The global surge in COVID cases and deaths requires an immediate international response

Benjamin Mateus

Last week, during the World Health Organization (WHO) press brief, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director for the WHO emergencies program, observed, “We are not in an epidemiologically stable situation. The virus is still working its way through the human population. A vast majority of people remain susceptible. So, it has not settled down in a pattern that we can predict.” He also highlighted that though the pandemic is raging across Europe and North America, most of the world’s population remains susceptible to the coronavirus.

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery adorned with tributes to victims of COVID-19 in New York City, May 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

This week saw the highest number of cases and deaths globally. On Wednesday, 13,579 people succumbed to the infection, and on Thursday, almost three-quarters of a million people were infected. Of the 75.7 million cases of COVID-19, 20.9 million were active cases of infection, with more than 107,000 in critical condition. There are have been 1.676 million deaths thus far.

Europe has registered 22.884 million cases. After a sharp rise in October, cases peaked at 333,344 on November 7. However, limited restrictions and piecemeal non-pharmaceutical interventions employed to turn the curve have led to a tepid decline that has seemed to stall at around 244,663 cases per day. Since November 9, weekly deaths have exceeded 30,000 and over 35,000 per week since November 23.

Long touted as the country that fared better than its European neighbors, Germany has now become the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe with more than 30,000 cases yesterday for a new one-day high. Deaths have also dramatically followed the surge. On December 15, there were around 800 deaths alone, and the seven-day average has seen more than 500 fatalities per day.

Given its experience in the spring with its health system intact, the government enacted the mildest lockdown during the winter surge, leaving shops, offices and factories open. This left the country vulnerable to the devastation being wrought by the pathogen. Christian Kleber, an emergency room physician from Dresden who is in charge of coordinating the redistribution of COVID patients across the region, told the Wall Street Journal, “Our hospitals are at the limit of what they can manage.” The health system is expected to reach capacity at the current pace of infections. In Hanau, Germany, bodies are being kept in metal shipping containers as morgues have reached capacity. The government has moved to impose “a harder” lockdown at least until January 10.

On Wednesday, the United States experienced its single worst day with 250,173 cases of COVID-19 and 3,561 fatalities. With 17.8 million cases, the death toll has rapidly reached 320,000. Yet, no effort is being employed to quell this deluge of death sweeping across the nation. The life-saving vaccines being ushered in as the panacea to the virus are now facing glitches in distribution. Several states have been told that they would be receiving fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine next week, which means that states have to readjust plans to deliver the vaccines to their citizens.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan complained, “Where are our doses? What is holding them up? There are millions of Pfizer vaccines, many right here in Portage, Michigan, that are waiting to be shipped, but the feds are slow-walking the process of getting addresses to Pfizer for some reason I cannot get an answer to.”

Meanwhile, California has seen an unprecedented surge in cases that has led to daily record highs and an announcement that Southern California’s intensive care beds are wholly occupied. Nearly 400 deaths were reported on Thursday, with over 60,000 new cases on Wednesday. There are more than 15,000 people in hospitals and over 3,000 in the ICUs. Across the state, fewer than 1,300 ICU beds remain open. Speaking to CNN, Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at LA County and USC Medical Center, said, “We’re getting crushed. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are getting crushed.”

Despite a slow decline after the summer peaks, Mexico has seen a rapid climb in cases that has reached new highs. There have been close to 1.3 million reported cases and over 116,000 deaths. The seven-day moving average in fatalities has climbed close to 600 a day. However, these figures are known to be severely underestimated.

In an official survey conducted in Mexico City, Juan Rivera, the general director of the National Institute of Public Health, explained during a news conference that seroprevalence studies suggested that a quarter of Mexico’s population, around 31 million people, have been exposed. The blood tests that detected antibodies to the coronavirus were collected between August and November, which involved 9,400 households.

With cases soaring again, Mexico City will shut down all nonessential activities commencing this weekend until January 10. These measures are being driven as the hospital occupancy has exceeded 75 percent, and limited actions have done little to stop hospital admissions nor fatalities. Dr. Marta Patricia Mancilla, who works at Mexico City’s Ajusco Medio hospital, named as one of the few exclusively COVID-9 hospitals, said, “The worst is still to come. And unfortunately, it is going to catch us very tired.” The patient capacity runs at 122 percent, while the ICU is at 116 percent and emergency units at 100 percent. Additionally, almost 2,000 Mexican health care workers have thus far died from COVID.

