Health and Wealth in India – Farmers’ Lives Matter

Colin Todhunter

To appreciate what is happening to agriculture and farmers in India, we must first understand how the development paradigm has been subverted. Development used to be about breaking with colonial exploitation and radically redefining power structures. Today, neoliberal dogma masquerades as economic theory and the subsequent deregulation of international capital ensures giant transnational conglomerates are able to ride roughshod over national sovereignty.

The deregulation of international capital flows has turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, governments could to a large extent run their own macroeconomic policy without having to constantly seek market confidence or worry about capital flight. However, the deregulation of global capital movement has increased levels of dependency of nation states on capital markets and the elite interests who control them.

Globalisation

The dominant narrative calls this ‘globalisation’, a euphemism for a predatory neoliberal capitalism based on endless profit growth, crises of overproduction, overaccumulation and market saturation and a need to constantly seek out and exploit new, untapped (foreign) markets to maintain profitability.

In India, we can see the implications very clearly. Instead of pursuing a path of democratic development, India has chosen (or has been coerced) to submit to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend, giving up any pretence of economic sovereignty and leaving the space open for private capital to move in on and capture markets.

India’s agri-food sector has indeed been flung open, making it ripe for takeover. The country has borrowed more money from the World Bank than any other country in that institution’s history. Back in the 1990s, the World Bank directed India to implement market reforms that would result in the displacement of 400 million people from the countryside. Moreover, the World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ directives entail opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds and compel farmers to work to supply transnational corporate global supply chains.

The aim is to let powerful corporations take control under the guise of ‘market reforms’. The very transnational corporations that receive massive taxpayer subsidies, manipulate markets, write trade agreements and institute a regime of intellectual property rights, thereby indicating that the ‘free’ market only exists in the warped delusions of those who churn out clichés about ‘price discovery’ and the sanctity of ‘the market’.

What could this mean for India? We only have to look at the business model that keeps these companies in profit in the US: an industrialised system that relies on massive taxpayer subsidies and has destroyed many small-scale farmers’ livelihoods.

The fact that US agriculture now employs a tiny fraction of the population serves as a stark reminder for what is in store for Indian farmers. Agribusiness companies’ taxpayer-subsidised business models are based on overproduction and dumping on the world market to depress prices and rob farmers elsewhere of the ability to cover the costs of production. The result is huge returns and depressed farmer incomes.

Indian agriculture is to be wholly commercialised with large-scale, mechanised (monocrop) enterprises replacing family-run farms that help sustain hundreds of millions of rural livelihoods while feeding the masses.

India’s agrarian base is being uprooted, the very foundation of the country, its (food and non-food) cultural traditions, communities and rural economy. When agri-food corporations like Bayer (and previously Monsanto) or Reliance say they need to expand the use of GMOs under the guise of feeding a burgeoning population or to ‘modernise’ the sector, they are trying to justify their real objective: displacing independent cultivators, food processors and ‘mom and pop’ retailers and capturing the entire sector to boost their bottom line.

Indian agriculture has witnessed gross underinvestment over the years, whereby it is now wrongly depicted as a basket case and underperforming and ripe for a sell off to those very interests who had a stake in its underinvestment.

Today, we hear much talk of ‘foreign direct investment’ and making India ‘business friendly’, but behind the benign-sounding jargon lies the hard-nosed approach of modern-day capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was for English peasants whose access to their productive means was stolen and who were then compelled to work in factories.

The intention is for India’s displaced cultivators to be retrained to work as cheap labour in the West’s offshored plants, even though nowhere near the numbers of jobs necessary are being created and that under the World Economic Forum’s ‘great reset’ human labour is to be largely replaced by artificial intelligence-driven technology under the guise of a ‘4th Industrial Revolution’.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Those who remain in farming will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

Cocktail of deception

A 2016 UN report said that by 2030, Delhi’s population will be 37 million.

One of the report’s principal authors, Felix Creutzig, said:

“The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.”

The drive is to entrench industrial agriculture, commercialise the countryside and to replace small-scale farming, the backbone of food production in India. It could mean hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work. And given the trajectory the country seems to be on, it does not take much to imagine a countryside with vast swathes of chemically-drenched monocrop fields containing genetically modified plants and soils rapidly degrading to become a mere repository for a chemical cocktail of proprietary biocides.

Transnational corporate-backed front groups are also hard at work behind the scenes. According to a September 2019 report in the New York Times, ‘A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World’, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies. The article lays bare ILSI’s influence on the shaping of high-level food policy globally, not least in India.

ILSI helps to shape narratives and policies that sanction the roll out of processed foods containing high levels of fat, sugar and salt. In India, ILSI’s expanding influence coincides with mounting rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Accused of being little more than a front group for its 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, ILSI’s members include Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone. The report says ILSI has received more than $2 million from chemical companies, among them Monsanto. In 2016, a UN committee issued a ruling that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, was “probably not carcinogenic,” contradicting an earlier report by the WHO’s cancer agency. The committee was led by two ILSI officials.

From India to China, whether it has involved warning labels on unhealthy packaged food or shaping anti-obesity education campaigns that stress physical activity and divert attention from the role of food corporations, prominent figures with close ties to the corridors of power have been co-opted to influence policy in order to boost the interests of agri-food corporations.

Whether through IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programmes, as occurred in Africa, trade agreements like NAFTA and its impact on Mexico, the co-option of policy bodies at national and international levels or deregulated global trade rules, the outcome has been similar across the world: poor and less diverse diets and illnesses, resulting from the displacement of traditional, indigenous agriculture by a corporatised model centred on unregulated global markets and transnational monopolies.

