Bangladesh people’s initiatives in facing the pandemic: A short note

Farooque Chowdhury

People are at the center in the pandemic now ravaging the world. It’s in terms of toll and contribution from the people. It’s in economy, and consequently, in life. Bangladesh is no exception.

The stories of suffering are broadly the same in all lands: hunger/hunger-scar, less-/least-accessible health care, death. Reports from the country considered the world’s richest, smartest, wisest, most powerful and most advanced nullify all allegations of incompetence, mishandling and mismanagement in countries considered poor, undemocratic and inefficient.

The least told part of the story is of the people. The Bangladesh people aren’t away from this saga. At the year-end, a look at this part is a requisite.

Many parts of the Bangladesh people took exemplary initiatives to face the pandemic while the rest was unorganized, and engaged with the pandemic within their environment. It’s an environment of poor habitats with unhygienic condition, uncertain income and food, inadequate health care infrastructure.

Most of the initiatives – reaching the people with the requirement (RPR) – were by the low-income stratum of the society, the stratum that lives far away from benefits dominating capital always derives. This stratum, lower and weak, has no share either in appropriation or in loot. This stratum has no mechanism in taking the share. This part of the people initiating the RPR is without any surplus resource, which it can spend for the RPR. Despite that, this part was with the RPR.

Most of these RPRs were self-initiatives, without any central directive, by students and youth mostly from the middle class. A few were by professionals with small earning. In areas, actors, artists, journalists, juvenile organization activists, small/local NGO workers, poets, singers, teachers joined. A few of the initiatives were unique. Political parties and a few resourceful NGOs took initiatives, which are not discussed in this article, as this article isn’t covering the issue, which needs deep dig.

Student, youth, juvenile and cultural organizations, and individuals including teachers and homemakers sprang into the RPRs. New organizations cropped up in areas. A few individuals initiated RPR jointly, but stayed away from forming formal organization also.

The RPRs included preparation and distribution of hand sanitizer, dissemination of information, spreading of disinfectant, organizing transportation of the infected persons, and last rites and burial of the dead, distribution of food and soap. The distributed food included rice, pulse, potato, edible oil, egg, salt, sugar, spices, fruits and tea. The distributed spices included onion, garlic, turmeric, ginger, cardamom and cinnamon, and the fruits included mango and orange. It should be mentioned that drinking tea and warm water with ginger, cardamom and cinnamon 2-4 times a day turned out as a practice among many during the pandemic.

The focus of the RPRs was the poor peasantry/persons in the so-called informal sector in urban and rural areas and the dalits, subdued of the subdued. In cases, members of the middle class with lost income were also covered, which included private tutor, photocopy shop owner, social/juvenile organizer. Persons in the informal sector included technician, transport worker, carpenter, vendor, domestic worker, microphone renting shop and decorator shop staff, old newspaper trader. At the initial days of the pandemic-related lockdown, they lost income. The dissemination of information included informing rickshaw pullers, group by group.

Cultural activists, journalists, lawyers, poets, singers and teachers collectively harvested paddy of a number of poor farmers facing difficulty to hire farmhands as movement of persons and transport faced restrictions due to lock downs. This happened in at least one area. The participants in the harvesting of paddy have decided to organize such initiative, join the poor peasantry, every year.

Students also joined in harvesting of paddy in many areas. They carried harvested crop to famers’ home/yard. Students organized low priced shop centers for the poor/less-earning families in areas. These centers operated for a few hours each day. Students roaming with bicycles distributed medicines in areas.

A few of the RPRs were for a few days while a few continued for weeks and months. A few of the RPRs were conducted once in one area while a few were carried on repeatedly.

Most of the contributions in the RPRs came from the middle class. Homemakers, physicians, salaried employees, students, teachers, traders contributed to the RPRs. Persons and students staying abroad also contributed although they were facing hardship in the countries they were staying.

The initial days of the pandemic were scary to many. Many persons had to stay within home, movement of persons was restricted, transportation was very limited, accessing proper hospital facilities was difficult, many hospitals run by private capital shuttered down. Many persons including the self-employed lost their income. Even, many in the middle class were in a difficult position, as seeking government relief was embarrassing to them. The situation required handing over of necessities to them. At least one RPR covered such a group of families.

A comparison between the RPRs’ contribution and the contribution by the super-profiteers in standing by the persons pressed by the pandemic help understand a few facts of social reality. Anyone can question: Who/which class(es) has(ve) contributed how much, how much has been pilfered-siphoned-embezzled and trafficked abroad, and how much has been produced by the part which has been suffering? Reports of the MSM and a few exposures including the Panama Papers say about these amounts. It’s billions of Taka, the Bangladesh currency. The pilfered-siphoned-embezzled-trafficked amounts are from the labor of a part of the pressed during the pandemic. The amounts are so much, the laboring part, which has been robbed, is so many, and the owners of the amount are so few! The robbed amounts indicate the huge surplus the so many produce. The robbing capital is so desperate, and the robbers are so confident about ensured supply of labor that sometimes a part of necessary labor is also snatched. The robbed amounts are only a part of the produced. The reality stands: So many have been robbed by so few, and the so few have robbed so much! The pandemic has once again exposed this stinging story. The pandemic has also shown that the commoners stand on their own initiative, and they wait for none to stand in solidarity.

Need to Check Wasteful Food Processing and Promote Rural Livelihoods With Small and Cottage Industries

Bharat Dogra

  While agriculture has been much in discussion, the related work of food-processing has hardly received any attention, even though there is a huge scope for providing millions of rural jobs while at the same time also improving the nutrition situation very significantly by moving from present-day large scale big-business controlled food processing to food crop and other crop processing in small and cottage rural industries, much along the lines advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and some of his close colleagues.