Brazil has shown that the virus has little to do with seasonality. With its summer approaching, cases of COVID have reached their July highs. On Wednesday, it registered over 70,000 new cases. Daily deaths have followed in kind, reaching a one-day high of more than 1,000 just yesterday. This staggering figure was last reported on September 15. During the pandemic, there have been 7.16 million cases of COVID and 185,650 deaths in the country.

These figures do not include the number from São Paulo state, which has reported technical issues with uploading their numbers. São Paulo state, the nation’s most populous region, has been the epicenter of this wave. The government has thus far resisted issuing lockdowns or restrictions, which have contributed to this present crisis.

Brazil’s supreme court issued an order that imposed time limits on when bars and restaurants could serve customers. The court also noted that if individuals refused to take the vaccine, they could face sanctions or imposition on their liberties. At odds with the court, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s fascistic president, has repeated that he refuses to take the vaccine and that ordinary citizens would not be required to do so.

Like in the United States, COVID has become the leading cause of death in the Americas. It now surpasses coronary heart disease as the number-one cause of death in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panama. Latin America accounts for 48 percent of the COVID-19 deaths. The endemic poverty, crowded living conditions, and underfunded and fragmented health care systems have primarily contributed to these developments.

Carissa Etienne, the head of the Pan-American Health Organization, told NPR, “The many millions who rely on the informal economy for their livelihood didn’t have the option to stay home. And for people in marginalized settings and remote areas—like our indigenous communities and migrants—proper health care was often out of reach.”

South Korea and Japan, which had been held up as examples of employing strong public health measures, have been sidelined by the coronavirus’s sudden resurgence within their communities. South Korea has seen cases jump to over 1,000 per day, while in Japan, new cases reached a one-day high of more than 3,000 yesterday.

Still, on the deadliest day of its experience with the pandemic, South Korea has reported 22 deaths. But experience has shown that these developments can rapidly escalate. There are 12,209 active cases, and 242 are in serious or critical condition. The majority of these cases are located in the densely populated metropolitan area of Seoul. As the AP noted, “The viral resurgence came after months of pandemic fatigue, complacency and government efforts to breathe life into a sluggish economy ” (emphasis added). While the government is agonizing over placing restrictions in place that would impact more than 1.2 million businesses, the health ministry data indicated that the greater Seoul area’s critical care capacity is reaching its limit.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has raised its health care alert to the highest level as the number of new cases reached a single-day high. In the meantime, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has apologized for attending a dinner with friends and celebrities while the country was seeing a surge in cases.

Masataka Inokuchi, the vice-chair of the Tokyo Medical Association, explained at a news conference attended by the Tokyo Governor Yurike Koike, “We fear a serious dysfunction of the medical system in two weeks, on December 31, if the number of new daily infections keeps growing at the current pace.”

According to the IMF’s latest projections, per capita growth in 170 out of 190 economies will be negative for 2020. According to the Brookings report from November, for the first time in 50 years, “the global consumer class will shrink.” Even more concerning, extreme global poverty is expected to rise for the first time in 20 years, pushing an additional 27 million, or a total of 115 million, into destitution. This is expected to rise to 150 million by 2021 due to economic contractions.

The present surge across the globe is a byproduct of lifting restrictions on commerce by every major nation whose economy faces stagnation. Yet, these actions are leading to mass infections and deaths. According to the World Bank, “the pandemic and global recession may cause over 1.4 percent of the world’s population to fall into extreme poverty.” Only the international working class has the means to address the pandemic and social misery being inflicted on the planet’s population.

More than 30,000 daily infections in Germany and war-like conditions in hospitals

Gregor Link

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are becoming more dramatic every day in Germany. After a new record death toll of 952 was reported on Wednesday, the number of those infected also reached a new all-time high on Thursday, exceeding the 30,000 mark for the first time. Across Germany, the positive test rate is currently around 12 percent—more than double the value that epidemiologists cite as the threshold beyond which the infection incidence runs out of control.