For all the discussion in India about loan waivers for farmers and raising their income levels – as valid as this is – the core problems affecting agriculture remain.

Financialisation

Recent developments will merely serve to accelerate what is happening. For example, the Karnataka Land Reform Act will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land, resulting in increased landlessness and urban migration.

Eventually, as a fully incorporated ‘asset’ of global capitalism, India could see private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – being injected into the agriculture sector. A recent article on the grain.org website notes how across the world this money is being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns.

This process of ‘financialisation’ is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming and who are merely in it to make money. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

This financialisation of agriculture perpetuates a model of commercialised, globalised farming that serves the interests of the agrochemical and seed giants, including one of the world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness.

Cargill trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

While this model of corporate agriculture is highly financially lucrative for rich investors and billionaire owners, is this the type of ‘development’ – are these the types of companies – that will benefit hundreds of millions involved in India’s agrifood sector or the country’s 1.3-billion-plus consumers and their health?

Farm bills and post-COVID

As we witness the undermining of the Agricultural Produce Market Committees or mandis, part of an ongoing process to dismantle India’s public distribution system and price support mechanisms for farmers, it is little wonder that massive protests by farmers have been taking place in the country.

Recent legislation based on three important farm bills are aimed at imposing the shock therapy of neoliberalism on the sector, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector for the benefit of large commodity traders and other (international) corporations: smallholder farmers will go to the wall in a landscape of ‘get big or get out’, mirroring the US model of food cultivation and retail.

This represents a final death knell for indigenous agriculture in India. The legislation will mean that mandis – state-run market locations for farmers to sell their agricultural produce via auction to traders – can be bypassed, allowing farmers to sell to private players elsewhere (physically and online), thereby undermining the regulatory role of the public sector. In trade areas open to the private sector, no fees will be levied (fees levied in mandis go to the states and, in principle, are used to enhance market infrastructure to help farmers).

This could incentivise the corporate sector operating outside of the mandis to (initially at least) offer better prices to farmers; however, as the mandi system is run down completely, these corporations will monopolise trade, capture the sector and dictate prices to farmers.

Another outcome could see the largely unregulated storage of produce and speculation, opening the farming sector to a free-for-all profiteering payday for the big players and jeopardising food security. The government will no longer regulate and make key produce available to consumers at fair prices. This policy ground has been ceded to market players – again under the pretence of ‘letting the market decide’ through ‘price discovery’.

The legislation will enable transnational agri-food corporations like Cargill and Walmart and India’s billionaire capitalists Gautam Adani (agribusiness conglomerate) and Mukesh Ambini (Reliance retail chain) to decide on what is to be cultivated at what price, how much of it is to be cultivated within India and how it is to be produced and processed. Industrial agriculture will be the norm with all the devastating health, social and environmental costs that the model brings with it.

Of course, many millions have already been displaced from the Indian countryside and have had to seek work in the cities. And if the coronavirus-related lockdown has indicated anything, it is that many of these ‘migrant workers’ have failed to gain a secure foothold and were compelled to return ‘home’ to their villages. Their lives are defined by low pay and insecurity after 30 years of neoliberal ‘reforms’.

Today, there is talk of farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines and monitored by drones with lab-based food becoming the norm. One may speculate what this could mean: commodity crops from patented GM seeds doused with chemicals and cultivated for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed by biotech companies and constituted into something resembling food.

Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are even more smallholder Indian farmers to be displaced from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

It raises the question: what does the future hold for the hundreds of millions of others who will be victims of the dispossessive policies of an elite group of powerful interests?

The various lockdowns around the globe have already exposed the fragility of the global food system, dominated by long-line supply chains and global conglomerates. What we have seen underscores the need for a radical transformation of the prevailing globalised food regime which must be founded on localisation and food sovereignty and challenges dependency on global conglomerates and distant volatile commodity markets.

The ICC refuses to prosecute UK war crimes in Iraq despite “reasonable” evidence

Jean Shaoul

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has abandoned its inquiry into war crimes committed by British troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.

The decision is a green light to the major powers to ignore international criminal and humanitarian law when pursuing their imperialist interests throughout the world.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced the decisions even as she admitted there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that British armed forces may have carried out atrocities, including the willful killing of detainees held in custody in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.

Fatou Bensouda (credit: Max Koot Studio - Own work)

She admitted that this was not simply a case of a few “bad apples,” but stemmed from institutional failings, saying, “[My office] further found that several levels of institutional civilian supervisory and military command failures contributed to the commission of crimes against detainees by UK soldiers in Iraq.”

The ICC’s shameless decision hinges on citing its remit stipulating that it can only proceed to a formal investigation and prosecution if it deems that the domestic courts and investigative bodies have failed to fulfil their proper legal functions.

Bensouda stated that Britain had set up the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) in 2010 in response to the “admitted failures of the British army at the time to conduct effective investigations.” IHAT investigated 3,405 war crimes allegedly committed by British troops during the occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2009. But despite evidence of widespread abuse and mistreatment, including the killing of unarmed civilians and children, she noted that no charges had been brought against any soldiers—“a result that has deprived the victims of justice.”

Rejecting the notion that these claims were vexatious, as the government has sought to imply, Bensouda claimed that the failure to prosecute meant that the investigations had failed to find sufficient evidence to warrant action being taken or to provide a realistic prospect of conviction in a criminal trial. Her remarks clearly implied that the authorities did not find the evidence because they did not want to. Nevertheless, she concluded there was no proof that the British authorities had blocked any investigations or were unwilling to pursue them.

With that sleight of hand, Britain was off the hook. So long as there had been a domestic investigation, the ICC would not prosecute, whatever the evidence.