At present while on the one hand a lot of unnecessary and possibly harmful additives are being used, wasteful practices are actually removing nutrients on a truly large-scale from the most staple foods. The technologies currently used for obtaining rice from paddy involve a lot of wastage of grain. What is more, the part of grain which is wasted is the one which is the most nutritious. According to an expert L. Ramchandran, who has made detailed estimates of the loss suffered in the process of refining cereals in his book, ‘Food Planning,’ “The quantitative loss in the case of cereals alone may amount to not less than eight million tons. The qualitative loss is even more staggering because the portions of the grain that are removed in refinement are many times richer in quality, proteins, fats, minerals such as iron and phosphorous, and vitamins such as thiamine, nicotinic acid, riboflavin, and, in some cases, also vitamin A, in the form of carotene, than the portions that are retained and consumed by us. These are precisely the nutrients in which the average Indian diet is woefully deficient.”

Another major source of loss of nutrients is the hydrogenation of oils.  Hydrogenation changes most of the unsaturated fats into saturated fats. Saturated fats consumed in excess can be very harmful. Unsaturated fats, specially some of the poly unsaturated fats, are important in nutrition and play a protective role against the risk of cardiovascular disease and other ailments. In the words of Ramchandran, “in hydrogenation, what is good and necessary is changed into what is not necessary and may be harmful.”

There has been a big increase in recent years in the number and quantity of additives used by the food processing industry, including flavours, colours, emulsifiers, preservatives and an amazing range of other additives.  The combinations of additives may react with each other and with foods to produce new chemical substances. A wide range of health hazards has been reported for several additives as well as their combinations.

At the same as this gigantic  waste and worse is perpetuated and accentuated with the flooding of market with junk food, very talented and skilled traditional processors of food are languishing in neglect and face loss of livelihood. Hence there is a crying need for cottage and small scale food industries in villages ,led by women and their self-help groups and producer organizations and co-operatives which can take up the processing of cereals, millets, pulses, vegetable, fruits, milk and milk products, spices, honey etc. , providing millions of jobs, encouraging creativity and entrepreneurship, at the same providing very healthy, tasty, safe and nutritious food to consumers.

India: Karnataka factory inspectors find workers’ abuse at the Wistron iPhone plant

Kranti Kumara

An enquiry initiated by the state government of Karnataka in southern India found grave violations of labour laws by the Taiwanese multinational Wistron Corporation.

The investigation came after an uprising by Wistron workers at the Narasapura plant over nonpayment of wages. The plant, which manufactures iPhone 7 and iPhone SE for Apple, is located about 55 km from the state capital Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore).

Apple CEO Tim Cook mingles with Indian politicians (Courtesy Apple Insider)

Outrage at the plant boiled over on December 12 after management slammed the door in the face of workers requesting payment of back wages, which have accumulated for three months or more for some even as they are forced to work 12-hour shifts. The provocation triggered a violent reaction from thousands of workers, who laid waste to managers’ offices and overturned their vehicles.

Initially, the company accused workers of severely damaging the facility to the tune of 4.37 billion rupees ($58 million). However, the company later backtracked, stating that “unlike earlier reports, the violence did not cause any material damage to major manufacturing equipment and warehouses, with preliminary estimates of damages in the range of Rs 270-520 million ($3.6-$7.2 million).”

The investigation by the state Department of Factories, Boilers, Industrial Safety & Health found that the company had illegally increased working hours from 8 hours to 12 hours a day and did not pay the stipulated overtime wages. Furthermore, the company was guilty of non-payment of wages on time according to Karnataka laws, which state that wages have to be paid by around the first of the month. Instead, the company deposited workers’ wages into bank accounts irregularly, with some wages paid as late as the third week of the month.

The report further highlighted that the attendance monitoring system was in total shambles, resulting in the company undercounting the number of hours worked by an employee. There was a wide gap between company practices at the factory and the legal mandates the company was obliged to follow, the report observed.

Despite such gross violations, including wage-theft, there is no indication that Wistron executives will be held to account in any fashion.

Wistron workers rebel over unpaid wages

As opposed to the velvet-glove treatment towards Wistron Corporation, police raiding parties have rounded up at least 160 workers and thrown them in jail with the threat of criminal prosecution. According to other press reports, the police have filed First Information Reports (FIR) against a draconian 7,000 persons at the behest of the company. An FIR is a formal document filed by the police when they receive criminal complaints, the first step towards possible prosecution. In this case, the police are acting on the complaints of the company to issue these thousands of FIRs.

The overwhelming majority of the workers employed at the facility were contract workers who are hired and fired at will, endure brutal working conditions and are paid slave-wages. According to the state Labour Ministry, at least 8,490 workers are employed on contract through different labour contracting companies and only 1,343 are regular workers on company payroll.

Speaking anonymously to The Indian Express, one of the workers revealed the harrowing pay and working conditions the workers are enduring:

“After our [job] interviews, they said our shift would be of eight hours and that they would receive Rs. 15,000 ($201) per month on hand after deductions are made for taxes and retirement Provident Fund. However, we were paid less than Rs 10,000 ($133) and the wages even differed from person to person.”

Continuing, he added that “the company allotted night shift and day shift allowances of only Rs 127 ($1.70) and Rs 50 (67 US cents) per day in addition to food. Though initially, we worked eight hours, over the last three months we were told to put in more than 13 hours, with a lunch or dinner break of only one hour in between. Apart from this, several workers were terminated last month.”

