and KESK, and professionals’ unions were forced call on December 6 for a “full lockdown” against COVID-19.

They proposed to “stop the production in all workplaces and businesses except health, municipality, cleaning, energy, food production and sales for 21 days; implementation of a full lockdown; free COVID-19 tests; forming of pandemic committees at the workplaces; the uninterrupted payment of the wages of all the workers; and humane living wages for the unemployed people.”

This “demand” is empty, however: they made no call for protests or strikes to force the government to immediately implement these measures. In fact, all the union bureaucracies have been complicit in the government response to the pandemic. Their main concern is the same as that of the ruling class: to contain and suppress the growing anger among workers.

The pro-opposition DİSK declared on March 30 that in 48 hours it might invoke the constitutional right to not work in unsafe conditions. Ultimately, however, it did not call strikes. The KESK, also controlled by bourgeois opposition parties and their pseudo-left accomplices, openly supported the government’s back-to-school campaign in September.

15-year-old is assassinated while being treated in hospital in Mexico as homicides reach record levels

Angel Andres

On Sunday, a 15-year-old youth was shot and wounded and later assassinated while being treated for his wounds at the General Hospital of Tecate in the Mexican state of Baja California. Tecate sits on the US border and is home of the internationally known Tecate beer.

This shocking incident has unfolded amid record levels of both coronavirus cases and homicides across the country, which are placing intolerable burdens on the already underfunded health care system. The response by local authorities and the federal government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), which inflexibly prioritize capitalist profits over the lives of workers and youth, has only exacerbated the twin crises.

Mexico's National Guard (gob.mx)

While minimizing the danger of COVID-19 and seeking to normalize mass deaths, the AMLO administration refuses to carry out any policies to counter the widespread conditions of poverty and social inequality that lie at the root of the homicide levels and the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.

The government has projected that Mexico will reach 40,000 homicides by the end of the year, breaking 2019’s record of 36,476 killings. The bulk of the homicides are tied to organized crime and operations conducted by the Mexican police and military, ostensibly to combat the drug-trafficking cartels.

At the same time, Mexico has reported more than 1,250,000 coronavirus cases and 114,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, as hospitals in Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez and other cities begin to fill up. Hospital occupancy in Baja California has increased from 33 percent to 72 percent since early November.

At around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday, 15-year-old Martin W. was shot in the back. A local Facebook news service, CNR TECATE, reported the incident and showed the body of the young man being treated for a gunshot wound by the paramedics.

There was reportedly still hope that the youth would recover. After he was transported to the hospital and was being treated for his wounds, a gunman walked into the hospital with the sole mission of finishing him off. The gunman found the youth in the emergency wing of the hospital, where he delivered the coup de grâce as horrified medical staff looked on.

This sort of barbarism and unabashed act of criminality was once a rarity in the small city of 73,000 people. Nowadays, stories of execution-style murders are becoming ever more common. Organized crime is increasingly taking control of the city, even to the extent that cartel thugs can kill a young man in his hospital bed in plain view of the public.

These acts are already routine in large cities like Tijuana, which is located south of the border of San Diego, California, and 30 miles west of Tecate.

AMLO campaigned on the promise to solve the issue of violence, partly by removing the military from the streets, but homicides have kept increasing during the first two years of his tenure. While proclaiming a policy of “Hugs not Bullets,” he secured approval for a new National Guard, composed of military and former federal police, with total disregard for their long record of crimes, human rights abuses and involvement with the drug cartels themselves.

AMLO proved his salt by coming to the aid of General Salvador Cienfuegos, also known as the “Godfather,” by securing his return from the United States, where he was imprisoned and facing trial, and setting him free without charges. Cienfuegos was indicted by the US government on charges of providing the H-2 cartel with protection, taking bribes, and deploying the military against its rivals during his tenure as defense minister.

Mexican youth like Martin W. make up the vast majority of victims of organized crime and government operations in what constitutes a war against Mexican working class youth. Most homicide victims are young men under the age of 30 from the poorest layers of the population.