Bensouda’s statement nevertheless confirms that IHAT was a fraudulent effort on the government’s part to claim that war crimes evidence was being investigated to combat the growth of widespread anti-war sentiment, while successfully forestalling any ICC prosecution.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) was clear on the significance of the decision. Clive Baldwin, HRW’s senior legal adviser, said, “The UK government has repeatedly shown precious little interest in investigating and prosecuting atrocities committed abroad by British troops. The prosecutor’s decision to close her UK inquiry will doubtless fuel perceptions of an ugly double standard in justice: one approach to powerful states and quite another for those with less clout.”

The UK’s civil courts and public inquiries have found extensive evidence of torture by British forces in Iraq—with most of the allegations focusing on the conduct of British military interrogators—forcing the government to pay out millions of pounds in out-of-court settlements to avoid criminal prosecutions.

On the government’s own admission, it has received so many complaints from Iraqis unlawfully detained and mistreated by British troops that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) says it is unable to say how many millions of pounds have been paid to settle the claims. The MoD claims it can give approximate figures for the thousands of Iraqis who have lodged complaints against British forces involved in the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, but it has refused to answer a Freedom of Information request by the Middle East Eye (MEE) website about the amount spent settling these claims, citing the cost to collate the information.

In 2017, replying to a similar request, the MoD disclosed that it had paid £19.8million in 326 cases brought before the UK courts and that £2.1 million had been paid out in a further 1,145 cases by British military officials in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. This payment included £2.8 million paid to the family of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel receptionist, who was tortured to death in September 2003.

The MEE believes that the number of payouts has ballooned since 2017, given the MoD’s “approximate figures” showing around 1,200 cases in the UK and another 3,200 cases in Iraq.

A parliamentary report into the IHAT investigation, which called for it to be closed down, acknowledged that Iraqi prisoners had been abused, saying that this was apparently, in part at least, due to the “inaccurate” training British military interrogators had received, which put them at risk of breaking the Geneva Conventions. Not only did the report suggest the abuses had a systemic character, it also stated that the MoD’s admission that training material for interrogations “contained information which could have placed service personnel outside of domestic or international law represents a failing of the highest order.”

This would place responsibility for the abuse of Iraqi detainees not just on the individual military interrogators but the higher echelons within the military and Ministry of Defence, which the government was not prepared to countenance. It demonstrates how much is at stake for the ruling establishment as the commitment to militarism and defence spending grows, along with preparations to use the military at home in the context of Brexit and the pandemic.

Days later, the then Minister of Defence Sir Michael Fallon announced the closure of the IHAT investigation, ostensibly because one of the human rights lawyers, Phil Shiner, from the now-defunct law firm Public Interest Lawyers, in charge of many of the abuse allegation cases, was struck off for misconduct.

It contrasts starkly with Britain’s treatment of WikiLeaks journalist and publisher Julian Assange. Assange’s only “crime” was to expose war crimes—including killings, torture, abuse—regime-change operations, and global spying committed by the US and its allies, including Britain. In the eyes of the ruling class, whistle-blowers, not the perpetrators, are the real criminals. Assange sits in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, dubbed the UK’s Guantánamo Bay—amid the spread of COVID-19 throughout the facility—as the US seeks his extradition to face jail for life, if not execution, on US Espionage Act charges.

It was precisely because the evidence in some cases was so damning that in 2014 ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had accepted a complaint alleging UK military personnel had committed war crimes against Iraqis in their custody between 2003 and 2008 and ordered a preliminary investigation.

This was the first time the ICC had opened an enquiry into a Western state. Previously, the ICC had focused almost exclusively on African heads of state or officials, while allowing the US—not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2002—and the other major powers get off scot-free.

The imperialist powers that orchestrated these criminal wars are determined that they should never be brought to account for their war crimes. In June, the Trump administration sought to discredit the ICC, announcing sanctions on the ICC’s senior officials, including Bensouda, blocking their assets in the US and banning them from entering the country. This was in response to the ICC’s investigations of US abuses in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. The ICC has duly bowed to the pressure.

The British government has introduced legislation proposing a five-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill creates a “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including torture and the mass murder of civilians.

The legislation will further serve to protect the MoD, which has repeatedly covered up war crimes committed by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby putting the military above the law and sanctioning war crimes by British forces. It signifies that the UK, like the US, has abandoned any commitment to the post-World War II international order.

Protests erupt in New Caledonia over sale of nickel mine

John Braddock

Roadblocks established by protesters in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia have been lifted after demonstrations and riots over the sale of the Vale nickel plant had cut key roads in the capital Noumea last week.

Last month, French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu declared France would not tolerate what he called “a mess” in the territory as rallies and blockades began over the planned sale of the plant. Speaking in the National Assembly in Paris, the minister said no one should have any illusion that protesters can “do whatever they want.”

Nickel processing site in southern Caldonia (Image credit: vale.com)

The leadership of the main pro-independence group, the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), shut down further protest action this week after agreeing to join talks with Lecornu and the anti-independence parties over the sale, having previously refused to talk.

Protests erupted again on November 8 and 9, with cars torched, shops vandalised and people injured in clashes with police. Videos posted on social media showed police firing teargas and cars burning. Twelve people were arrested. French riot police were deployed in several areas while an elite squad was sent to the Vale plant, which was damaged and forced to shut.

The protests, which caused the cancelation of international flights and closed the SLN-owned Thio mine, prompted the anti-independence parties, led by President Thierry Santa, to organise a large counter march in central Noumea last weekend.