Refrigerated container for coronavirus dead at the main cemetery in Hanau (AP Photo/Michael Probst)]

Thursday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced just under 27,000 new infections, reported a further 3,500 cases from Baden-Württemberg, which had initially not been communicated “for technical reasons.” On Friday again more than 30,000 cases were reported. Compared to the previous week, the number of newly infected persons grew by 14 percent. According to Worldometer, another 767 people died of COVID-19 on Friday. This brought the number of coronavirus deaths in Germany to over 25,900. More than 1.46 million people have been infected with the virus since the outbreak of the pandemic.

The “80-plus age group” is particularly hard hit, accounting for 12.3 percent of infections. Reports of deadly mass outbreaks in old people’s homes are piling up from all over Germany, most recently in the district of Düren, where 30 cases of infection and two deaths were mourned after a St. Nicholas party.

“We know that the number of deaths and seriously ill people always lags about four to five weeks behind the infection figures,” World Medical Association President Frank Ulrich Montgomery told broadcaster n-tv yesterday. At the current death rate, this would mean between 30,000 and 35,000 additional deaths by mid-January. But the overloading of hospitals could lead to many more people dying: clinics all over Germany would have to decide who receives life-saving treatment and who does not, the physician said.

Conditions at German hospitals already resemble those in a war. Medical director Mathias Mengel from Saxony reported to news portal t-online that at Zittau hospital, several times in the past few days, “we had to decide who gets oxygen and who doesn’t.” Ingo Autenrieht, chief medical director of Heidelberg University Hospital, also told the press that nurses and doctors had “adjusted” to making such life-and-death decisions: “We haven’t experienced a situation like this in Heidelberg or anywhere else in Germany in the last 50, 60 years.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s leading university hospital, Berlin’s Charité, is considering transferring non-COVID patients to other cities for the first time. Berlin alone—where state education minister Sandra Scheeres (Social Democrat, SPD) is pushing particularly hard for schools to return to regular operations as soon as possible—reported 1,473 new cases and 30 deaths Thursday, a 31 percent increase on the previous week.

Almost 30 percent of all intensive care patients in the capital are COVID-19 sufferers, who increasingly have to be treated with ECMO machines, which temporarily take over the work of the heart and lungs. To do this, thick tubes are inserted into the veins of the patient’s legs to artificially circulate the blood and enrich it with oxygen. Of the 35 specialist machines at the Charité, only three were still available on Monday, Tagesspiegel reported. The newspaper quotes a COVID ward doctor saying, “We don’t have a single free place here at the moment ... Nobody is placed on the artificial lung anymore just because they are seriously ill.” “Hopeless cases” could “simply no longer be treated.”

Given the impending overload, the Charité had already turned to university hospitals in Dresden, Leipzig and Magdeburg for help. “But they need help there themselves at the moment,” writes Tagesspiegel. “Since the East German university hospitals are not available, [Charité vice-chairman] Ulrich Frei has now made calls throughout a 400-kilometre radius.” The emergency transfer of severe non-COVID cases to Lübeck, Kiel, Hanover, Göttingen is being discussed. At the beginning of the pandemic, Frei had declared the country was facing the “greatest medical challenge in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Throughout Germany, the virus is ravaging nursing homes. At the end of November, the state of Hesse reported that two-thirds of coronavirus deaths in the autumn were in nursing homes. The Süddeutsche Zeitung described a situation in Munich, where first staff, then more and more residents, tested positive in October. However, there was no separation of the infected and non-infected, so that the spread of the virus continued unhindered. A relative of an affected resident said, decisions impacting life and death were “going on here before a doctor even gets involved.”

The Munich Health Council and Bavarian Ministry of Health reacted dismissively to his open letter to politicians and the authorities warning of the “potentially lethal danger” in the home. It was supposedly impossible to implement safe distance rules for dementia patients, they said.

After almost a year of the pandemic, there is still no proper supply of protective equipment for nursing homes. The federal government’s grandiose announcement to supply homes with FFP2 protective masks has turned out to be a mockery. The Workers’ Welfare Association (AWO) in western Westphalia has received 30,000 masks from the federal government, but they consider them medically unsuitable and therefore cannot use them in their homes.