Recently, there have been protests by pseudo-left, anarchist and feminist organizations that have demanded that the authorities end the “femicides” in Mexico. In the capital of Mexico City, they occupied a Human Rights Commission building, chanting “Stop killing us.” AMLO criticized the protests as the wrong way to enact change. Last month, local police under AMLO’s Morena party in Cancún used gunfire to disperse a similar feminist protest as National Guard troops stood watch.

Pseudo-left organizations have focused their activism on the increased killings of women under the artificial label of “femicides” coined by the identity politics milieu. While there has been a horrifying increase in the killings of women, they form a small fraction of the overall homicides. Out of the 40,000 projected homicides, just over 3,000 of the victims will be women.

The bourgeois media and pseudo-left activists blame the homicides on a culture of violence in Mexico rooted in Machismo. Thus, they frame the problem as one of culture and identity. The enemy is not fundamentally the complicit government or organized criminal organizations with ties to the business elites and the state, but a long-ingrained hatred of women that supposedly lies deep within Mexican culture. This is patently false and hides the true causes of the homicide epidemic in Mexico, which are tied to Mexican capitalism under the auspices of U.S. imperialism.

The pseudo-left’s focus on “femicides” obscures the fact that the overwhelming majority of homicide victims, men and women alike, are drawn from the working class and the most impoverished layers of society. The immense inequality between the rich and poor in Mexico and oppressive poverty afflicting Mexican youth are creating conditions where organized crime thrives. It is a question of class and global capitalism.

This devastated environment creates the conditions in which both the cartels and state forces are able to recruit youth and send them to war against each other. The cartels have no respect for age or sex. They possess government-sanctioned impunity to dispose of Mexican working-class youth. Local, state, and federal authorities demonstrate complete indifference to the terrible conditions and suffering of the working class, which have now been vastly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mexican youth and workers need to join their international brothers and sisters to form their own independent political movement to get rid of the parasitic cartels and capitalists that are plundering their livelihoods and destroying their lives. Only an international socialist revolution can achieve this aim.

Chilean health unions suspend indefinite strike, provoking anger among workers

Mauricio Saavedra

Less than two weeks after calling an indefinite strike, public health unions announced December 6 its suspension as they re-entered negotiations with the ultra-right government of President Sebastian Piñera. The decision provoked widespread opposition among health workers who rightly accused the unions of preparing a “sellout.”

Patricia Valderas of the Confederation of Health Workers (FENATS Nacional) told CNN Chile that seven health unions had agreed to suspend the strike to demonstrate their “conscientiousness” towards the Chilean public under conditions where the capital city of Santiago has experienced a recent spike in coronavirus cases. By December 6, the total number of confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases in Chile reached 639,492 with 20,767 confirmed and suspected deaths.

Chilean healthcare workers march in Santiago. Banner reads “Less applause and more resources for Public Health”. (Credit: Guillermo Correa Camiroaga)

Valderas also told the CNN reporter that the unions were eager to conclude an accord with the government even if it meant reducing the so-called “COVID bonus.” A tripartite working group was agreed to on December 4 with the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Finance and representatives of the seven health unions with this end in mind.

“I think that in times of pandemic we can understand that they don’t want to give (the full bonus) but let’s reach an agreement and set up a roundtable to define that,” Valderas said appealing to the government not to “close (discussions) immediately, seeing that there were already agreements with the ministry.”

Valderas knows that if the ministry continues to stonewall, the unions will be left with an explosive situation difficult to contain. The bonus was originally offered to healthcare workers in June as a sop for the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic by the former Health Minister, Jaime Mañalich. The COVID bonus wasn’t even initiated the union bureaucracy, but rather by the parliamentary left congressmen who proposed giving a measly 500,000 pesos (US$645) to the workers at the coalface of the pandemic. Involved were the Stalinist Communist Party, the pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the Socialist Party who collectively control the leadership of the various union federations.