Brazilian-owned Vale has repeatedly threatened to shut its Goro plant, which would result in thousands of job losses within the company and the wider economy. Vale eventually signed a binding agreement this month to sell to an international consortium, Prony Resources.

Indigenous Kanak leaders and pro-independence parties, backed by the trade unions, have supported a bid by local company Sofinor in partnership with Korea Zinc Co, arguing that majority ownership of the mine should rest with New Caledonians. Sofinor is the financial arm of the pro-independence Northern Province. Protests escalated after Korea Zinc pulled out claiming it could not get access to the site to do its due diligence.

The Sofinor bid was rejected by Vale and the French overseas ministry, which recognised the Prony consortium as the only viable option. Nickel is critically important in the defence industry, and has been designated a “strategic material” by Paris to ensure the French state can maintain a close watch over its production and distribution.

The Prony deal includes a 50 percent holding by local stakeholders, with 25 percent held by other undisclosed investors. It also provides a 25 percent stake to Trafigura, a Swiss commodities trader recently investigated by US authorities for alleged corruption in oil trading. The company has been involved in other scandals including dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, which caused a public health crisis that affected more than 100,000 people.

Goro is the world’s fourth-largest nickel ore producer and the region’s costliest industrial installation, directly employing 3,000 people. The industry is the territory’s biggest private sector employer, accounting for a quarter of all jobs. With the exclusion of tourism, nickel ore and derived metallurgical products represent about 97 percent of the total value of exports and 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings.

The dispute over the Goro mine sale erupted alongside the recent independence referendum, the second of three projected plebiscites. In October, the territory voted by a 53.3 to 46.7 percent majority in favour of remaining a part of France. Support for independence appears to be growing with a final referendum due in two years.

The conflict over ownership of the Goro plant between the pro-and anti-independence factions of the ruling elite has nothing to offer the working class. While the FLNKS calls for independence from France, it represents the interests of a relatively privileged layer of Kanaks who are seeking a larger slice of the economic pie and greater political say.

The nationalist movement—formed by a layer of educated Kanaks radicalised while studying in France during the late 1960s dropped its socialistic phrase-mongering following the 1988 Matignon Accord with Paris, which set aside the independence issue for 10 years, in return for political and business opportunities.

As elsewhere, the globalisation of production has completely undermined the program of national economic regulation on which nationalist movements such as the FLNKS were based. The tiny island states in the Pacific that were granted nominal independence in the 1970s and 1980s are completely dependent on the major powers economically and strategically.

Vale has lost billions with its New Caledonia plant, which has run at a deficit for 15 years. During 2015, the price of nickel on the world market fell by more than 40 percent, ending the year at $US8,100 a tonne. This was below the cost of production for more than two-thirds of the world’s mines. The New Caledonia industry recorded losses of $US1 billion for 2015 alone. According to Bloomberg, the Goro mine produced at a cost of $US20,000 per tonne that year.

There is also widespread opposition, particularly among youth and the local Kanak population, to the unregulated activities of the mining companies that cause major environmental degradation, often on traditional native lands. In 2014, the Goro plant was shut for three weeks after 100,000 litres of effluent containing acid entered a creek, killing about 1,000 fish and sparking protests at the mine site.

The oppressed Kanaks, who make up 44 percent of the territory’s 270,000 population, invariably bear the brunt of destructive corporate activities. Under French colonial rule, the Kanaks are socially disenfranchised and many still live in primitive, subsistence circumstances in rural villages. Noumea is a polarised capital, where many low-paid workers live in slum conditions.

Whoever ends up owning the Vale plant will inevitably carry through an assault on jobs and working conditions to restore profits. The drive to austerity is further intensifying under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is devastating the economies of all the Pacific states and territories.

Broad sections of the New Caledonia working class, including miners, processing workers, truck drivers, airport workers and others have engaged over recent years in militant struggles to defend jobs and conditions, bringing them into conflict with the entire ruling class.

Invariably, these struggles have been sold out by the trade unions. Workers cannot fight to defend their jobs, working conditions and social rights, however, within the straitjacket of the “pro-independence” parties and the corporatist trade unions, which accept the entire framework of profit accumulation, austerity and the capitalist nation-state system.

Brazil and Mexico report spikes in COVID-19 deaths as pandemic ravages Latin America

Tomas Castanheira

The two largest countries in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico, have reported accelerated growth of COVID-19 infections and deaths over the past month. They are coming close to surpassing the terrible peaks recorded earlier this year.

Yesterday, Brazil recorded the sinister milestone of 7 million COVID-19 cases, reporting 68,437 new infections—the second highest number in a single day since the pandemic hit the country in March. It also reported 968 deaths, the largest number since mid-September. The coronavirus death toll in Brazil is already 183,822, second only to the United States.

Workers at JBS meat processing plant in Rio Grande do Sul. (Credit: MPT)

Nevertheless, the numbers reported by Brazil on Wednesday were substantially lower than the reality. The state of São Paulo, which is reporting the highest absolute numbers of cases and deaths, did not release data yesterday, alleging a failure in its system. The day before, it had reported 4,412 contaminations and 232 deaths.

Mexico surpassed 115,000 deaths by COVID-19 on Tuesday, reporting 801 new victims. The country has recorded the fourth-largest number of deaths in the world. With extremely low testing rates, almost 30 times lower than the United States, daily infections have more than doubled in less than a month. On November 20, there were, on average, 3,958 daily cases and today, 10,564, according to Worldometer.

Throughout the Latin American region the virus is spreading savagely. In June, the WHO had declared Latin America the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, its countries have experienced practically a continuous wave of devastation.

