Quebec government documents expose its disastrous mishandling of initial pandemic response

Frédéric Charlebois

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in Canada, with the number of infections now well past the half-million mark. In the most populous province, Ontario, the situation is so out of control that a partial lockdown (under which many nonessential workplaces remain open) is now in effect for most residents until Jan. 23.

In Quebec, the second most populous province, the rolling 7-day average of new infections has exceeded 2,000 per day for the past eleven days. Since March, more than 194,000 people have contracted COVID-19 in Quebec, and 8,124 have died. So high is the volume of coronavirus patients, several major hospitals have been forced to turn patients away.

Nearly 7,500 Quebec health care workers are currently unable to work because they have become infected with COVID-19 or have had to self-isolate. The remaining staff are facing an arduous and unsustainable workload, with anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress reportedly at record levels.

These catastrophic conditions are not the inevitable product of the virus, but rather the result of the policies pursued by Quebec’s and Canada’s ruling elites. Despite having received multiple warnings about the threat a pandemic would pose prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and having witnessed the disastrous mishandling of the SARS epidemic in Ontario in 2003, Canada’s governments and public health authorities were completely unprepared. Ontario, for example, failed to restock tons of supplies of emergency equipment bought in the aftermath of the SARS crisis after they expired.

From the outset of the current pandemic, the authorities downplayed its severity so as to defend corporate profits: first by doing nothing that would disrupt economic life, and then, having been forced to impose hastily organized lockdowns, by seeking to “reopen” the economy long before the first wave of infections had even crested.

Radio-Canada (the country’s French-language national broadcaster) exposed the Quebec government’s shambolic initial response to the pandemic in a recent exposé. Through an access to information request, the broadcaster obtained more than 2,000 pages of internal communications, directives and emails from Quebec’s health authorities during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first four months of 2020.

These documents reveal a staggering, even criminal, level of indifference, and lack of preparation in implementing basic public health measures.

Quebec Public Health Director Horacio Arruda (Wikimedia Commons)

Provincial authorities were aware of the potential threat, but delayed taking action until the virus has spread far and wide among the population. As early as January 12, Quebec’s Director of Public Health, Dr. Horacio Arruda, was saying behind the scenes that “if the virus ever leaves China, it will be problematic for Quebec.” Despite these concerns, public health officials spent the next two months “observing and monitoring” the virus while publicly minimizing its dangers.

While the WHO (World Health Organization) declared an international state of health emergency on January 30, Quebec’s Public Security and Health Ministries did not go into pandemic preparedness until February 26, and failed to update the province’s pandemic plan until March 9.

In the meantime, Arruda and the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government squandered the precious weeks before cases began to rise exponentially, issuing appeals for calm and arguing that “there is no increase in emerging cases” (February 3) and that “there is no active contamination in Quebec” (March 9). This despite the rapid spread of the disease internationally throughout February and early March, and Quebec officially recording its own first case on February 27.

The day after this first case was reported, Arruda continued to downplay the danger. In internal communications, he complained that the coronavirus “takes up a lot of space in the media” and that “there are many public health issues ... that are not being addressed instead.”

This indifference in the face of a deadly danger to the population extended to federal authorities. It was not until March 10 that Justin Trudeau's Liberal government bothered to write to the provinces to inquire about possible shortages of medical equipment, particularly ventilators and PPE (personal protective equipment).

Going back to the timeline of events in Quebec, it was only on March 4 that Public Security wrote to health care institutions to ask them to provide a list of all their medical equipment within two days. On March 14, two days after the WHO declared a global pandemic, Quebec declared a state of health emergency. Five days later Quebec recorded its first COVID-19 death.

The Quebec government’s lack of preparedness is highlighted by its failure to stockpile or secure additional supplies of protective equipment.

As early as January 28, Quebec drugstores were reporting a shortage of protective masks. On February 6, the provincial health network canceled a major call for tenders for unexplained reasons, “out of our control,” and the next day the WHO warned that there was a worldwide shortage of masks.

On February 15, doctors warned that “equipment is at a very low level in hospitals.” But it was only three days later that the province issued an emergency appeal for PPE on the Quebec Electronic Tendering System. It read: “Emergency situation where the safety of people or property is at stake; Reasons: Global shortage of masks. Quebec’s health care institutions and first responders no longer have any stock.” Only on Feb. 21, well over a month-and-a-half after reports of a new deadly virus had begun to emerge in China and more than three weeks after the WHO had declared a health emergency, did Quebec sign its first contract for additional PPE.