The government, which brought about these conditions with its profits-before-lives policy, expects the situation to worsen many times over in the coming weeks and months. “The next three months will be by far the toughest months in the entire course of the pandemic,” said Karl Lauterbach, the SPD’s health policy spokesman, in an interview with the daily Welt. Chancellery Minister Helge Braun (Christian Democrat, CDU) also threatened that the population would face three “particularly difficult months.” In the government’s view, tens of thousands of deaths are inevitable. According to Lauterbach, the current measures were “the maximum we can decide at the moment.”

How consciously the government prepared for mass deaths is glaringly evident in Hanau, Hesse. Mayor Claus Kaminsky (SPD) announced Thursday on Twitter that the city was using a “refrigerated container for coronavirus dead for the first time because the Hanau clinics are overloaded,” It was “good that we took precautions for this very early on,” Kaminsky said.

By “early precautions” the SPD politician does not mean taking timely measures to protect the population but making arrangements for the temporary storage of their bodies. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the refrigerated container had been set up “as early as April.”

Opposition is growing among the population to the murderous policy that brought about the disaster by keeping businesses and schools open for months. “If they had taken the right measures early on, they would not need a refrigerated container, which they are apparently still proud of. It’s macabre. My sympathies go out to all the relatives,” commented Twitter user Tigerlutz on Kaminsky’s tweet.

U. Lancier writes, “‘early provisions made’—a bitter mockery for the relatives of the thousands who died too early. Early precautions would have been a hard lockdown after the end of the holiday season, with schools closed for at least three weeks. [What is being done now is] ‘The wrong thing, too little, too late’.”

Another adds, “A cynical statement and slap in the face of the relatives. Precaution would have been a timely lockdown and sensible schools’ policy. Instead, this decision has been delayed and protection in schools prevented.”

Numerous students, educators and parents express their anger that the federal and state governments continue to refuse to consistently shut schools and non-essential businesses.

“Day-care centres are still open in Berlin, not only for essential workers but also for parents who have a need. In my centre, several educators, children and parents are COVID-positive. I’m glad I’ve been able to keep my child out of it for months,” Jesse, a teacher in Berlin, wrote on Twitter.

Franziska from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania criticises the fact that the state government there, made up of the SPD and CDU, also refuses to consistently close day-care centres and schools. “The day-care centres are open normally. There are still many children going to school. I think they should have closed everything until January 10, including schools and day-care centres. It’s all useless like this,” she writes in the Facebook group “School Strike.”

Marie-Luise from Brandenburg/Oberhavel, who is active in the same group, writes: “We have an incidence of 177—and rising. Despite the abolition of compulsory attendance since Monday, schools and day-care centres are still full. Graduating classes and special schools have compulsory attendance.” And Lisa M. explains, “In Potsdam, the incidence value is 193—yet the schools are full and the final year classes and special classes even have compulsory attendance. I’m so pissed off!”

Clemens from Munich, who is undertaking voluntary service in a day-care centre and is a member of the Action Committees for Safe Education network, told the WSWS, “The thousand coronavirus deaths per day are the tragic result of the criminal policies of the ruling class. The federal and state governments have known that it could come to this and have deliberately accepted it to be able to keep businesses open. To do that, they also had to keep schools and kindergartens open.”

“There are 10 children again today” in his kindergarten group. “Our protection amounts to wearing masks all the time—until recently they were FFP2 masks, but they are all gone. Now we only have disposable masks, which we can’t change regularly.”

On the political tasks facing workers and youth in this situation, Clemens said, “Chancellor [Angela] Merkel and other government politicians have made clear they want to keep our facilities open at all costs. The price for this policy is thousands of deaths, to which more will be added if the working class does not take action and form rank-and-file committees everywhere and fight for their demands based on a socialist perspective.”

One in five US prisoners has contracted COVID-19, 17,736 have died

Kate Randall

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to surge across the US bringing with it a wave of death, a forgotten section of the population is being especially ravaged: prisoners in state and federal prisons. The Marshall Project has been tracking inmate cases and deaths since mid-March.