The situation in Colombia is representative. About 170 people are dying every day from COVID-19 in the country. This average has remained almost the same for three months, after a peak of about 300 deaths a day in August. With the number of contaminations this week once again exceeding 10,000 per day, Colombia has more than 1.4 million cases and 39,356 deaths from the coronavirus.

About 170 people also die every day in Argentina, which has already surpassed 1.5 million cases and 40,000 deaths. A recent growth in the number of cases in the capital, Buenos Aires, considered the epicenter of the pandemic in the country, sounds the alert for a new surge in this South American country.

In a number of Latin American countries, health care systems are on the verge of collapse. Brazil, which until last week had 31,000 COVID-19 patients hospitalized, is already reaching maximum hospital capacity in several of its state capitals.

With a queue of over 600 COVID-19 patients waiting for a hospital bed, health professionals in Rio de Janeiro are being forced to choose between those who will have a chance to survive and those sent home to die.

On Sunday, Folha de São Paulo published an article on the routine of the doctors who do this work at the Rio de Janeiro Hospital Bed Regulation Center. One of the doctors told Folha: “It’s not as distressing as being on the hospital floor, of course, but we leave work mentally and emotionally very destroyed. Yesterday a [request for admission] was made for a woman who had just lost her child to COVID and was hospitalized.”

The situation is equally critical in Mexico. With more than 8,000 patients hospitalized, the country has reached its record of COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS). The IMSS director Victor Borja warned this week that 95 percent of beds are occupied in the state of Mexico. Borja stated that 700 COVID-19 patients in the region are waiting for treatment, in many cases, for a bed to be available.

In Panama, the hardest hit country in Central America, which is experiencing an exponential rise in infections, hospitals have entered into a state of collapse. With about 4.3 million inhabitants, Panama has almost 1,500 COVID-19 patients hospitalized. Health professionals are working double shifts of 16 hours to attend to the sick.

A new rise of contaminations in Peru, which has one of the highest death rates of COVID-19 per inhabitant in the world, is causing overcrowding of hospitals in the country’s north. In the Piura region, 95 percent of ICU beds are already occupied.

The catastrophic situation in Latin America is the product of the absolutely criminal policies of its capitalist governments in the face of the pandemic. Months ago they lifted every restriction on the spread of the virus, spouting lies about a supposed state of control of the pandemic.

The greatest representative of the policy universally pursued by the Latin American ruling classes is, not by chance, Brazil’s fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Since the pandemic hit Brazil in March, Bolsonaro has openly and continuously defended the infection of the entire population. In July, when Brazil reached 2 million cases of the disease, Bolsonaro declared a “war on lockdowns” in the name of the capitalist class, stating: “we cannot continue suffocating the economy.”

Notably, although they occupy allegedly antagonistic political camps, there are great similarities between Bolsonaro’s murderous attitude and that adopted by Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, from the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA).

López Obrador, just as Bolsonaro, has defended quack cures for the deadly virus, disregarded the use of masks, and incited the population to reject social isolation. AMLO, as the Mexican president is popularly known, prematurely forced the reopening of workplaces, especially of the auto parts industry, essential to reactivate the production chain linked to the US.

With Mexico reaching the worst state of the pandemic, López Obrador, for the first time, according to El Universal, called on the population to stay at home during the holiday season. “It’s only these 10 days,” he said. Help everyone, let’s take care of ourselves, because this way we avoid more contagion, [as well as] the saturation of hospitals. Anyway, we’re increasing the hospital capacity.”

This is pure hypocrisy. As it shifts its responsibility onto workers’ shoulders, the AMLO administration is doing nothing to prevent the disease from continuing to spread and kill hundreds every day. The priority of this bourgeois impostor, representative of the Latin American parties falsely identified as “left,” is to preserve profit flows for the capitalist elite.

The workers of Latin America must be aware that the situation of the pandemic is critical. Although governments in the region are announcing vaccination plans, which may begin later this month in countries like Mexico, experts say the vaccination process may well span through 2022. Meanwhile, the death toll is increasing faster every day.

Immediate action must be taken. Social isolation is the necessary measure, according to science, to interrupt the circulation of the virus in society. The wide circulation of people and family gatherings that usually are part of Christmas celebrations, represent a very serious threat. The effects of the recent Thanksgiving holiday on the increase in COVID-19 deaths in the US should serve as a tragic lesson to the international working class.

However, it is impossible to effectively guarantee social distancing and stop the wave of deaths without directly confronting the interests of the capitalist class. It is fundamental to shut down factories, commerce, transportation and all non-essential economic activities. Essential production should be defined by the working class itself according to its social interests, and must be carried out under safety norms formulated and supervised in collaboration with scientists and health professionals.

For as long as necessary, workers away from their jobs must have the full payment of their wages guaranteed. The resources for implementing this program exist in society, the central question is which class controls them. This truth is especially striking in Latin America, the most unequal region on the planet.

To fight for these measures, workers cannot count on the unions that claim to represent them officially. These organizations are, in fact, radically opposed to this program.

Trade unions—from those linked to López Obrador in Mexico, to those controlled by his allies of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil—are actively collaborating in the implementation of the corporate attacks on the working class and cover up COVID-19 cases and deaths in workplaces to guarantee the continuation of production.

Likewise, it is impossible to find any word in defense of such measures in the publications of the pseudo-left in Latin America and internationally. For these organizations, which represent the interests of upper-middle-class layers that are increasingly incorporated into the bourgeois state, any interference in the process of capitalist accumulation is ruled out. They are effectively giving political cover for the social murder promoted by the ruling class.

The defense of the lives of the broad strata of the world population is a matter of class struggle. The strikes and mass protests that spread throughout Latin America in the recent period signal the maturing of the consciousness of workers and youth toward the revolutionary tasks that they confront.