That same day the Health Ministry instructed health care institutions to preserve and ration protective equipment.

From February 21 to April 8, PPE was in short supply, and health centres had to operate with equipment reserves equivalent to between 3 and 6 days. On March 31, Quebec Premier François Legault was forced to admit publicly that “there will be a shortage of certain equipment during the next 3 to 7 days.” The next day, Trudeau in turn admitted that there was “not enough protective equipment in emergency reserves” to respond to the crisis.

The rationing or outright absence of personal protective equipment—especially in long-term care facilities—resulted in tens of thousands of health care workers, and the entire population, being unnecessarily exposed to the deadly danger posed by the virus.

This disastrous handling of the pandemic stems from the class policy of capitalist governments throughout North America, Europe and internationally. Their preoccupation has been “keeping the economy open,” that is, maintaining the flow of profits regardless of the cost in human lives. Even in its budget, presented March 10, Quebec’s CAQ government did not include any measures or additional funding to fight the coronavirus.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on March 21: “Trudeau, Legault and the other provincial premiers were all criminally negligent in the face of the threat posed by the deadly virus. Large scale preventive and testing measures should have been put in place in January and early February when the deadly outbreak in China was identified as a pandemic threat and the World Health Organization was summoning the alarm. Yet these governments—and their counterparts in the US and Europe—refused to act because the necessary measures were seen as an impediment to big business’s pursuit of profit. Instead, they downplayed the extent of the danger, some going so far as to say that the virus resembled seasonal flu.”

This orientation was evident when Legault began lifting lockdown measures in April, even as the pandemic continued to rage. He publicly advocated the scientifically baseless theory of “herd immunity,” that is, allowing the virus to spread freely in the population, in his failed attempt to reopen schools in the Montreal area, which was then the epicentre of the pandemic in Canada.

As the WSWS noted at the outset of the crisis, such a pandemic was both foreseeable and foreseen. For years, scientists and even public institutions had been pressing for pandemic-preparedness measures.

Numerous reports were written, including one co-authored in 2006 by Canada’s current Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam. Canada’s unpreparedness for the novel coronavirus pandemic is all the more glaring and inexcusable, since it was the country, outside of East Asia, most affected by the 2002-3 outbreak of SARS, a highly contagious respiratory disease similar to COVID-19.

Despite this, the authorities failed to take elementary preventive measures before and at the onset of the crisis. They preferred to lie to the population so as not to harm the profits and investments of the financial oligarchy, with disastrous consequences for the working class and the population as a whole.

The Legault government’s initial inaction and subsequent reckless reopening of the economy, and the decades of cuts to health and elder care implemented by federal Liberal and Conservative and Quebec Liberal and Parti Québécois governments, led to mass death in Quebec, especially in nursing homes. During the pandemic’s first wave, Quebec had one of the highest per capita mortality rates in the world.

The relentless back-to-work drive pursued by all levels of government in Canada, including the reopening of schools in the fall, has created the conditions for a second wave that is now raging across the entire country and threatens to be even deadlier than the first.

The emergence of multiple vaccines underscores that the spread of the virus can be halted through the application of science. But the mass vaccination campaigns announced for 2021 will not reduce the spiraling number of infections and deaths for at least several months.

This makes it all the more urgent that the working class act now to preserve human lives.

In all workplaces, rank-and-file safety committees must be formed, completely independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions, which have uniformly supported the ruling elite’s homicidal “back-to-work” policy. These committees must demand the strictest measures to combat the pandemic—mass testing, massive investments in health care, and the closure of all in-class schooling and all nonessential production, with full compensation for affected workers and small businesses.

The hundreds of billions in bailout money handed out in March to the financial and corporate elite by the Trudeau government demonstrate that there are ample resources to fund the emergency measures needed to curb the pandemic and save thousands of lives. But they are monopolized by the ruling elite.

Boeing’s deadly 737 Max resumes US commercial flights

Bryan Dyne

On Tuesday, American Airlines carried out the first US commercial flight of the deadly Boeing 737 Max 8, nearly two years after it was grounded in the aftermath of two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019—killing a combined total of 346 men, women and children.