These political operators knew that they had to quell an incendiary situation. The deeply hated minister, Jaime Mañalich, was forced to resign following the scandalous exposure that he had been providing reduced coronavirus figures to the general public. For months, he faced hostile protests whenever he appeared at public hospitals. He was hated for his callous indifference to deplorable conditions and the spread of the virus especially among overstretched and burnt out staff, forced to sew masks, wear makeshift eye shields and don garbage bags for personal protective equipment from the onset of the pandemic.

The number of health professionals testing positive for COVID-19 has surpassed 37,500, and 72 workers have died due to the lack of resources and protective attire. Staff have been working 24, 36 and even 48-hour shifts due to the high number of workers falling ill, on top of insufficient staffing levels to begin with.

The latest Health Minister, Enrique Paris, has continued with the same “herd immunity” policies that aim to keep the country’s non-essential economic activity operational amid a threatened second wave. The ousted Mañalich in many ways served as scapegoat to protect not only the Piñera government, but the entire political caste that includes the parliamentary left, the true culprits in creating a systemic crisis in public health and causing so much wanton death.

Following the CIA-backed 1973 military overthrow of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, Milton Friedman, the principal figure in the Chicago school of economics, was called upon by Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet to devise a “free market” program based on the deregulation of the economy and privatization—abolishing the minimum wage, quashing trade unions, privatizing the pension system, state industries and banks, and lowering taxes on incomes and profits.

The main author of the dictator’s constitution was Jaime Guzmán, founder of the ultra-right and fascistic UDI and proselytizer of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Guzmán’s politically authoritarian and neoliberal economic philosophy enshrines the conception of the subsidiary state which meant guaranteeing private ownership and placing on the market all areas including education, health and social security, and utilities, including water. Any attempt at nationalization was strictly proscribed.

The Friedmanite free market nostrums, imposed through state terror and then consecrated in Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, were maintained and intensified under the Center-left coalition that took power in 1990 with the return to civilian rule—with the assistance of the corporatist trade unions that they dominate and whose primary concern has been to oversee the implementation of pro-corporate policies.

For the public health system, which copes with over 80 percent of the population who subscribe to the National Health Fund (FONASA), this has meant chronic underfunding, under-resourcing and understaffing for over four decades. Outside of 2020, the yearly budget has not exceeded four percent for many decades.

One of the ways this has been achieved is by keeping health professionals in a permanent state of employment insecurity and precariousness. Last year, the number of permanent staff running the entire public health system in Chile—a nation of 19 million—was an extraordinary 39,740 employees.

The majority of staff, which for 2019 consisted of 109,217 employees, are obligated to sign contracts for a maximum of one year, expiring every 31st of December. In some instances, such as at Tomé Hospital in Talcahuanot, the contracts of nurses, kinesiologists and other health professionals have been only partially renewed until March 31, 2021, even though they may previously have had ongoing employment at the institution for four to seven years.

Underneath contracted staff are the “personal a honorarios,” which roughly translates to independent contractors, who can be hired and fired at will. The 11,999 honorarios hired in 2019 lack the right to sick leave, annual leave or maternity/paternity leave or any of the productivity-linked bonuses. And on the lowest rung are the substitute and replacement workers (15,355 for 2019) who replace contract staff away for more than a fortnight. This highly precarious sector must remain registered and technically up to date if they are to receive any work.

Healthcare workers reacted angrily to the unions’ suspension of the indefinite strike. Over the last week, many have posted hostile comments on the union’s Facebook page. Many are demanding renewed strike action.

Victor Arriagada from a hospital in Concepcion said: “Always remaining as martyrs without receiving any reward… We are already tired, they restricted our vacations, some of us still continue to take 24-hour shifts. Who thinks about us? Damned dictatorship in which we are surviving, they make fun of us and still do not give us what we deserve. Hopefully, there will be an indefinite strike, enough of putting others first.”