Bars inside a prison [Credit: Robert Crow/vividcorvid - Fotolia]

The non-profit news organization, in coordination with the Associated Press, reports that by December 15 at least 276,107 people in prison had tested positive for the illness, a 10 percent increase over the week before, far outpacing the previous peak in early August. As testing for the virus is limited, and all cases are not reported, this number is undoubtedly much higher.

The following number of new cases were reported on the last week studied:

• California: nearly 6,000
• Federal Bureau of Prisons: more than 3,000
• Michigan and Pennsylvania: more than 2,000 each
• Arizona and Nevada: more than 1,000 each

These staggering figures show that the ruling elite’s policy of “herd immunity” is even more concentrated within prison walls, where prisoners are confined to close quarters and social distancing is nearly impossible. As with workers sent into auto, meat processing and other factories, the lives of prisoners are seen as expendable. Prisoners, moreover, are viewed as a drain on the resources of the capitalist state, which receives limited cash value from their incarceration.

Federal prisons have had 33,410 cases, more than any one state prison system, and 175 deaths, second only to Florida, which has seen 189. The number of federal cases has been boosted by the Trump administration’s pursuit of executing as many federal prisoners as possible before Joe Biden is to be sworn as president on January 20. Biden has said he will move to end federal executions.

The Department of Justice, under the direction of Attorney General William Barr, is on track to carry out 10 executions on Trump’s way out of office, more than have taken place over the previous three decades. Barr, who directed the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) last year to reinstate capital punishment for federal inmates after what had been an essential moratorium on federal executions, will leave his post before Christmas, washing his hands of the final three executions scheduled in January.

One of these inmates is Dustin John Higgs, 48, who is scheduled to be put to death on January 15 in connection with the kidnapping and killing of three women in Maryland in 1996. The BOP notified Higgs’s attorneys on Thursday that their client had tested positive for the coronavirus. The news comes amid prisoner concern about an exploding number of cases of the virus at the complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the only federal death row is housed.

Dustin John Higgs, contracted COVID December 17 [Source: change.org]

After the November 19 execution of federal prisoner Orlando Hall, 49, it was reported that eight prison employees who had taken part in his execution at the Terre Haute facility had contracted COVID-19. Despite this, five of these employees were scheduled to work during the executions of Brendon Bernard, 40, on December 12, and Alfred Bourgeois, 55, the following day.

Another federal inmate in Terre Haute, James Lee Wheeler, tested positive for the virus on November 17. He was evaluated by medical staff at the prison on November 25 for decreased oxygen saturation on November 15 and was transferred to a local hospital for further treatment.

James Lee Wheeler died December 7 [Source: TampaBay.com]

Wheeler had long-term, preexisting medical conditions placing him at increased risk for developing severe COVID-19 disease. On December 9, he was pronounced dead by hospital staff. Wheeler, 78, was serving a life sentence following convictions in Florida and Ohio for obstruction of justice, racketeering and drug charges.

James Frazier, 79, Ohio’s oldest death-row inmate, died November 19 from a likely case of coronavirus. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 for the murder of Mary Stevenson, 49, of Toledo. One hundred eighteen Ohio prisoners have died due to COVID-19, according to the Marshall Project, the fourth largest death toll following Florida, the federal government and Texas. More than 8,000 Ohio inmates have been infected.

On November 14, 2017, authorities found Frazier in his cell at the Chillicothe Correction Institution following what doctors called multiple minor strokes, according to Frazier’s attorneys. He was later transferred to a local hospital.

James Frazier, died November 19 [Credit: Death Penalty Information Center]

Frazier’s attorneys filed a notice of insanity in Lucas County Common Pleas Court to stop his execution, scheduled for October 20, 2021. They said he suffered from dementia and had little idea where he was.

In addition to Higgs’s January 15 execution, there are three other federal executions scheduled before Inauguration Day, January 20.

Lisa Marie Montgomery, 52, is scheduled to be put to death January 12. Her December 8 execution was temporarily stayed after her attorneys contracted COVID-19, most likely from visiting her in prison, and could not prepare her clemency petition. US District Judge Randolph Moss signed a court order blocking the federal government from executing her before the end of the year.