In response, Apple is mounting a damage control operation. It now claims that it has placed this facility under “probation” i.e., no new orders will be forthcoming from Apple until Wistron has “corrected the problems.”

Apple’s statement is entirely hypocritical. It is notorious for squeezing its contract manufacturers of Apple products, and its relentless pressure upon factories in China and Taiwan to reduce “costs” is how it consistently maintains its super profits.

This was recently revealed when the Pegatron corporation, another prominent manufacturer and supplier for Apple, was recently placed on “probation” for abusive practices against workers at its facility in China.

According to press reports, a few months ago, Wistron tried to massively ramp up production of iPhones at this facility. It hired thousands of new contract workers which ended up overwhelming its existing labour management and attendance monitoring systems.

In the aftermath of plant uprising, the focus of the Karnataka state government, headed by arch-reactionary BJP Chief Minister Yediyurappa, together with the national government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been about the “damage” this may cause to its “Made in India” campaign.

“Made in India” transnational manufacturers like Wistron corporation hire workers on contract who can be paid a pittance and hired and fired at will, in exchange for locating manufacturing and assembly facilities in India. Modi’s government has gutted labour laws, environmental regulations and offered financial breaks as further incentives.

Thundered Yediyurappa in the aftermath of the Wistron workers rebellion:

“We have taken action. Foreign companies are important. These things should not have happened. The Prime Minister is also very much worried. We have instructed that such things will not be tolerated and let them continue production (sic).”

Under what the Modi government terms as Production Linked Incentives (PLI), a gargantuan sum of $6.65 billion has been earmarked to companies, including top Apple contractors Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron, to locally manufacture smartphones.

The BJP “rolled out the red carpet,” in Modi’s words, to global corporations since coming to power in 2014. This has been its political focus even during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has spread uncontrollably, leading to over 146,000 deaths in India, behind only Brazil and the United States.

This has triggered mass opposition. On November 26, tens of millions of workers and farmers participated in a nationwide general strike against the Modi government. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of farmers have laid siege to the country’s capital New Delhi for four weeks. Various other agitations including a 6-week-long strike followed by and subsequent lockout of 3,000 Toyota Kirloskar Motors auto workers in Karnataka, and an indefinite strike by 5,000 nurses at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, India’s premier Medical Institute.

Still no deal in Brexit talks as working class faces catastrophe

Thomas Scripps

The bitter political conflict over Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) continues.

Amid a deadly catastrophe unparalleled in Europe since the end of the Second World War, the UK and the EU governments are locked in an intractable struggle for economic and political advantage.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed the Withdrawal Agreement for the UK to leave the EU on January 31st. [Credit: U.K. Prime Minister]

By law, Britain leaves the EU on January 1. If no post-Brexit trade deal is in place, the UK will begin trading on World Trade Organisation terms involving tariffs and quotas.

On Sunday, the latest in a series of “final deadlines” passed. The leaders of the European Parliament had announced last Thursday that they would be able to pass a Brexit deal before the New Year only if “an agreement is reached by midnight on Sunday 21st”.

No agreement was reached, with a UK government source telling the Guardian, “We continue to explore every route to a deal that is in line with the fundamental principles we brought into the negotiations.” Talks between the two sides’ negotiators are ongoing this week.

As a senior EU diplomat told the Telegraph late last week, “December 31 is the only final deadline.”

Many government figures are now discussing the possibility of EU member states “provisionally applying” a deal agreed in the next few days on January 1, pending official ratification by their respective parliaments later in the month. However, the later the negotiations go the less time various governments have to translate, scrutinise and apply the text of any agreement, and the more likely it is that Britain is left in a “legal limbo” come the New Year.

It is a mark of the extreme political fragility of British and European capitalism, and the fraught state of inter-imperialist antagonisms, that the Brexit crisis has been allowed to reach this point. Most sources suggest the largest remaining division between the two sides’ negotiators is fishing rights in the UK’s waters. The economic value of fish caught in British seas is miniscule compared to overall GDP—UK vessels catch €850 million worth of fish in British waters and EU vessels €650 million.

French President Emmanuel Macron is worried about the political fallout of conceding anything to the UK on this issue. He faces an election in 2022 and is making an increasingly right-wing pitch to win over supporters of Marine Le Pen’s fascistic National Rally party. One key battleground includes the coastal communities with close economic ties to fishing in UK waters.

A major concern of the leading EU powers is that allowing any significant concessions to Britain could inspire other breakaway attempts from the increasingly fractious union.

For Johnson’s part, securing “British sovereignty” over its waters is a vital sop to the Tories’ far right, nationalist constituency. If reports from the negotiations are accurate, Britain has forced to accept a mechanism for preventing the UK from undercutting the EU on labour, social and environmental protections—the driving agenda behind the Brexit campaign.

Any such retreat—made necessary by the huge power imbalance between the EU and an isolated Britain, and the ongoing collapse of the Brexiteer’s perspective for a close alliance with a Trump-led America—threatens serious divisions in the Tory party. Members of the European Research Group of backbench Tory MPs are threatening to vote against a “bad deal”.

Johnson is pursuing a policy of brinkmanship over a marginal economic issue to hold together the party of government in a period of unprecedented crisis for British capitalism. In pursuit of this goal, he is courting economic ruin.

The House of Commons Brexit committee warned last week that British businesses were not ready for a no-deal Brexit. The deputy director of the Confederation of British Industry said earlier this month, “Preparation doesn’t mean protection if a tidal wave is coming. You can put in place the sandbags, and that helps a bit, but the water is still going to get through.”