Erica Perez from a family health center in Temuco said: “We do not live on applause. What do they expect us to do with 380 lucas (US$514 per month) that I earn? A complete family depends on me. I am a replacement and I do not get any bonus. Let’s fight so that for once we are all equally respected.”

Tatiana Saldías said: “A mockery...lack of respect for the people that have been working so closely with this pandemic on exhausting shifts...we are physically and mentally exhausted and this is how they recognize our work.”

Janet Herrera from Santiago said: “now (the unions) say they’ve been disrespected, when they have lifted the strike. What did they expect? Pressure is created by fighting and not being sellouts to the government. We need leaders who are the voice of the members (not) inconsequential leaders who do not represent us.”

Claudia Flores, also from Santiago: “They should have called an indefinite strike today already! What are they waiting for? They just go out and make a show of being indignant and blah blah blah. They have me fed up!!!!”

Hugo Barrientos from a hospital in Talcahuano said: “Listen this is the same crap as every year. It’s all stitched up, damned sellouts as always including the C.U.T. (Workers’ Central).”

Nicol Hidalgo a nursing technician from La Serena wrote: “A voice is telling me NATIONAL STRIKE.”

The healthcare unions’ latest demands are an insult added to the injuries inflicted by the ultra-right government. They are calling for a four percent increase for monthly incomes of 3,000,000 (US$4,085) and under, but outside the upper stratum of employees no-one receives such an income. This is revealed in their other demand to increase the minimum salaries of assistants to 409,000 (US$557); of administrative staff to 455,000 (US$619), technicians to 484,000 (US$659) and for professionals to 850,000 (US$1,157). These are starvation wages that the unions will help impose!

No faith can be placed in these thoroughly corrupted and pro-corporate organizations. The resources and wealth collectively produced by millions of workers is hoarded by a parasitic financial and corporate aristocracy and defended by the state, its institutions and the political parties that serve their interests.

Human life, health, welfare and livelihoods will take priority only when the working class breaks with bourgeois politics, especially the Stalinist PCCh, the pseudo left Frente Amplio and the establishment left, who accept the confines of parliamentary legality, capitalist private property and production for profit. The working class must expropriate all socially created wealth and place it in public hands.

Editor of New Zealand’s major corporate think tank exposed as a bigot

Tom Peters

A December 11 Newsroom article by Marc Daalder revealed that New Zealand Initiative (NZI) chief editor Nathan Smith had a personal blog that “attacks Muslims and Jews and espouses incel [misogynist] ideology.”

The NZI is New Zealand’s most significant big business think tank. Its representatives are frequently interviewed in the media and publish op-eds advocating lower taxes, cuts to social services and other pro-corporate policies.

Photo from Nathan Smith's since deleted profile on the New Zealand Initiative website (Credit: https://nzinitiative.org.nz/)

The think tank is funded by international corporations including Google, British American Tobacco and MasterCard; and New Zealand’s five major banks, Fletcher Building, Countdown supermarkets, Contact Energy, Genesis Energy, Mainfreight and Vodafone, among others. The Universities of Auckland and Waikato, and Wellington City Council are also listed as members.

In short, the NZI represents the interests of dominant sections of New Zealand’s capitalist class. Smith, who resigned following the Newsroom article, played a major role in the think tank for at least a year. He edited and co-wrote numerous publications and interviewed people for podcasts.

Many of these items were erased from NZI’s website over the weekend, along with a brief biographical profile which had stated that Smith “brings deep experience writing about business and policy from his eight years as a reporter for the National Business Review, ” where he wrote “weekly columns on foreign affairs and trade [and] coordinated the newspaper’s feature section.”

Smith’s personal “Likebulb” blog, which has been deleted, contained views not very different to those of the fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, and far-right groups such as Action Zealandia.

Newsroom reported: “In a post from April 2018, Smith outright says he ‘just [doesn’t] like Arabs or Africans.” In April 2020, Smith wrote: “While not all Jews encourage immoral behaviour (from a Christian perspective), most people who do tend to be Jewish. Same with influential positions in the West. Not all Jews are in those spots, but nearly all those spots are filled by Jews… The answer to why Jews keep being kicked out of Christian countries is Jewish behaviour.”