Montgomery was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2007 strangling of a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant and taking her unborn baby, who survived. Sandra Babcock, one of the lawyers representing Montgomery against Barr, said, “Mrs. Montgomery’s case presents compelling grounds for clemency, including her history as a victim of gang rape, incest and child sex trafficking, as well as her severe mental illness.”

If Montgomery’s execution does go forward, it would be the first federal execution of a woman in almost seven decades. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by electrocution on June 19, 1953. They were framed up and prosecuted at the height of the Cold War under the Espionage Act of 1917 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Cory Johnson, 52, is scheduled for execution January 14 for the 1992 killing of seven people as part of a drug trafficking conspiracy based in Richmond, Virginia. Johnson’s attorneys argue that he has an intellectual disability and needs to present evidence of this in court.

Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 after a brief hiatus, the US has sent 1,529 people to their deaths, including 13 federal prisoners. These have included the mentally impaired, foreign nationals denied their consular rights, individuals sentenced to death for crimes committed while minors, and women.

On November 27, the Justice Department published a new regulation that permits the federal government to perform executions using any form of lethal injection “or by any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed or which has been designated by a court” in accordance with federal death penalty statutes.

Methods of state killing in the 28 states that still have the death penalty on the books include lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging and the firing squad.

Australian “National Day of Action” a farce as union prepares to sell out Coles workers

Martin Scott

Despite declaring December 17 a “National Day of Action” in support of locked-out Coles distribution centre workers, the United Workers Union (UWU) is preparing a sell-out deal with management.

The 350 warehouse workers at the major supermarket chain’s Smeaton Grange Distribution Centre in southwestern Sydney were locked out by Coles after they began a 24-hour strike on November 19.

The workers rejected a proposed enterprise agreement, which offered a 3.5 percent pay increase, and a payout of four weeks’ pay per year of service if they are terminated. The warehouse is set to be shut down in 2023 and replaced by an automated facility, meaning the destruction of most of their jobs.

The “National Day of Action” amounted to nothing more than a media stunt. No effort was made to broaden the struggle to include workers in other distribution centres. The main orientation of the campaign was to protest outside some Coles supermarkets.

While workers were led through a chorus of insipid slogans in inner-city shopping centres, UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings illustrated the retreat being orchestrated by the union.

UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings speaking in a video filmed at Martin Place in Sydney on Thursday [Source: Twitter, @UnitedWorkersOz]

In a video filmed at Sydney’s Martin Place, Eurlings said: “We’ve accepted the 3.5 [percent], and we know that’s more than enough.” All the workers want is “a fair redundancy and a chance to go into automated sheds.”

In fact, the locked-out workers initially demanded a 5.5 percent pay rise in addition to the right to continued employment at the new facility, and five weeks’ pay per year of service (up to a maximum of two years’ pay) if made redundant.

A vote to accept the 3.5 percent increase was taken on the urging of UWU bureaucrats, who insisted workers needed “to show good faith to Coles” to persuade the company to “come to the table.”

As workers on the picket outside the Smeaton Grange facility on Thursday told the World Socialist Web Site, “both sides are holding their breath, but workers can’t outlast a multinational company.”

The workers believed that Coles was determined to hold out because it is replacing its major distribution centres with automated plants in the coming years, and Smeaton Grange workers were “guinea pigs.”

The workers said that although they were relatively young and believed they would find other work if they are terminated by Coles, the same restructuring processes were in force throughout the industry. As a result, they expected they would likely find themselves in the same position in “five or ten years.”

By contrast, the UWU has portrayed the plight of the workers as the result of the malevolence of a single company. As part of the “National Day of Action,” shoppers in Brisbane were told, “the best thing you can do to support [the locked-out workers] is to shop at Woolies.”

The union’s call for a boycott of Coles supermarkets—and, inevitably, the support of competing chain Woolworths—is a political dead end. Workers cannot wage a struggle for their livelihoods by trying to pit one multinational corporation against another.

Less than five months ago, more than 550 workers at a Woolworths distribution centre at Wyong, about 90 kilometres north of Sydney, were locked out after going on strike on July 24.

Workers at Wyong, angered by dangerous conditions at the warehouse, including soaring pick rates and the lack of COVID-19 safety measures, were demanding wage parity with Sydney workers.