The most fundamental of these tasks is the construction of an internationalist and socialist leadership in the working class; that is to build Socialist Equality Parties throughout Latin America and around the world.

French President Emmanuel Macron tests positive for coronavirus

Will Morrow

French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a statement released by the presidential Élysée palace yesterday morning. Macron’s spokesperson Gabriel Attal reported that he had been tested on Wednesday evening, immediately after beginning to experience symptoms of a fever and dry cough. He has been placed in isolation for seven days. His symptoms are currently reported to be mild.

Numerous heads of state in Europe announced yesterday that they had been contacted by French authorities and told they were contact cases. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez dined with Macron without masks on Monday. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa is being quarantined preventively, having met with Macron on Wednesday evening. Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo is a contact case after meeting with Macron at the last European summit, and Charles Michel, the head of the European council, is in isolation.

French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for COVID-19, the presidential Elysee Palace announced on Thursday. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Francois Mori)

In the French government, Prime Minister Castex has gone into isolation, although he tested negative on Thursday, and will be tested again in seven days. The secretary of the Élysée palace, Alexis Kohler, is being isolated. Macron had also taken part in a working lunch with the heads of all Senate groupings on Monday, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Valérie Rabault of the Socialist Party, and Olivier Brecht. They are being tested, although are not officially designated contact cases.

There were statements of solidarity from other heads of European state, which are pursuing the same policy of ending even limited lock-down measures even as the virus spreads throughout the continent. Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen both tweeted statements of support. In the population, however, there was not the slightest sign of popular sympathy for the “president of the rich,” whose government is pursuing in all but name a policy of “herd immunity,” allowing the virus to spread throughout the population.

Given that the heads of state are subject to the most scrupulous screening measures, the fact that Macron was contaminated only underscores how contagious the virus is and the criminality of the policies he is pursuing.

The day before Macron was tested, France officially ended the very limited national lock-down that had been in place since the end of October. This was despite the fact that the number of daily cases never dropped under twice the official target of 5,000 which it previously declared would be required.

Unlike the first lock-down from March to May, this lock-down never closed schools or non-essential work. As a result, COVID-19 case numbers declined at a much slower rate; hundreds of thousands were consciously allowed to be infected. The government’s policy has not been motivated by the requirement to save lives, but to ensure that non-essential production and profit extraction could continue. Many thousands of people are being allowed to die. The partial lockdown was aimed only at preventing a social explosion that the ruling class feared would occur if the hospitals were completely flooded with the sick.

Even these limited restrictions are now being lifted, even as the slowing of the spread in the virus has begun to reverse, and is once again accelerating. Over the past two months, the seven-day rolling average declined, albeit at a much slower pace than during the first lockdown, to a minimum of just over 10,396 on December 5, just after the first loosening of restrictions at the beginning of the month.

It has since increased to 12,121, and new cases and intensive care unit admissions have risen every day this week. There were 2,850 people in intensive care on Tuesday, and another 289 deaths. On Wednesday, there were more than 17,000 new cases reported in 24 hours.

Millions of families are expected to travel home for the holidays, further accelerating the contagion. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Castex announced that “where possible,” parents would be permitted to not send their children to school on Thursday and Friday this week. Yet the government’s policy of keeping schools open has been justified with false claims that children are less contagious than parents. The government’s latest “offer” will be impossible for millions of families who are still forced to go to work.

Macron has declared that his government is determined to proceed with the reopening of schools after the holiday season on January 4 and will not be postponing the reopening. Keeping schools open is aimed both at ensuring that parents can continue to work, and pursuing a policy of “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to spread among children.

This is preparing an even greater disaster. On Tuesday, the head of the national scientific council, Jean-François Delfraissy, gave an interview with Le Parisien, in which he admitted that “we have arrived at a plateau, with a stagnation of new cases around 10 to 15 thousand cases per day. Probably because the virus is tied to the weather and the cold wave has favored its ‘recirculation,’ and because of the loosening of measures has permitted more movement in the population, and contamination, even if the French have respected the rules well.”

He added: “Could the present rebound survive until mid-January or later? The answer is yes, the model has not changed, the virus continues to circulate throughout winter. The arrival of the vaccines will not have an impact on the first trimester [four months] of 2021, and very little on the second. The beginning of the year will not be different from 2020.”

Delfraissy added that the vaccination campaign in retirement homes “will not begin before mid-January, and this will take until the end of April, possibly May, to immunize the 22 million most at-risk French people.”

Yet Delfraisy added that because “we don’t expect an epidemic increase before January 10, a priori, the return of classes must continue at the date expected.” The media is already discussing a likely “third wave.”

In other words, a vaccine is available that could save tens of thousands of lives, but will not be distributed for at least four months. Yet the Macron government is demanding that workers and students return to non-essential production and to school, leading to countless thousands more new cases of COVID-19.

Its policy is premised on a continued acceleration of the pandemic throughout the coldest part of winter, before any vaccine can be effective. This policy of death is premised on the defense of the interests of the French corporate and financial elite, and ensuring that nothing be done which could in any way impinges upon its profits.

In its statement released December 16, the Socialist Equality Party advanced the following essential demands for the working class to intervene into the crisis and prevent the further spread of the pandemic: 1) “All nonessential production must be shut down immediately”; 2) “All schools and universities must be closed to in-person learning”; 3) “a shutdown can be effective only to the extent that workers are fully compensated and have an income until they are able to return to work.”

Over 800,000 workers fall off payrolls, as poverty rockets in Britain

Julia Callaghan

This week, it was revealed that there are now an estimated 819,000 fewer people employed on company payrolls in Britain since the start of the coronavirus crisis in February. The figure was compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using PAYE (pay as you earn) tax data from HM Revenue and Customs.