These dire prospects have been brought into sharp focus by the latest development in Europe’s coronavirus pandemic. The explosion of a new, even more infectious strain of the virus in Britain has been met with travel bans on passengers arriving from the UK by a slew of countries, including most of Western and Northern Europe. On Sunday night, France barred UK lorry freight from entering the country for 48-hours, with only a few hours’ notice and without informing Downing Street.

The UK’s ports—already groaning under the weight of Brexit stockpiling and coronavirus restriction, with queues of lorries more than five miles long—have been thrown into chaos. Rod McKenzie, policy director at the Road Haulage Association, warned of a “devastating effect on the supply chain.” He continued, “What we are talking about is everything: factory parts, fresh and frozen vegetables, and all the Christmas deliveries.”

The effects are being felt throughout the British economy. On Monday morning the FTSE 100 fell 3 percent, wiping out £50 billion from company shares, and the pound fell significantly against the dollar and the euro. It closed down 1.7 percent. A double-dip recession had already been predicted for the UK by the Bank of England last week.

The costs of this crisis will be borne by the working class through a further disastrous collapse in their standard of living, heralding a period of fierce class struggle.

In 2019, the government was forced to release its forecast for a no-deal Brexit, partially leaked the previous year, codenamed “Operation Yellowhammer”. The document warned of the hold-up of freight transport, long-term disruption of supply networks affecting medicines and an increase in food and energy prices. It predicted, a “rise in public disorder and community tensions.”

This summer, a Cabinet Office paper was leaked which warned of a combination of a no-deal exit from the EU and a second wave of the pandemic, plus flooding and the flu season, causing “a systemic economic crisis with major impact on ­disposable incomes, unemployment, business activity, international trade and market stability.” The document warned of price hikes and shortages, significant “impact on low economic groups” and public disorder.

These scenarios are now coming to pass. The Johnson government’s only answer is brutal repression.

Operation Yellowhammer took shape amid plans for the deployment of tens of thousands of soldiers and riot police in the event of a no-deal Brexit, and the use of the police-state measures outlined in Tony Blair’s 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Emergency coronavirus legislation was passed earlier this year with the announcement that tens of troops of soldiers would be placed on standby.

Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic have confirmed the utter bankruptcy of all nationalist political perspectives. Johnson’s Brexit campaign, given a “left” cover by various pseudo-left formations –including the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party--who claimed an independent UK would be the basis for a rebirth of reformism, has laid the ground for the growth of the far right and a savage assault on the working class. The EU offers no progressive counterweight, seeking only to advance the reactionary national interests of its own most powerful member states.

Britain and the EU powers have all refused to take the necessary steps to contain and eradicate the COVID-19 virus to protect the profit interests of their super-rich oligarchs and out of fear of losing out in economic competition with each other, the United States and China.

Massive new coronavirus outbreaks at Amazon in Germany

Marianne Arens

In the last few days, several hundred workers of the shipping giant Amazon in Germany have become infected with coronavirus. Amazon distribution center workers continue to toil under deadly conditions while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, further enriches himself during the pandemic.

At least 100 of the 900-person workforce at the sorting and distribution center in Garbsen near Hannover had been infected by the time mass testing began at the plant. Despite this, the highly-automated Garbsen facility, one of the newest and most modern of its kind, has not yet been closed.

The Amazon warehouses in Bayreuth, Koblenz and Graben near Augsburg are also reporting new outbreaks, but work continues at full speed in all sorting and distribution centers.

An Amazon fulfillment center (Wikimedia Commons)

The online retail giant Amazon is taking advantage of the so-called “shutdown” imposed by the German federal government, which has shut down in-person retail (with the exception of grocery stores). However, schools and daycare centers remain open as well as public transportation and shipping firms. In spite of the “shutdown,” COVID-19 cases continue to rise, and hospitals are overcrowded. The Robert Koch Institute reported on Friday 33,777 new infections and 813 COVID-19 deaths in Germany, once again an alarming new record.

Yet, business is booming in the entire shipping industry. Much to the delight of Jeff Bezos, who is the world’s richest man and CEO of Amazon. He has increased his wealth by over $70 billion during the pandemic. Amazon now hopes to massively increase its Christmas sales.

Amazon workers’ wages and health precautions will not be increased. For them, the busy Christmas period, especially under conditions of the pandemic, means incessant stress, longer hours and putting their lives in danger. The promised Christmas bonus of 2 Euros per hour between December 9 and 22 only applies for the hours that workers are actually present. The consequence of this is that those who are sick come to work, which increases the risk of infecting others.

In order to send out all seasonal extra orders, the company has added around 10,000 temporary workers in its German distribution centers. This has caused “chaos and a lack of social distancing,” as one operations manager recently put it.

This has allowed COVID-19 to spread nearly unabated. In fact, cases have increased rapidly, not only at Amazon, but also other logistics companies: at the package delivery service Hermes in Bad Rappenau, 40 workers became ill. Other companies have also reported major outbreaks, including Zalando, DPD and DHL.

Tens of thousands out of Amazon’s global workforce of over one million have become infected. In the United States alone, 20,000 employees in Amazon distribution centers and the grocery chain Whole Foods, which belongs to Amazon, had contracted the virus by September 19.

An anonymous Bayreuth worker told local television station TVO: “more than 60 are sick, a number that rises every day.” Describing the pressure that workers face at the large centers, he added: “There are definitively many more packages… We try to work through everything in the hall, which is difficult to do. It takes us to our physical and emotional limits.”

The situation at Amazon is characteristic of the whole ruling class reaction to the pandemic. As the World Socialist Web Site already commented on March 6: “The indifference of the [ruling class] to the health of the population is no better, and perhaps worse, than the attitude of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the slaves.” This is especially true for the world’s largest corporate giant Amazon.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply aggravated the class antagonisms of the capitalist system. As the WSWS said, the central concern of governments is to “protect profits, not lives.” That is why the WSWS is fighting for the creation of Action Committees in workplaces, schools and daycare centers, in order to take matters into our own hands.