In October 2020, he wrote: “The word ‘racism’ is a propaganda tool to pathologise normal human behaviour. Preferring your own race is a survival tool—like eating or sleeping.”

Responding to the Christchurch terror attack, Smith wrote on March 24, 2019: “There is no such thing as racism.” He called for Muslims to “forgive” Tarrant, adding: “Unfortunately, I have never heard a Muslim or a progressive forgive.”

Like right-wing extremists internationally, including the Trump administration in the US, Smith downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, declaring that hospitals had inflated the death count.

NZI director Oliver Hartwich told Stuff he was “gobsmacked” to read about Smith’s views: “I almost fell off my chair… His sub-editing was extremely good, the podcast extremely good… we had no idea. I’m horrified.” Hartwich, who has known Smith for several years, said all publications Smith was involved in were being “vetted for any traces of his views.”

The National Business Review (NBR), New Zealand’s main financial newspaper, has remained silent about the fact that it employed an anti-Semite as a feature writer between 2012 and 2020.

It is scarcely credible that Smith’s colleagues in the NZI and NBR had “no idea” about his views. Several of his NBR articles in 2012 contained a link to his Likebulb blog.

Hartwich told Radio NZ that Smith’s “public writing in the [NBR] was very good and didn’t expose any of these issues.” In fact, his NBR articles frequently had a right-wing, militarist character and contributed to the demonisation of Muslims as potential terrorists. Smith defended mass surveillance by the US-led Five Eyes alliance, including New Zealand’s spy agencies; criticised the exposure of war crimes by WikiLeaks, and praised New Zealand’s alliance with US imperialism, including preparations for war against China.

An article on July 13, 2012, praised New Zealand’s participation in US-led naval exercises and the US military build-up against China’s increasingly capable navy. In January 2013, Smith wrote that NZ should send special forces to join the French war in Mali. On February 28, 2013, he hailed the CIA propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty, which glorifies the criminal war in Afghanistan and falsifies the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Smith’s November 2014 article, “‘Jandalled jihadis’ a growing threat in NZ,” which NBR appears to have removed from its website without explanation, inflated the supposed “threat” of Islamic extremism to justify “anti-terror” legislation that further expanded the state’s power to spy on the population.

The fact that Smith could fit in comfortably at the NBR and the NZI points to the increasingly far-right views held by the corporate elite and its media lackeys.

The NZI is a reactionary organisation dedicated to defending social inequality and the control of big business over all government policies. Its predecessor, the Business Roundtable, founded in 1986, played a key role in advising the then-Labour Party government as it launched a full-scale assault on the working class. Labour slashed taxes for the rich, deregulated the finance industry, privatised the railways, telecommunications and other industries and implemented tens of thousands of redundancies.

In its “Briefing to the Incoming Government” two months ago, the NZI advised Jacinda Ardern’s government to deepen its attack on workers by slashing the minimum wage “and re-introduc[ing] lower youth minimum wage rates.” It called for the reinstatement of charter schools to cut education spending, and for lifting the age of pension eligibility by two years.

The elevation of fascistic politicians and policies internationally, including in the US, Brazil, India, Hungary, France and the Philippines, is part of the ruling-class response to the unprecedented growth of class tensions, exacerbated by the pro-corporate response to the pandemic and the economic crisis.

Similar developments are underway in New Zealand. From 2017 to 2020, the Labour Party governed in a coalition with the Greens and the right-wing nationalist New Zealand First Party, which repeatedly agitated against Chinese, Indian and other immigrants, and demonised Muslims in terms like those used by Tarrant and Smith.

The Labour government’s anti-immigrant policies are intended to divert workers’ anger over soaring unemployment and the housing crisis. It has also promoted militarism, defending NZ and Australian war crimes in Afghanistan and strengthened New Zealand’s integration into US war plans against China. The views espoused by Smith, no less than the Christchurch terrorist, reflect this broader political environment.