The latest unemployment data shows an increase in October, up slightly from the previous month. However, the fact that approaching 1 million workers are no longer on the payroll, in comparison with those in work as the pandemic hit the UK at the start of the pandemic shows the scale of the crisis afflicting millions who have lost their jobs and livelihoods. Over a third of the fall in the number of workers on the payroll is accounted for by the hospitality sector.

Footprints in the Community food bank in northern England receives recent donation (Image credit: Twitter/Footprints_UK)

At the same time, the ONS reported that the number of redundancies hit a new record quarterly high of 370,000 in the three months to October.

The number of people claiming welfare benefits increased to 2.7 million in November, according to the ONS. This includes the unemployed, as well as those employed but on low incomes and reduced hours as companies can no longer offer them full-time employment.

Hundreds of thousands of workers and young people unable to find jobs face hardship and deprivation.

Several recent reports have exposed the shocking scale of poverty in the UK, as years of austerity and attacks on workers’ living standards are being compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.

A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) reveals that in 2019, even before the coronavirus outbreak, 2.4 million people in the UK had experienced destitution—a 54 percent increase in just two years. The 550,000 children among these who suffered represented a rise of 52 percent over the same period.

The JRF defines destitution as the inability to meet the conditions for “basic physiological functioning”, meaning a lack of two or more of shelter, food, heating, lighting, weather-appropriate clothing or basic toiletries. In income terms, after housing costs, this equates to less than a weekly income of £70 for a single adult or £145 for a couple with two children.

As well as the staggering escalation in the numbers of people experiencing destitution between 2017 and 2019, the destitution itself was also found to be more severe, with more households experiencing both lack a of multiple essential items and a very low income, or none at all.

In the wake of the pandemic, £350 billion was funneled into the pockets of the super-rich in business guarantees. However, less than a third of that sum (£100 billion) has been used to support the millions of working people who have lost their incomes. As a result, the JRF expects the number of people facing destitution to double. This means an estimated two million families, including a million children, face a serious struggle for life itself.

Official UK poverty figures covering 2020 will not be available until 2022, but the Legatum Institute has used up-to-date data to create a model of the likely level and distribution of poverty by this time. While praising the government’s “strength of reaction” to the pandemic, the right-wing Tory think tank nonetheless says that almost 440,000 people were plunged into poverty in summer 2020 and then almost 700,000 more in the winter. This puts the total number of people living in poverty in the UK at more than 15 million, or 23 percent of the population.

But even this is a conservative estimate compared to that of the New Economics Foundation, which has produced figures showing the number of people falling below the “minimum socially acceptable standard of living” having now reached an “eye-watering” 20.6 million—or around three in 10 people. “Worse still,” says the report, “this is set to rise further by the end of winter, to a total of 22.5 million living below the minimum income standard by April 2021, and 13.3 million below the threshold for especially high risk of deprivation.”

The worst affected are working people who have lost their income during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly young workers, and those in the lowest-paid jobs, who were already in a precarious financial situation, unable to cope with any unexpected costs or changes to their working situation.

Paltry welfare benefits do not provide a “safety net” from the harsh effects of job or income loss. Compared to other benefit systems around the world, the UK is winning the race to the bottom. Data from Human Rights Watch shows welfare support for children and families (as a proportion of GDP) was slashed in half between 2010 and 2018. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the UK benefit system now replaces just 13 percent of average earnings for single people and 20 percent for couples, against international averages of over 50 percent.

In addition to poverty-level benefit rates, the five-week minimum wait between filing a claim for Universal Credit (welfare) and receiving the first payment pushes many immediately into a desperate situation. Claimants are often forced to take out a “budgeting advance” to see them through these initial weeks, which then must be paid back through deductions to the already measly subsequent payments. This means that by the time their claim goes through, many are already in debt to the government. The JRF calls this “destitution by design”, with a Universal Credit claimant in its report quoted as saying, “As soon as my claim went through… I owed them £514… Because for six weeks, I had no income, so when I got the advance, that went on everything that I [already] owed… you’re just never catching up, because of the way it starts.”

The number of those claiming Universal Credit has doubled over the course of the year, rising particularly rapidly between March and May.

The UK’s largest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, agrees that this government enforced debt is a “core driver of destitution”. Almost half of those who used food banks this summer faced having money taken from their benefit payments by the government, with three quarters of those repaying Universal Credit debts.

In the six months from April to September, the Trust saw demand for its food parcels increase by 47 percent and estimates it could give out nearly 2.5 million meals in the run-up to Christmas, with two fifths of these set to go to children.

Revealing the precarious situation confronting many of the 16 million Universal Credit recipients, the meagre £20 weekly temporary uplift to the benefit introduced at the start of the pandemic has reportedly kept around 700,000 people, including 300,000 children, above the poverty line. The government is to remove this additional payment at the end of March, with many experts warning of the devastating effect this will have. Even with the extra £20 per week, the average benefit income of a family with children is still £2,900 a year less than it was in 2011. JRF director Helen Barnard said, “There is no conceivable scenario in which [the £20 top-up] will not be needed, and inaction risks a sharp rise in poverty.” Save the Children’ head of poverty, Becca Lyon, said, “Parents tell us they’re already having to go without meals or electricity when their money runs out—they simply cannot afford to lose over £1,000 a year.”

The approximately two million people on “legacy benefits” rather than Universal Credit have been excluded from the additional weekly £20. From April, these claimants, many of whom are disabled, will receive an “increase” of just 0.5 percent to their payment—equal to just 37p per week.