These committees must be organized independently of the Verdi service workers’ union and the trade unions as a whole, which stand completely for capitalist and nationalistic programs. The fight against Amazon requires an international and socialist program. To fight for this, the WSWS has a special Amazon page and publishes the International Amazon Workers Voice newsletter.

To the Verdi board, the well-being of the German economy is more important than workers’ health and lives. Verdi is part of the DGB, the German trade union federation, which is financed by the state as well as by German corporations and works on their behalf to smother workers’ opposition. For eight years now, the union has regularly organized toothless, isolated strikes at Amazon. Verdi has also called strikes at six distribution centers in the four days before Christmas.

Verdi claims that workers can only protect themselves when the company agrees to bargain with the union, including for a “Good and healthy work” contract. This is fraud and a deadly trap! It means waiting for Verdi officials to decide on a way forward together with management, behind the backs of the workers. They want to reach an agreement that does not cut into Amazon’s profits and gets Jeff Bezos’ support.

While unrest in the business is growing, more has been revealed about Amazon’s intensive spying on its employees. “Motherboard,” a project of the American magazine Vice News , published internally leaked documents about the company’s Global Security Operations Center, showing the extent to which Amazon workers are being watched.

Amazon is attempting to detect the earliest signs of resistance through video recordings inside its facilities and through spying on workers. Every conversation about protests, ranging from those of the “yellow vests” in France and climate protests, to all strike actions are registered with the date, time and the names of all involved. To assist in its spying program, the corporation also uses the infamous Pinkertons private security agency, known in America for its role over 150 years in spying on and physically assaulting workers.

Berlin teacher dies following COVID-19 infection

Markus Salzmann

The death of Soydan A., a young teacher who taught at a community school in Berlin-Kreuzberg, is due to the reckless school opening policy amid a pandemic that has been spreading rapidly for months. The responsibility for this lies with the Berlin Senate (state executive) comprising the Social Democrats (SPD), Left Party and Greens, whose unscrupulous education and health policies have made it acceptable for broad sections of the population to become infected.

Soydan A., who worked at the Carl-von-Ossietky School in the Kreuzberg district, apparently contracted the coronavirus at school. He was quarantined on November 10. According to information from Tagesspiegel, he was admitted to hospital five days later. He died there last week. The quarantine took place after several pupils in a class at the school tested positive. In addition, at least one other teacher was found to be infected with COVID-19.

The dramatic situation at the school was well known. A “red” coronavirus warning level had been in effect for weeks until December 16.

Soydan A. was a popular member of staff and taught German, Turkish and ethics. Relatives, friends, pupils and colleagues were stunned and full of grief about the death of the family man. There were many tributes on social media, such as, “Our school community mourns the loss of our esteemed colleague who left us far too early.” A book of remembrance has been set up at the school.

Carl-von-Ossietzky-Schule in Kreuzberg/Berlin (Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Many expressed anger at those in political power. “This is not just sad. This is a scandal. The lack of duty of care on the part of the employers is responsible here,” wrote Swifts on Twitter. “No FFP2 masks, no distance teaching, no split classes, no air filters ... Nothing. Are you actually still sleeping well, Minister of Culture?”

Jörg Scholl, a biologist, writes, “An accident would have been tragic. This [situation] was tolerated and could have been prevented. That’s what happens when economics is more important than people.”

The death of Soydan A. is not an isolated case. This week alone, three deaths of teachers or educators were reported to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). By December 3, 364 teachers and educators had been admitted to hospitals.

In Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the incidence rate among teachers was recently calculated based on data from the NRW Ministry of Education. The result shows that teachers have a significantly higher risk of becoming infected than the average person. International studies, for example from Britain, also come to similar conclusions.

The constantly rising infection and death rates, including among teachers, are a direct result of the “profits before lives” policy enforced by all government parties and the trade unions. In the interest of the economy and to ensure businesses could operate, schools were first reopened under unsafe conditions and have since been kept open at all costs.

In Berlin, this criminal policy is being pursued particularly aggressively by the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party. The official expression of sympathy by the Education Senator (state minister) Sandra Scheeres (SPD) cannot hide this fact. She is largely responsible for the pandemic situation in the capital, which has run completely out of control, and its deadly consequences. Only last month, she had claimed that “schools and day-care centres are the safest places to break infection chains.” Infections took place “outside the school.”

The result of these lies is a health disaster. On Sunday, Berlin passed the total of 1,000 deaths from coronavirus. There are now 86,564 confirmed cases. A series of mass outbreaks and deaths among residents and staff has afflicted old people’s and nursing homes. Berlin’s Charité hospital is having to scale back to providing a “purely emergency programme” as of Monday, and other hospitals will follow suit in the next few days. Hospitals in the neighbouring state of Brandenburg are now accepting patients from the capital’s completely overloaded hospitals, as there are already no more care facilities there at all.

Nevertheless, the SPD-Left Party-Green Senate is essentially continuing its political course. From January 11 onwards, there will again be in-person teaching at schools in Berlin and even during the Christmas holidays there will be extensive offers for them to provide “emergency care.” This also applies to day-care centres. Since there is no widespread closure of businesses and relief measures for parents, this automatically leads to children being sent to day-care centres. There are no special safety precautions. Furthermore, for reasons of cost, no air filters are installed in classrooms and mass testing is not in sight, nor is there the comprehensive vaccination of the population.