Canada’s far north Nunavut Territory faces major COVID-19 outbreak

Alexandra Greene

Until early November, Canada’s sparsely populated Nunavut territory was among the few inhabited places on the planet that had not seen a single case of COVID-19. Located in Canada’s remote far north, the territory was able to remain COVID-free for eight months after the virus took hold in North America, by implementing strict travel controls and social distancing in grocery stores and other places.

However, as a second wave of the pandemic developed in Canada’s south this fall as a result of the reckless back-to-work and back-to-school policies pursued by the federal and provincial governments, the virus inevitably found its way into the territory. After the first COVID-19 case was reported last month, the virus quickly spread, forcing small and isolated Nunavut communities to cope with major outbreaks in the midst of harsh winter conditions.

Sanikiluaq, Nunavut in December (Wikipedia)

Only residents and essential workers were permitted to enter the territory as of March 24. Those coming from elsewhere who were approved to enter the territory had to undergo a mandatory 14-day period of self-isolation beforehand in either Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton or Yellowknife.

Health officials and community leaders in the territory knew that if the pandemic were to begin spreading in the isolated region, the consequences would be dire. The population of Nunavut, standing at just over 39,000—85 percent of whom are Inuit—has been burdened with simultaneous crises for many years. A chronic housing shortage, a food insecurity crisis and a decades-long struggle with tuberculosis are the main hardships already faced by those living there.

In 2018, the federal government committed to ending TB among Inuit by 2030. But after just two years of effort, progress was officially stalled in January 2020 due to a lack of funding. Rates of tuberculosis among the Inuit are 300 times higher than those observed in non-Indigenous, Canadian-born citizens.

Advocates for tackling the TB crisis in Nunavut acknowledge that the problem is inextricably bound up with a housing crisis, food insecurity and high levels of unemployment.

Varied stressors of poor living conditions oftentimes allow for the disease to become active in a carrier, and this fact combined with the affected population living in overcrowded housing and suffering from malnourishment mean the likelihood of transmission is very high.

Tuberculosis is a disease caused by bacteria that most commonly affect the lungs, causing chest pain, coughing and a host of other symptoms. A 2011 Globe and Mail article labelled Nunavut as “one of the world’s worst places for respiratory health”.

Based on these factors and many others, COVID-19 reaching the territory was a grim prospect, with the potential to cause mass suffering and death.

On November 6, Nunavut’s chief public health officer announced the first official case within the territory. The infected individual was in the small Hudson Bay community of Sanikiluaq, where only about 850 people live. All residents of the community were instructed to remain at home and limit contact with others as contact tracing and exposure tracking measures were put into place. Two days later, a second infection in Nunavut was announced out of the same town.

Just 12 days after the first case was announced, Nunavut had a total of 70 confirmed COVID-19 infections. As of November 28, the territory was into the triple-digits of case numbers, with 131 active cases.

On December 2, lockdown restrictions imposed two weeks earlier were lifted for all areas except the hamlet of Arviat. Although the number of active cases has eased somewhat, there were still 49 active cases in Nunavut as of yesterday. The community of Arviat is especially affected, reporting nine new cases yesterday.

Over 640 people who have potentially been exposed to the virus are being “followed” by the Government of Nunavut. The official Nunavut Department of Health website page recording COVID-19 information states that “persons followed includes individuals with specific symptoms and exposures as well as others who are self-monitoring or self-isolated,” but this statement is followed by a disclaimer noting that not all of these individuals have symptoms or require testing.

Arviat, a community of approximately 2,550 people, is now seeing families confined to their homes as winter arrives. The problems of overcrowded and inadequate housing are thus compounded.