The flight, which reportedly took place without incident, was between Miami International Airport and New York’s LaGuardia Airport. American has thus far scheduled the Max 8 to fly a single route, from Miami to New York City and back, once a day.

A Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner at the Renton, Washington assembly plant [Credit: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File]

United Airlines is currently slated to restart flights of the Max 8 on February 11, and Southwest Airlines has said it will resume using the aircraft sometime in the second quarter of next year. Delta Air Lines, the fourth major US carrier, does not own any Max 8 jets.

Predictably, Wall Street hailed the flight, with Boeing stock spiking after the opening bell. The company’s share prices have been on a generally upward trend since late October, increasing by about 50 percent. At that time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) signaled that it was getting ready to unground the aircraft.

Wall Street, however, is celebrating not just rising share prices. Nearly two years after the second crash, not a single corporate executive or federal regulator involved in designing and certifying the lethal airplane has gone to jail for his role in the deaths of 346 passengers and crew members, as well as one diver in Indonesia who was killed during the search of the wreckage. The relaunch of the plane in the US is further confirmation that, as long as one’s actions are in the interests of the financial oligarchy, one can get away with murder.

It is worth noting that Boeing got off scot free after the first crash, which was largely swept under the rug by the FAA and the media. It was only after the second crash five months later that European and other international regulators grounded the Max 8. Even then, Boeing’s CEO at the time, Dennis Muilenburg, declared that the plane was perfectly safe, and the FAA refused to ground it for two days. President Donald Trump tweeted his support for Boeing and Muilenburg.

So far, the only other country to approve the Max 8 for commercial flights is Brazil. On December 9, even before the American Airlines flight, the jet was put into service by Gol Airlines, Brazil’s largest airline and one of Boeing’s biggest customers. Canadian and European regulators are expected to give their approval soon, with other international aviation safety agencies expected to follow their lead.

The plane was recently ungrounded by the FAA after 20 months of what the agency claims was a “comprehensive and methodical safety review process.” For his part, Boeing CEO David Calhoun hailed the ungrounding as a confirmation of the company’s “core values of safety, quality and integrity.”

No weight can be given to such words. Boeing did everything it could throughout the entire development and production process of the Max 8 to hide fundamental flaws in the plane’s design. The FAA became aware of the risks of the new plane but went ahead and certified it. Neither Boeing nor the FAA, with the complicity of the airline unions, told either airline workers or the flying public of the dangers they faced.

These risks included both inadequate training and poor design. The total training given pilots flying the Max 8 was a one hour video, compared to the normal requirement that pilots spend hundreds of hours on simulators to be certified to fly a new plane. Boeing pushed the claim that virtually no special training, a major cost to airline companies, was required as part of its drive to undercut its major international rival, European-based Airbus. This was given the green light by the FAA and the pilots’ unions.

The mechanical problems of the Max 8 were even more severe. The most well known of these is the now infamous auto-piloting system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The software was installed to compensate for the plane’s inherent tendency to stall, a byproduct of attaching a newer, larger engine onto the half-century-old Boeing 737 chassis.

This was done to avoid having to design a new model, thereby sharply lowering the cost and duration of the process of design, production, training and certification. As internal documents that have since come out reveal, Boeing’s fatal rush to market a new medium-range commercial jet, intended to serve as the company’s workhorse aircraft, was, like all subsequent decisions, driven by considerations of profit, market share and stock price, with safety at best a secondary consideration.

MCAS was designed and installed as a relatively inexpensive fix to the stalling problem. The existence of this system was not even mentioned in the pilot training manuals. Pilots were not told that the plane’s computers were given the ability to override pilot controls if the system deemed it necessary. Boeing ultimately gave MCAS 10 times the control over the pitch of the plane than it told test pilots, meaning it could crash the plane given faulty inputs.

This is exactly what happened in both crashes. Each plane’s angle of attack sensor wrongly indicated a stall, and because only a single sensor was tied to MCAS, rather than the industry redundancy standard of two or three sensors for critical functions, the software forced both flights into an unrecoverable dive. Black box recordings of the pilots bear this out. They plunged to their deaths, along with hundreds of others, desperately trying to manually override MCAS.