Australian arts and entertainment workers devastated by coronavirus pandemic

Martin Scott

Throughout the world, the arts and entertainment sectors have been decimated by the coronavirus pandemic. The dangerous and highly infectious virus has accelerated a decades-long assault on funding for creative and cultural endeavours at the hands of cost-cutting governments and brought into focus the perilous social conditions facing the overwhelming majority of artists and entertainers.

Under conditions where there was no vaccine, lockdowns and restrictions on public gatherings were necessary basic responses to the dangerous and highly-contagious disease. Trillions of dollars internationally have been handed over to big business but little or no compensation made available to the tens of thousands of individuals whose livelihoods depend on live audiences. Artists have been forced to live off their often meagre savings or poverty-level welfare payments.

Opera Australia members protest job cuts in Sydney (Photo source: MEAA)

While Australia has so far avoided the massive COVID-19 death tolls and infection rates seen overseas, the country’s live performance industry has not escaped the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic.

Along with tourism and hospitality workers, entertainment workers were among the first to lose work as the result of lockdowns, struggle to receive government assistance, and are still many months, if not years, away from a return to pre-COVID-19 levels of employment.

In mid-March, the closure of bars, restaurants and other venues meant the overnight cancellation of virtually all work for the hundreds of thousands employed in the arts and entertainment sector. By the end of April, more than $340 million in lost work had been reported to the ilostmygig website.

A report last month by consulting firm EY found that 79,000 jobs—two thirds of the workforce—had been lost in the live entertainment industry since October 2019, and the economic output had decreased by $23.6 billion (65 percent). The report also noted that, “for commercial live entertainment operators both large and small, revenue in September/October remains at no more than 10 percent of 2019 levels.”

Between February and August, hours worked in the “Arts and Recreation Services” fell by more than 25 percent, the largest decline in any Australian sector, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Opera Australia recently announced the forced redundancy of almost one third of its 56 full-time orchestral players, before advertising most of the “redundant” positions as temporary roles. This brazen move towards increased casualisation is typical of restructuring being carried out in numerous industries, ostensibly because of COVID-19.

These job cuts at Australia’s biggest arts employer are the product of decades of funding cuts to the country’s cultural institutions and the insistence that they must be run as profitable businesses rather than for the good of society. Only one fifth of Opera Australia’s revenue comes from government funding; the majority comes from ticket sales, meaning the pandemic has had a major impact. Yet the company was prevented from receiving emergency funding unless it first sold off its headquarters and warehouse in Sydney.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra stood down all its musicians and one third of administrative staff without warning in April, leaving them with only the $1,500 per fortnight JobKeeper payment.

In May, the 100 musicians and administrative staff of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) were forced to accept pay cuts of up to 30 percent at least until the end of the year. Musicians in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra took a 20 percent pay cut, despite continuing to perform for live streams and video recordings.

The response of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union representing musicians, to these attacks has been to praise the SSO deal and propose alternative cost-cutting plans along similar lines to the management of other orchestras.

The union has also agreed to new contract clauses for screen productions allowing cast and crew to be immediately stood down without pay if shooting is halted due to the coronavirus.

While government bailouts for big business were announced within days of lockdowns being announced, the $1,500 per fortnight JobKeeper payment only began being paid to sole traders (which includes most performing artists) in early May, after more than six weeks with no work.

Around one-third of Australia’s 40,000 creative and performing arts workers were not able to receive JobKeeper payments at all.

Actors, dancers, musicians, and crew working in theatrical productions are usually employed by a number of different companies each year, meaning they did not qualify for the wage subsidy. Many of the 42 percent of arts and recreation workers employed as casuals were also ineligible for the payment, as they had not worked for the same employer for 12 months.

Despite widespread calls for broader access to the wage subsidy, the JobKeeper extension, which began in October, posed additional eligibility challenges with the introduction of a tiered payment system meaning workers unable to prove they worked more than 80 hours in February will receive only $750 per fortnight before tax. For artists, who typically devote significantly more time to unpaid preparation than they spend on stage, this presented a major challenge.

A $250 million support package for the arts was announced by the federal government in June, but so far nothing has been delivered. Arts Minister Paul Fletcher claimed in a television appearance on October 11 that “much of that money or some of that money [is] already flowing.” The following week, however, Simon Atkinson, secretary of the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications—“Arts” having been subsumed into the mega-department in 2019—admitted that “in a cash flow sense—no cash has flowed.”

Little of the promised $250 million is likely to end up in the hands of artists or industry workers in any case. The first component of the package to roll out is the $50 million Screen Australia temporary interruption fund, which provides additional insurance cover—for a fee—for film and television productions that have not been able to commence filming because insurance companies refuse to accept liability in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak on set.

The first recipients of funding from the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) grant program were announced last month, almost six months after the package was unveiled. Only 80 percent of the promised $75 million will be awarded in the first round, with the remainder deferred until mid-2021.

The rest of the package comprises $90 million in government-backed loans for new productions, and $35 million for Commonwealth-funded arts organisations on the brink of insolvency.

These sums are woefully inadequate and will do little to save an industry that employs 600,000 people and contributes more than $110 billion to the national economy each year.

Even if Australia continues to avoid the worst of the virus and a successful vaccine can be widely distributed in the coming months, the economic impact of the pandemic will not disappear overnight. The arts and entertainment sector, heavily dependent on the disposable income of its audience, will suffer for years as working people continues to face mass unemployment and cuts to wages and conditions.

The poor state of government arts funding is nothing new, but the coronavirus pandemic has sharply exposed the problems of forcing cultural institutions to operate as profit-making businesses. The insistence that these organisations rely on ticket sales not only hurts performers and technical crew, but also stifles the intellectual development of workers by denying them access to the arts.