Families are speaking out about the difficult living conditions that they are struggling to cope with. Cecilia Akammak, an Arviat resident, spoke to CBC News about how her household of 11 people has gone without hot water throughout the duration of the outbreak. The family’s boiler is broken, and at a time when hygiene and sanitation to limit the spread of the virus is of the utmost importance, Cecilia has had to boil water to disinfect surfaces and to provide her family with water to simply wash their hands.

Cecilia lives with her husband, children and grandchildren in a three-bedroom public housing unit. The Nunavut Housing Corporation says only emergency repairs are possible, as maintenance staff with the local housing authority are self-isolating. Consequently, Cecilia’s boiler cannot be fixed at this time.

Another Arviat resident, Jennifer Aulatut, told CBC News that the water in her household is yellow and makes her children sick. As a result, Jennifer buys fresh water at the store, yet due to financial constraints that is not always possible. Usually, when a situation like this occurs or the 60-year-old dilapidated home her family resides in needs repairs, she will stay with other family members in a different house. However, currently that is not possible due to lockdown measures.

These terrible conditions are faced by many other households in Nunavut, where 54 percent of Inuit peoples live in “hidden homelessness.” This means that they have no home of their own but are not visibly living on the street. Approximately one half of the 39,000 people living in the territory do so in overcrowded housing. As of 2016, 36.5 percent of the population were in “core housing need,” more than double the rate in any other province or territory.

The desperate housing crisis and rampant poverty confronting wide sections of Nunavut’s population are exacerbated by the longstanding problem of exorbitant food prices. Major retail chains offload the cost of shipping food to the far north by charging exorbitant prices that make it impossible for most people to eat a healthy diet. A kilogram of asparagus costs over C$32 in Iqaluit in January, while an apple averages around C$1.50. According to Food Banks Canada, it costs a staggering C$1,846 per month to feed a family of four in the community of Taloyoak, compared to C$868 in the national capital, Ottawa.

Government policies have actively contributed to the worsening food crisis. In 2011, the federal government implemented the Nutrition North Canada (NNC) program, which provides subsidies to retailers, supposedly to reduce prices for customers. However, this hardly ever occurs, both because the government does not enforce price controls and because the retailer receiving the subsidies is often the only store one can shop at in the entire community. According to a 2019 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, food insecurity in Nunavut’s 10 largest communities increased 13.5 percent following the introduction of the NNC, which replaced a scheme known as Food Mail, which subsidized food shipments via Canada Post.

Labor helps expand Australian spy agency’s secret interrogation powers

Mike Head

Last Thursday, just as parliament shut down for the year, the opposition Labor Party joined hands with the Liberal-National Coalition government to pass a bill to significantly expand the police-state powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

In just a matter of hours, the ASIO Amendment Bill was pushed through both the House of Representatives and the Senate with virtually no debate, accompanied by lavish praise for ASIO, the main domestic political surveillance agency.

The legislation allows ASIO to secretly interrogate teenagers as young as 14, rather than 16. It also extends ASIO’s coercive questioning powers beyond alleged terrorism-related activity to suspected “foreign interference,” “espionage” and “politically motivated violence.”

People can be detained by ASIO for up to 24 hours and forced to answer questions if the spy agency suspects that they have information about plans for such activity. If they refuse to answer a question, or provide an answer considered misleading, they can be jailed for up to five years. Moreover, they can be imprisoned for five years if they alert or inform anyone that they have been interrogated.

Despite its far-reaching implications for free speech and other core democratic rights, the bill’s passage went almost completely unreported by the corporate media. The political and media elite are seeking to keep the public in the dark about the growing power of the intelligence apparatus.

When this unprecedented power—effectively detention and interrogation without trial—was first introduced in 2003, it was presented by the Coalition government and Labor as an exceptional but necessary tool to extract information from anyone who might know of a potential terrorist plot.

Once more—as the WSWS warned from the outset—previously unheard-of powers that were originally imposed under the cover of protecting the public in the post-2001 “war on terrorism” have been expanded to cover fields far beyond terrorism. In particular, the legislation covers political activity that governments and ASIO deem “extremist” or coordinated with a “foreign” or international organisation.