This month, tens of thousands receiving Universal Credit, who made their first claim at the start of the pandemic in March and have not worked since, will be told that their benefit payments will be capped. On average, that will make these households £250 per month worse off from January 2021, with many at immediate risk of destitution. Shelter housing charity chief executive Polly Neate said the benefit cap “limits families’ basic incomes to the point where parents have to choose between paying their rent or feeding their children. And too many get to the point where they have no choice, and homelessness becomes unavoidable.”

These same desperate and rapidly worsening living conditions faced by millions of people in one of the world’s “richest” countries are shared by hundreds of millions more internationally.

What is the impact of $37,000 of student debt on a worker’s life?

Emily Ochai

The average student in the United States today leaves college with $37,172 of debt from student loans. All told, national college debt stands at a staggering $1.56 trillion, the highest figure ever recorded for student debt.

A major factor in this immense rise in student debt has been the constant increase in college tuition, which has risen by 1,140 percent since the late 1970s. Despite this massive spike in college tuition over the last five decades, the median household income has remained unchanged since 1999.

More millennials, those aged 24 to about 40 years old, have a college degree than any other generation of young adults. In 2013, 47 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds received a postsecondary degree. For most, however, getting a college education has not led to a significant increase in quality of living.

Instead, millions of young people leave school shackled to the banks. This reality is having a staggering impact on the social behavior of an entire generation. Millennials are delaying life milestones such as buying a house, having savings or investments, getting married, starting a family, and pursuing a graduate degree.

For Gen Z, those younger than 24, the situation is gearing up to be the same, or even worse, due in part to the disastrous conditions caused by the pandemic. In fact, almost 50 percent of the high school class of 2020 changed their plans as a result of the pandemic according to a survey by Junior Achievement and the PMI Educational Foundations.

Of those who made a shift, 36 percent said they will not work, 32 percent decided to delay their start date for college, and 16 percent changed the career path they wish to pursue.

Under the current conditions, in which millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, student debt becomes even more debilitating. And, for millions of high school graduates, the prospect of piling up a mountain of debt in the face of an immense economic crisis is enough to deter them from pursuing a higher education at all.

For those working class youth who decide to take the risk, the impact will be deeply felt on all other aspects of their lives.

What exactly is the impact of $37,172 of student debt on a worker’s life? Below are 10 facts that illustrate the obscene amount of student debt held by young people and its lasting impact on their lives:

1. The total student debt in the US could be paid for in full by less than 2 years’ worth of the current US military spending, which now stands at $934 billion. The cost of one small diameter bomb could more than cover the average student debt load.

2. The number of hours of minimum wage work needed to pay in-state tuition and fees for each year of a four-year public college for the “Baby Boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964) was 510. For millennials, it is 1996. Millennials have taken on a staggering 300 percent more student debt than their parents’ generation.

3. More than 3 million people over the age 60 are still paying off college loan debt.

4. The average time to pay off student loan debt is 21.1 years. Assuming that a young person goes to college immediately after graduating from high school and takes only four years to graduate, that would mean the average age to complete paying off student loan debt would be over 43.

5. It takes only 16 seconds for Jeff Bezos to make the average students’ total student debt.

6. More than 4 in 100 Americans die with student debt. About 68 percent had credit card balances at the time of death. The next most common kind of debt was mortgage debt (37 percent), followed by auto loans (25 percent), personal loans (12 percent) and student loans.

7. The national average income for a service worker is $31,083, while the average student debt is $37,172. According to GlassDoor, the national average salary for Amazon Warehouse Worker is $28,677, approximately $8,500 less than the average national student debt. ZipRecruit announced that as of November 10, 2020, the average annual salary of a Starbucks Barista is $24,208 which is approximately $13,00 less than the average national student debt.

8. Student loan debt is the second highest form of consumer debt category in the United States according to research released in May 2019 by Federal Reserve Bank of New York Research and Statistics Group. Mortgage debt being the highest, student debt loan is higher than both credit cards and auto loans.

9. 32 percent of consumers filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy carry student loan debt. Of that group, student loan debt comprised 49 percent of their total debt on average. Student loan debt, by a wide margin, makes up the largest proportion of the average bankruptcy filer’s total debt if that filer also has student loan debt.

10. Compared to those without student debt, graduates with debt also have lower rates of attending graduate school, owning a home, and having savings or investments. A survey from the New York Times revealed that for people of age 20 to 45, for those who did not plan to have children, 13 percent raised having too much student debt as the reason.

The rise in student debt is part of an overall attack on public education overseen by both Democrats and Republicans. This includes the dismantling of public schools through privatization, the promotion of charters, and the transformation of universities into profit-making enterprises subordinate to the interests of giant corporations and the military-intelligence apparatus.

Student debt is without a doubt one of the most prominent issues for young people, affecting every aspect of their lives.

Under the current pandemic conditions, where emergency or unexpected expenses could arise at any time, the burden of student debt together with rising unemployment rate is crushing young workers. In fact, young workers are vastly over-represented in sectors that were devastated by the pandemic, such as retail and food service. Earlier this year, more than 7.7 million workers younger than 30 became unemployed, which is equivalent to one in three young workers.

As the ruling elites and the mass media scapegoat young people for the spread of the pandemic, university students are being forced to pay full tuition for rushed and unplanned online learning programs.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) is fighting for the immediate abolition of all student debt. We believe that everyone should be able to attain a college education without being required to enter the modern equivalent of indentured servitude. Public education is a social right, not a privilege.

The ruling class claims that there is no money to finance free public education, but trillions are made available for war and gambling on Wall Street.