Documents that have surfaced in the past two years from numerous investigations into the Max 8 show that Boeing was very aware of the problems with the MCAS and the Max 8 as a whole. Leaked internal emails reflect dismay and incredulity among employees over the development of the Max 8. One commented, “This is a joke. This airplane is ridiculous.” A different message stated, “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd.”

Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot at the time of the aircraft’s development, called MCAS “egregious,” and noted that it was “running rampant” in Boeing’s simulators, causing crashes.

But despite such incriminating evidence, no criminal charges have been laid and there have been no high-level arrests. Most notably, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, controlled by the Democrats, despite publishing a damning report showing Boeing risked countless lives, proposed no actions to hold executives or officials accountable. There were no calls for criminal prosecution, nor were any financial penalties imposed. Now, with the relaunch of the Max 8, both the company and its big shareholders are positioned to reap massive profits, potentially at the cost of more human lives.

Fascists enter parliament as COVID-19 devastates Romania

Andrei Tudora & Tina Zamfir

Elections in Romania were held on November 6, as the COVID-19 pandemic that has now killed more than 15,000 people ravaged the country. The election was marked by an unprecedented abstention—only about 30 percent of the electorate turned up to vote—and by the emergence of the fascist Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) party, which took 9 percent of the vote.

How has a hitherto unknown political entity, founded last year and which as late as September polled less than 1 percent, managed to become essentially the third political force in the country, after the Liberal-Save Romania alliance and the ex-Stalinist Social Democratic Party?

The answer is found in the response of the international ruling class to a mortal crisis of capitalism, sharply intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. Fearing that its disastrous handling of the pandemic will trigger an outpouring of workers’ struggles, the Romanian ruling elite is working to build a fascist movement that it hopes to use against the working class. All the main bourgeois parties, media and cultural figures are implicated in this filthy operation.

The Parliament of Romania (Pixabay)

The chief responsibility lies with the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the chief party to emerge from the Stalinist bureaucracy after it restored capitalism in Romania and across Eastern Europe in 1989. The PSD has provided both material and crucial political support for the rise of fascism.

During the pandemic, the National Liberal Party (PNL)-led government has followed the policy of the ruling class internationally—“herd immunity.” After a belated, one-month lockdown, authorities essentially stopped efforts to contain the virus. The economy and schools reopened, with contact tracing all but nonexistent.

The result has been a social catastrophe. Factories, schools and hospitals became epicenters of the disease, with mass casualties in care homes for the elderly and disabled. With a health care system already rotting on its feet, Romania has had one of the EU’s highest death rates. The government has been widely accused by health experts of doctoring numbers to delay taking even minimal measures. Facing a mounting death toll and an imminent collapse of the hospitals, authorities closed schools and kindergartens one month after opening them.

Throughout the year, the PSD denounced every measure, however minimal, to contain the virus. This let the government justify its reactionary policies by citing the pressure of parliamentary opposition.

The PSD, heir to the Stalinist Communist Party, increasingly adopted the language and methods of the far-right networks deployed internationally to protest COVID restrictions. It is an open secret that this summer’s demonstrations against the use of masks—attended by a motley crew of religious zealots and neo-Nazi groups—were held with the PSD bosses’ blessing. Lower-level party officials supervised the events, which received saturation coverage in PSD-aligned media.

One of the more prominent groups at the anti-mask demos was the AUR, headed by 34-year-old George Simion. A lifelong provocateur, Simion comes from the milieu of far-right football thugs. He has spent much of his career agitating in the neighboring Romanian-speaking Republic of Moldova. He participated in a violent provocation with ethnic Hungarians in Romania, before launching a bid for the EU parliament candidacy in 2019, which although unsuccessful received wide media attention.

The backbone of the new party is made up of the religious fundamentalist elements, represented by party co-founder Claudiu Tarziu. Tarziu was a leader of the Coalition for Family, an umbrella organization of fascists of different religions, both Orthodox and Protestant. It gained notoriety as the main vehicle for a failed referendum in 2018 to change the definition of the family in the Romanian constitution and exclude gay couples from marriage. The referendum was organized by the then-PSD government, which also campaigned for it.

As a writer for various Orthodox rags, Tarziu’s defining feature is his unashamed fascination with the fascist Romanian Iron Guard of the 1930s.