This dovetails with the bipartisan commitment to back the escalating US confrontation against China, and the associated denunciations of the Beijing regime and its unsubstantiated supposed “foreign interference” in Australia.

The expansion of ASIO’s powers also points to preparations to try to suppress political discontent amid the increased poverty and social inequality resulting from the official response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and worst economic crash since the 1930s Great Depression.

Even 14-year-olds can now be interrogated for up to 24 hours at a time, without being charged with any criminal offence, in order to demand that they provide ASIO with “information.” A security-vetted lawyer can be present, as long as he or she does not “unduly disrupt” the questioning.

Under the amendment bill introduced by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, ASIO’s power to detain and question people for up to seven days, which has never been used officially, will be removed, but the questioning power will become more far-reaching.

The new law allows the attorney-general to issue ASIO questioning warrants, rather than a judge, and to do so orally in an “emergency.” It also permits police to search individuals they are interrogating and to seize items, such as phones, that could be used to alert other people to the questioning.

ASIO also will be able to place “tracking devices” on cars or in people’s bags with only internal ASIO approval, rather than a warrant.

As the WSWS explained when the bill was first unveiled in May, the expansion of ASIO’s interrogation powers “is another warning of plans to crack down on any views regarded as a threat to the capitalist political and economic order.”

The “foreign interference” laws do not only target China and its alleged local sympathisers. They can be used to outlaw political opposition, anti-war dissent and social unrest by alleging that it is connected to “foreign” campaigns.

These activities could extend to anyone opposing Australian involvement in a US-led military conflict with China, as part of a global fight against the danger of war.

According to a legal advice commissioned by the reformist lobby group GetUp, published in October, the bill could allow ASIO to coercively question journalists and members of civil society organisations, including those involved in international environmental and human rights advocacy.

The Labor Party’s role in helping push the legislation through was consistent with its record. It has either agreed to, or itself legislated, every one of the 140 “national security” laws since 2001. In fact, Labor had already given in-principle backing to the bill in May, before it went to parliament’s intelligence and security committee for fine-tuning with a number of minor amendments.

ALP deputy leader and shadow home minister Kristina Keneally (Photo: Wikimedia)

Speaking in the Senate last Thursday, Labor’s shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally specifically re-emphasised her party’s support for extending ASIO’s questioning power to cover “politically motivated violence, including terrorism, foreign interference and espionage.”

Keneally underscored the unity with the Coalition by quoting former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who said: “There is no set-and-forget when it comes to national security.” She echoed the government’s anti-China scare campaign, saying: “We acknowledge that foreign interference and espionage are at heights not previously seen in Australia, including at the height of the Cold War.”

Keneally concluded by paying tribute to ASIO, hailing it for “keeping Australians safe,” while using its powers “judiciously and sparingly.” Officially, the questioning powers have been used 16 times since 2004, but as Dutton had inferred in May, the powers have been used more often informally to pressure people into providing information or collaborating with ASIO.

Far from keeping ordinary people safe, ASIO has a decades-long record of spying on, harassing and conducting dirty tricks operations against socialists, militant workers and others, even church groups and Labor politicians, regarded as opponents of the political establishment.

Several federal and state inquiries conducted in the 1970s proved that ASIO and the state police special branches with which it collaborated, kept extensive files on the activities and personal lives of thousands of members and supporters of left-wing organisations, trade unions and anti-war groups.

Today, ASIO and its partner agencies, such as the Australian Signals Directorate, continue that function as members of the global US-led Five Eyes mass surveillance network, which is increasingly focussed on Washington’s confrontation with China.

Labor is no less committed than the Coalition to the alignment behind the US escalation of the economic and military drive to prevent China from challenging Washington’s post-World War II global dominance.

As Keneally’s remarks underscore, Labor is also equally devoted to suppressing domestic discontent amid the worsening danger of involvement in catastrophic US-led wars.