As the UWU is preparing to do at Smeaton Grange, the union brokered a sellout at Wyong workers—a deal with which Woolworths chief supply chain officer Paul Graham said the company “was happy.” Under the agreement accepted by the UWU, workers were to receive a 3.7 annual percent pay rise, far short of what would be required to bring their pay into line with their counterparts in Sydney.

Locked-out Coles workers at Smeaton Grange distribution centre [Credit: WSWS Media]

This collaboration of the UWU with Coles and Woolworths is entirely in keeping with the role of all the unions as industrial police forces of management.

While professing to “stand with” workers, the unions isolate them, and suppress any effort to build a genuine movement of the working class. This orientation was clearly in evidence at the Smeaton Grange site on Thursday.

Patricia Fernandez, secretary/treasurer of the New South Wales branch of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, intervened to prevent workers from speaking to WSWS reporters. Absurdly, Fernandez justified this violation of the workers’ democratic rights by quoting an earlier WSWS article, which stated: “UWU officials directed workers not to discuss anything with the WSWS.”

Fernandez did not deny any of the contents of the article, which outlined the UWU’s record of selling out workers. Instead, along with another AMIEU representative who did not give his name, she branded one WSWS reporter a “capitalist” because he owned a car.

The unnamed AMIEU organiser blurted out the divisive nationalism of the unions, which oppose any unified fight by workers against global capitalism. He told the WSWS: “I don’t care what happens overseas; only Australians are going to fight for Australian workers.”

When asked why the unions support the Labor Party, which enacted the “Fair Work” legislation outlawing almost all industrial action, he tried to evade the question. “We don’t support everything the Labor Party does, we make propositions to the Labor Party,” he said.

In reality, the unions worked hand-in-glove with Labor to draft the anti-strike laws under the Hawke and Keating governments of 1983 to 1996, and the Rudd and Gillard governments of 2007 to 2013, and use the laws to oppose any industrial action, except in isolated workplaces during union-controlled “enterprise bargaining.”

Congress dithers over token relief bill as 4.8 million more Americans face poverty in January

Jacob Crosse

Despite claims of “good progress” and assurances of “getting a deal done,” Democratic and Republican congressional leaders adjourned Friday without passing an estimated $900 billion coronavirus relief bill. The completely inadequate bill, which is still subject to change, would reportedly provide a $300-a-week federal unemployment benefit for 10 weeks and a one-time direct payment of $600 to low- and middle-income people.

Auto workers leave the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Warren Truck Plant after the first work shift, Monday, May 18, 2020, in Warren, Mich. [Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya]

The short-term federal jobless benefit is 50 percent less than the $600 weekly supplement that expired on July 31, and the one-time stimulus check is only half the amount provided under the CARES Act, passed by a near-unanimous bipartisan vote in March. That bill provided some $6 trillion in low-interest loans and cash handouts to banks and corporations, dispensed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

The new bill is being touted by the Democrats as a “down payment” on a second stimulus package to be enacted under the incoming Biden administration, which will undoubtedly provide trillions more for the financial markets and the stock portfolios of the financial oligarchs.

The current measure, under the rubric of the “small business” Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), includes billions of additional dollars for large businesses and another multibillion-dollar bonanza for Wall Street banks in the form of loan fees. The vast bulk of small businesses were frozen out of the two previous iterations of the PPP, resulting in the permanent closure of hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of layoffs. This round of the program promises to be no different.

Congress passed a two-day continuing resolution to extend federal spending and prevent a government shutdown while remaining differences are thrashed out and the relief bill is passed and signed into law by President Trump, who has signaled his support. The bill is to be attached to a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending package.

As of this writing, it was not clear whether the bill would include an extension of the Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium, which expires in less than two weeks. According to the Aspen Institute, failure to enact an extension will result in a wave of evictions leaving up to 40 million people homeless.

A study released this week by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University estimates that without the immediate renewal of the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement and other CARES Act programs, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), an additional 4.8 million people, including 1.3 million children, will fall into poverty next month. This is on top of the already eight million who have been driven into poverty since the expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits at the end of July.