Another dubious and indicative figure around the party is Calin Georgescu. A career bureaucrat working for the UN and the Romanian government on environmental and “sustainable development” issues, he is associated with the Club of Rome, a Malthusian think tank. Repeatedly interviewing him, the Romanian press has given ample attention to his social Darwinist ramblings. He is the AUR’s candidate for prime minister.

Another ominous element in the AUR’s physiognomy is the presence of retired army generals. The most notorious is former Chief of Staff Mircea Chelaru. As an active duty general, he was involved on two occasions in erecting busts of the former fascist dictator Ion Antonescu, once in front of an army barracks and then in a church courtyard.

The AUR received wide attention in the media in the weeks prior to the election. Simion conducted friendly interviews on national television and with three of the best-known journalists in the country.

The rush to prepare the new political formation for election involved a concerted effort from the main bourgeois parties. An investigation by Galatimedia blog, quoted by G4 media, revealed that in one county, most AUR candidates were in PSD or PNL movements; in many cases, they were even PSD or PNL local elected officials.

Cosmin Gusa, a political spin doctor and media mogul employed by both major bourgeois parties, hailed the new formation after the election, praising its “unifying, patriotic message, street fighting against excesses to which Romania is subjected.”

While a number of journalists and politicians have expressed concern over the fascists’ entry into parliament, all of them, including mainstream media and pseudo-left commentators, are characterized by a criminal degree of complacency. Appeals are made and assurances given that the major parties—the very same forces that created and nourished the AUR—would “isolate” the new party. Another argument is that the new formation is similar to many other “anti-establishment” parties that have sprung up in Romania in the last two decades.

The weeks following the election already have proven how fraudulent these claims are. The AUR has been given legitimacy and was invited by the president to official talks to form a new government. Simion has held high-level discussions with PSD leaders and the party has been given the leadership of four parliamentary committees.

The AUR is similar to far-right parties internationally, such as the AfD in Germany and the Vox party in Spain. It is a hand-crafted weapon of the ruling class, which is terrified of explosive social anger in the working class. Its references to the Iron Guard—one of the most murderous and demented organizations in history—must serve as an urgent warning to workers in Romania and internationally. There is no way to defeat the danger of fascist reaction save the independent mobilization of the working class internationally against capitalism and for socialism.

Excess deaths in Russia spike

Andrea Peters

While Russia’s official death toll from coronavirus stands at just over 55,000, recently released data from the country’s statistical agency Rosstat reveal a sharp uptick in excess deaths since the start of this year. The real number of COVID-19 victims is likely at least double or triple that officially reported, if not more. October and November each posted record death rates.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said on Monday that mortality in Russia increased by 13.8 percent during the first eleven months of 2020 as compared to the previous year. Of that increase, 81 percent “relates to COVID-19 and the consequences of COVID-19,” she stated, adding that the figures still remain to be fully analyzed.

An examination of the Rosstat data conducted by Reuters found more than 240,000 excess deaths between April and November alone. The news agency writes, “Rosstat data, tallied by Reuters, showed that less than half the total number of such excess deaths - at 116,030 since the start of the pandemic in Russia in April - can be attributed directly to the coronavirus. This is still more than double the preliminary death toll figure reported on a daily, cumulative basis by the Russian government coronavirus crisis centre.”

A woman wearing a face mask to protect against coronavirus walks past a graffiti dedicated to the victory of the Soviet Union in the World War II, in St.Petersburg, Russia earlier this year. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Other news outlets, such as the Guardian, maintain that Russia’s COVID-19 deaths are closer to 186,000. Whatever the precise number contained in the Rosstat data, Golikova’s remarks make clear that the Kremlin has been grossly understating the coronavirus death toll.

More than three million Russians have contracted COVID-19 since the outbreak started, with infection rates hovering between 25,000 and 29,000 a day for the past few weeks. On this basis, the government is insisting that the situation in the country has stabilized in most regions. Nonetheless, infections continue to climb in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as cities in western and central Siberia, which have been particularly hard hit by the virus.

On December 28, Golikova stated that the federal government did not order a second nationwide lockdown this fall because it was prepared for the second wave of the virus, making restrictions on work, school, and transportation unnecessary. The country’s spiraling death rate proves this claim to be false.