CDC reports a record 81,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in a 12-month period

Alex Findijs

More than 81,000 people died from drug overdoses between June 2019 and May 2020 in the United States according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the highest number of overdose deaths recorded in a 12-month period.

The report noted that overdose deaths were already increasing before the pandemic, but that the data shows an acceleration in death rates following the outbreak of COVID-19 in the US.

The leading factor in this rise in deaths has been attributed to the use of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. The number of synthetic opioid deaths rose by 38.4 percent from the 12-month period ending in May 2019 compared to the 12-month period ending in May 2020.

A package of prescription drugs (pxhere.com)

Of the 38 jurisdictions with synthetic opioid overdose data, 37 reported an increase in deaths, 18 of which reported increases over 50 percent. Ten western states also reported an increase in synthetic-opioid–related deaths of more than 98 percent. The CDC did not specify the states.

Additionally, cocaine overdose deaths rose 26.5 percent, and deaths related to psychostimulants, such as methamphetamine, rose 34.6 percent. The CDC believes that the rise in cocaine overdose deaths was influenced by co-use or contamination with fentanyl or heroin. The report also noted that the number of deaths involving psychostimulants has surpassed cocaine-related deaths.

The acceleration in drug overdose deaths during the pandemic is a development of a broader exponential growth in such fatalities over the past four decades. The number of drug overdose deaths rose from 1.13 per 100,000 people in 1979 to 16.96 per 100,000 in 2016, according to research published in Science magazine. This growth has resulted in just under 600,000 deaths over a 38-year span, with a doubling of deaths every 9 years.

The trends for individual drugs have fluctuated over time; however, the last 20 years have seen opioids take a central position in the growth of overdose deaths. According to data from the CDC, the number of opioid prescriptions is three times higher than in 1999.

Opioid prescriptions and overdose deaths steadily rose throughout the 2000s. Prescriptions peaked in 2012 with 255 million issued at a rate of 81.3 per 100,000. The total volume of opioids dispensed peaked in 2010 at 782 morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs) per capita.

Since then, the total number of prescriptions has fallen considerably to 153 million in 2019. The immediate cause of this reduction in prescriptions was the publication of several studies between 2010 and 2012 providing evidence of the addictive qualities of prescription opioids and their relation to high rates of substance abuse and overdoses.

While prescriptions have declined, the death rate has remained high and even accelerated. This was largely a result of the rapid rise in fentanyl and heroin use since 2010. People who had become addicted to opioids quickly found it more difficult to acquire a steady supply due to a crackdown on pill-mill pharmacies. Without any substantial government funding for addiction rehabilitation, thousands of addicts were left to find their way to more dangerous substances.

Illegally manufactured fentanyl and heroin quickly became cheap and powerful alternatives to prescription opioids. Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. Because of this, it is often used to cut heroin or to create counterfeit opioids, sometimes resulting in unintentional consumption.

Purdue Pharma, the company that produces OxyContin, launched an extensive and coordinated campaign in the early 2000s to expand opioid sales and promoted the myth that its product was non-addictive.

Purdue gathered data on which physicians had the largest number of patients with chronic pain. They then used that data to target where they concentrated their marketing and sales staff. By 2003, nearly half of all OxyContin-prescribing physicians were primary care physicians.

The result was that physicians often did not have the expertise or time to assess pain levels and accurate pharmaceutical needs. By 2002, Purdue had multiplied its OxyContin prescriptions to 6.7 million, 10 times the number in 1997. In 1996, OxyContin sales were $44 million. Between 2001 and 2002, Purdue sold $3 billion worth of opioids.

Over this time, and still today, Purdue and other opioid manufacturers refused to admit any connection between opioid use and addiction. Salesmen promoted the limited research showing fewer than 1 percent of people became addicted when treated for short terms.

However, further research into the long-term use of OxyContin showed considerable addictive qualities. The evidence on this was so compelling that Purdue was forced to pay $634 million in fines along with several executives pleading guilty to misbranding OxyContin as nonaddictive in 2007.

In 2019, Purdue filed for bankruptcy after more than 2,000 lawsuits were filed against them by cities and states. With the evidence stacked against them, the Sackler family and Purdue executives decided to plan for the inevitable.

While Purdue still denies wrongdoing, as of October 2020 it has agreed to pay $8 billion in settlements, $3.5 billion in criminal fines and $2.8 billion in damages. Compared to the $35 billion in profit that was made from selling OxyContin, this is a fairly light punishment for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Purdue will also restructure into a “public-benefit company.” Ostensibly, this will make Purdue committed to public health and providing funds to state and local governments for opioid relief programs. What this will actually entail is still to be seen.

Regardless, the Sackler family that founded Purdue has transferred more than $10 billion to their assorted properties in preparation for the litigation, much of which they have squirreled away into offshore back accounts. They will likely remain billionaires after the collapse of Purdue and will potentially avoid prosecution through a $3 billion personal settlement with litigators.

The rise in drug overdose deaths during the pandemic is indicative of the inability of the country’s for-profit health care system to adequately provide for the social needs of the working class. Millions are suffering from the effects of drug abuse, yet no aid has been given to help people address this issue.

“The disruption to daily life due to the COVID-19 pandemic has hit those with substance use disorder hard,” CDC Director Robert Redfield noted in announcing the annual report. He further added that “it’s important to not lose sight of different groups being affected in other ways. We need to take care of people suffering from unintended consequences.”