Overall, the authors of the Columbia study estimate that without any action, 17.5 percent of the US population, and over one in five children, will fall into poverty. Even if a deal is struck immediately, for the roughly 13 million people making use of the PUA and PEUC programs, including the self-employed, contract workers and “gig” workers, there will be a delay in receiving checks that could last weeks, according to Michele Evermore, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “It usually takes around two to three weeks to turn benefits back on,” Evermore told CNBC.

Data from the Census Household Pulse Survey conducted between November 25 and December 7 gives some indication of the suffering and hardship endured by millions of people due to congressional inaction and indifference. In several states, over half of the population surveyed is expected to be evicted or foreclosed on in the next two months, with the District of Columbia leading the nation at 67.3 percent, a 14.4 percent increase from last month.

DC is followed by South Dakota at 59.5 percent, a nearly 20 percent increase, and North Carolina at 54 percent, while in Wisconsin, 44.1 percent expect either to be evicted or foreclosed on in the next two months.

Overall, the Census notes that some 13 million adults in the US, or over nine percent of the population, are not current on their rent or mortgage payments and have “slight” or “no confidence” that they will be able to pay next month’s bill on time, an increase of nearly two million compared to two weeks ago. Louisiana leads the nation in this category, with nearly 16 percent, followed by Delaware at 15.2 percent, an increase of 5.5 percent, while Pennsylvania and Florida have seen a more than three percent increase from the last survey, at 13.2 and 12.3 percent, respectively.

What little money workers do have has been going to provide necessities such as food. However, for millions of people even that is a struggle in the richest country on the planet, with an estimated 27.4 million adults in the last month agreeing with the statement that in their households there were “sometimes” or “often” not enough to eat over the previous seven days. This is an increase of nearly two million from the month prior. Arkansas leads the nation, with 19.4 percent, or one in five people saying they did not have enough to eat, while 16.7 percent of Hawaii residents, an increase of 4.6 percent, went hungry.

Weekly state and federal unemployment claims have topped one million in recent weeks, job growth has slowed dramatically, and more than 10 million jobs have been permanently lost since the pandemic began in earnest in March.

The failure to provide serious aid to workers and small businesses is the result not of confusion or mere incompetence. Rather, it is part of a policy dictated by the economic interests of the capitalist class to block any serious measures to contain the pandemic that would impinge on corporate profits and use mass unemployment and the threat of starvation and homelessness to force workers into coronavirus-infected factories and workplaces. The reopening of schools in the midst of the raging pandemic is part of this homicidal “herd immunity” policy.

The Trump administration has openly carried out this policy of mass death, while the Democrats have feigned opposition while in practice collaborating fully at the state and local level and in Congress. The result is over 17 million confirmed cases, more than 300,000 deaths, a daily death rate surpassing 3,000, and the overwhelming of hospitals in many parts of the country. This is combined with the greatest levels of unemployment, social distress and suffering since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In Nevada, where the state government has run out of money to provide unemployment benefits, over 45 percent of the population expects a loss in income in the next four weeks. This is followed by California at 38.9 percent and New Mexico at 38.6 percent. New York and Hawaii are not far behind at 36.5 and 36.4 percent, respectively.

The criminality of the ruling class was underscored this week by the announcement by the Federal Reserve that it would continue to pump billions of dollars a month into the financial markets and purchase dubious corporate bonds indefinitely.

As of Friday evening, the main obstacle to the passage of the miserable relief bill appeared to be Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s inclusion of language that would end several Fed lending programs, such as the misnamed $600 billion Main Street Lending Program. This provoked an apoplectic reaction from Democratic lawmakers, including senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and California Representative Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Warner said putting an end to the programs would “set a terrible precedent, hurt the Fed’s independence, and weaken its ability to respond quickly to future crises.” Warren called the proposal “reckless” and an attempt to “sabotage President Biden.”

Wall Street is greedily anticipating another windfall from an incoming Biden administration. Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock, which is heavily represented in Biden’s cabinet, hailed the selection of former Fed Chair Janet Yellen as Biden’s Treasury secretary, saying he expected to forge an “important partnership.”

“I think people understand this is a big deal,” Rieder said. “The economy can handle more accommodation and more fiscal, funded by the Treasury and supported by the Fed.”

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.