In Saint Petersburg, with a population of nearly five million, just 8.7 percent of beds at medical facilities remain unoccupied. A local military hospital recently opened its doors to civilian patients in order to alleviate the burden on the city’s overstretched healthcare system. Saint Petersburg’s Lenexpo Exhibition Complex has been converted into a field hospital. Across the country, authorities are scrambling to add beds to handle the influx of COVID-19 patients.

Shopping and family gatherings happening during the New Year holiday are expected to increase infections. Without another lockdown, this spread will be exacerbated by the return to work and school in mid-January, when the vacation period comes to a close.

In early December, the country began mass inoculations with the Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine. Despite the official fanfare that accompanied news of Sputnik V’s registration in August, distribution of the vaccine has remained relatively slow. Thus far, 700,000 doses have been administered, with another 300,000 expected in the final days of 2020. Given that Sputnik V requires a two-dose regimen spread across two months, only a tiny percentage of the Russian population of 140 million people has been fully vaccinated—about 20,000 people, according to government sources.

An ongoing issue is the fact that Sputnik V was registered and approved for use prior to the completion of phase three trials—the final stage in the vaccine testing process—which are still underway. Opinion surveys show widespread concern within the population over the safety of the vaccine. According to the Levada Center, 58 percent of respondents say they would not be willing to be inoculated with Sputnik V, with a third of those citing the fact that phase-three has not yet been completed and another third indicating concerns over side effects.

These poll results are similar to ones released in August when the vaccine was first announced, indicating that the government’s efforts to convince the population of the safety of Sputnik V have fallen flat. According to a mid-December news report in the Moscow Times, the 70 inoculation points set up across the capital city are underutilized, with far fewer people coming in to receive the vaccine than the facilities can handle.

On Monday, Sputnik V was approved for use in individuals over the age of 60, and the government is making a renewed push to increase the share of the population that is inoculated. The Russian government has said that it aims to vaccinate seventy percent of the adult population by November 2021.

On December 27, echoing comments made earlier in the month by the country’s defense ministry, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov decried attacks on Sputnik V by press outlets in countries with an anti-Russian agenda.

Major media in the US, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have taken advantage of the roll out of Sputnik V prior to the completion of phase three trials to press forward with their anti-Putin agenda. They do not care in the slightest about the health and wellbeing of the Russian people, millions of whom they know would perish in the war for which they are braying against Moscow.

Given the dangers involved in exposing the general population to a drug that has not been fully tested, the decision of the Russian government to approve and begin mass inoculations with Sputnik V speaks to a degree of desperation in the Kremlin in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. With popular anger mounting over its inept response to COVID-19 and failure to provide genuine financial relief to ordinary people, the Putin government evidently thought that registration of Sputnik V in August would give his administration a boost. Instead, it may be having the opposite effect.

It is unclear as to whether Sputnik V is dangerous. The UK-based firm AstraZeneca just signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Russian government regarding the incorporation of elements of Sputnik V into AstraZeneca’s own vaccine, in an effort to boost the latter’s efficacy and extend the length of time for which the vaccine gives the recipient immunity. Joint trials will be conducted.

Numerous countries have signed contracts with Russia to buy Sputnik V, with Hungary and Argentina receiving doses and vaccine components this week.

The class dynamic of the massive Wall Street speculation

Nick Beams

As 2020 draws to a close, the essential class dynamic and objective logic of the global capitalist system have never been more starkly revealed.

Billions of people around the world confront the escalating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the destruction of millions of jobs, impoverishment, including in some cases the threat of starvation, and the destruction of a viable future for a whole generation of youth. Yet the ruling financial oligarchy is benefiting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The year is ending amid the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But Wall Street, leading the way for stock markets around the world, is finishing the year at a record high.

When the economic and financial effects of the pandemic began to become apparent in March, Wall Street and global markets plunged. But the US Federal Reserve and the government, together with central banks and governments around the world, stepped in to organise the greatest bailout of the financial oligarchy in history, pumping more than $10 trillion into the financial system.

In the US, the Fed issued a virtual blank cheque to Wall Street, committing itself to purchase all classes of financial assets so that the siphoning of the wealth of society into its upper echelons could continue unabated.