The pandemic has vividly exposed all of the failings of the capitalist system, from government bailouts for corporations to the drive to reopen the economy at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. This latest data shows in stark detail the effects of failing to fully provide health care, including substance abuse rehabilitation, and the irreparable damage that can be done when the health of the working class is traded for profit.

Countries impose UK travel restrictions as more infectious Covid strain threatens to spread worldwide

Chris Marsden

Britain recorded 33,364 new cases of COVID-19, an additional 18,871 hospitalisations and 215 deaths—spurred on by the new more infectious strain first acknowledged by Boris Johnson’s government last week.

More than 40 countries have imposed flight and other travel restrictions on the UK to contain the spread of the new strain which is reported to be 70 percent more infectious than the previously dominant strains. They include at least 18 European countries, as well as Russia, India, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Peru. The US is expected to follow.

21/12/2020. London, United Kingdom. Boris Johnson Press Conference on Covid-19. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a Covid-19 Press Conference with the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps inside No10 Downing Street. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street

But Professor Calum Semple, of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has warned that the mutated strain is likely to become the dominant global strain nevertheless. Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, when asked by Sky News whether the mutant strain will become globally dominant, answered in the affirmative as it was affecting more people: “Because the virus has the evolutionary advantage in transmitting more quickly, it will out-compete all the other strains, and so it will naturally do that.”

He added, “As immunity comes into the community more widely, then you’ll start to see more pressure on the virus and you’re more likely to see other escapes of other variations,” before warning, “We do not yet have herd immunity despite those people that think herd immunity is going to be the salvation. We won’t have it until a very large number of people have been vaccinated.”

There is no evidence that the new strain is more deadly than its predecessors, or that it is resistant to the various vaccines now being rolled out. But its higher rate of infectivity means more cases, hospitalisations, and deaths and demands a faster and more widespread vaccination drive and far more effective measures of containment. These are still not being imposed in the UK or in any of the countries now belatedly imposing travel restrictions.

The two earliest samples of the mutated virus were collected on September 20 in Kent and another on September 21 in London. But the government only admitted to knowledge of the severity of the new viral spread on December 14. It was only on Saturday that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced a new more restrictive “Tier 4” level affecting 16.4 million people, including around 9 million people throughout London and much of south east England. But this still leaves millions going to work in an area where the new mutation accounts for 60 percent of infections and has no impact on the rest of the UK. The government has admitted that 10-15 percent of cases of the new strain, VUI-202012/01, are already occurring outside the south-east.

A rendering of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)

As a result, the door is being shut on UK travel after the new strain has already escaped to several European countries, and with two cases confirmed as far away as Australia. Infections have been officially recorded in Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy and British-ruled Gibraltar in Spain. South Africa, a centre of the pandemic, has recorded a similar mutation as likely responsible for a surge in cases.

Yesterday Johnson was preoccupied by negotiations with President Emmanuel Macron to reverse a unilateral 48-hour French ban on freight lorries travelling between Dover and Calais, as well as travel through the Channel Tunnel. A fifth of all UK goods travel though Dover each day. However, French health minister Olivier Veran told Europe 1 radio, “It is entirely possible that the virus is circulating in France.”

In Germany, Christian Drosten, director of virology at Berlin's Charite Hospital, was widely cited in the UK press for his remarks that politicians and the media could be exaggerating the infectivity of the new strain and that it was unclear whether the surge in cases in Kent and the South East was caused by the new strain. But Drosten also said he expected the new strain was already in circulation in Germany.

The implications for the spread of the pandemic in Europe and internationally are grave. On Saturday, Johnson said the new virus could boost the R reproduction rate in the UK by 0.4—meaning a substantial escalation in infections. This may be an underestimate. The government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) estimates the variant could increase the R number by between 0.4 and 0.9.

Even if the spread of the mutation is limited, it is already active on the continent and is only one of thousands of mutations worldwide—some of which have similar characteristics. British scientists are reportedly monitoring 4,000 strains of coronavirus. These include the D614G variant that became the dominant strain in Europe and then spread globally. A new strain was identified in October as responsible for 90 percent of new infections in Spain and is likely to have spread throughout Europe due to tourism. Johnson gave a press conference yesterday, flanked by his chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. Johnson and Shapps only became animated regarding the negotiations to end the French blockade of haulage trade and treated questions on the pandemic to cursory and evasive replies.

21/12/2020. London, United Kingdom. Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance inside No10 Downing Street. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street

The criminal response of the government was therefore most openly articulated by Vallance. Asked why tougher containment measures were not in place across the UK, he admitted, "The transmission is increased. We can't say exactly by how much, but it is clearly substantially increased, so it is more transmissible." He then predicted there would be spike in cases after an "inevitable period of mixing" over Christmas. But he still proposed no new containment measures.

The government is again ignoring prominent scientists demanding a second national lockdown, with Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health and a member of SAGE, insisting, “We need to reset our strategy and move rapidly to a zero Covid strategy of the kind that many have been proposing… the alternative could well be a catastrophic collapse in confidence in the country’s ability to control the virus and the economic, human and social disaster that would follow.”

The sole concern of the Johnson government and its counterparts in every country is with increasing the share values of the major corporations and filling the bank accounts of the super-rich. His focus on Dover was not prompted by the threat of food and medicine shortages, but the fall of the FTSE 100 by 1.7 percent provoked by the travel and trade bans, followed by still bigger falls in Europe and the US.

That is why the policy of herd immunity—refusing to implement genuine containment measures that would require closing workplaces and schools and would hinder the accumulation of profit—is pursued throughout the world. The price paid is coined in over 17 million human lives, including close to half a million in Europe. Hundreds of thousands face death in the coming weeks.

This must be prevented at all costs. Emergency measures must be taken to bring the virus under control!