Since its fall in mid-March, the S&P 500 index has risen by 66 percent. But this is only a partial expression of what has taken place, as the stocks of dozens of companies have risen at a much faster rate. Tesla shares are up by 691 percent so far this year; fuel-cell company Power Plug shares have increased by more than 1,000 percent. Zoom Communications is up 451 percent.

Vaccinations for COVID-19 are underway in the US and Britain, which could provide important breakthroughs in the medical fight against the virus. But the rollout in the US is already being described as a “mess.”

At the same time, a new class of billionaires is emerging, their fortunes propelled by the rise in the stocks of companies associated with the development of vaccines and their utilisation. Shares of Moderna, one of the companies involved in the development of a vaccine, have risen by 532 percent.

When governments and central banks launched their multi-trillion-dollar bailout operations, they claimed the extraordinary measures were necessary to save the economy. This fraud has been exposed. The sole concern of the ruling oligarchy was not the health and economic well-being of the mass of the population, but that of the financial markets.

Consequently, no effective measures were taken to deal with the pandemic, which would have involved the lockdown of non-essential businesses and the payment of income to workers and their families, coupled with the application of stringent safety measures at essential businesses that remained open.

Rather, the commencement of the bailout operation was accompanied by a homicidal return to work drive amid the open advancement of the policy of so-called “herd immunity,” ensuring the spread of the virus, so as to ensure that the supply of surplus value from the labour of the working class was not interrupted. This entailed the normalisation of mass death under the slogan coined by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

There is no limit to the supply of money to financial markets, but even meagre assistance to workers and their families is the subject of debate and delays in the US. Elsewhere, even limited emergency measures are now being withdrawn.

The provision of money by the Fed and other central banks to provide the backing for corporate debt has provided a bonanza for major banks. The largest banks around the world have raked in close to $125 billion in fees for underwriting corporate debt and the raising of new equity, as companies seek to raise cash in order to ride out the effects of the pandemic.

What has been described as a “very robust year for underwriting of both debt and equity” has been possible only because of the knowledge that the Fed and other central banks are ready to step in with further assistance should this prove necessary. This has already been factored in, with JPMorgan’s strategy team expecting the provision of a further $5 trillion in 2021.

The guarantee by the Fed that it will do everything in its power to ensure the continued rise of Wall Street has led to an orgy of speculation, via so-called margin debt, in which affluent investors borrow money against their existing holdings to buy more shares of stock.

Last month investors borrowed a record $722.1 billion against their investment portfolios, beating the previous high of $668.9 billion recorded in May 2018. Margin debt is regarded as risky because if stock prices fall the investor must meet a margin call from the brokerage firm from which he has borrowed, either by supplying cash or by selling the stocks underlying the loans, with the potential to trigger a broader sell-off.

Reporting on this milestone, the Wall Street Journal warned it was an “ominous one” because margin debt records were followed by the stock market crashes of 2000 and 2008. But notwithstanding the warning signs, the speculation continues because of the well-founded belief that the Fed stands ready to intervene.

As the chief global investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, Scott Minerd, recently commented to the Financial Times, the pandemic has “completely reworked” the so-called “free market” economic system, replacing it with cycles of “increasingly radical monetary intervention” and the “socialisation of credit risk.”

In other words, the capitalist state has emerged front and centre as the guarantor and facilitator for the looting of society by the financial oligarchy, whose interests it defends.

The present social order resembles nothing so much as the Ancien Régime of France on the eve of the revolution of 1789. Confronted with a deep-seated crisis rooted in the irresolvable contradictions of the economy over which it presided, the ruling elite, organically incapable of reform, had to be swept away in order for society to progress.

Likewise, the present situation has created the objective conditions for a massive class confrontation in which the working class is posed with the task of abolishing the reactionary and outmoded capitalist order and establishing a socialist system, in which human need, not profit and greed, forms the foundation of the economic order.

But that outcome, necessary for human progress, depends on the decisions made by workers and youth to take up the challenge before them by joining and building the revolutionary party to lead the struggles now about to explode.

The Bezos Earth Fund and the charity of the oligarchs

Shuvu Batta & Tom Carter

Amidst an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaires this year, sections of the bourgeoisie have decided to “donate” a small fraction of these ill-gotten gains to philanthropic causes. 

These donations have been prominently covered in the American media as though the billionaires have been visited by the Spirits of Christmas, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and decided to rededicate their lives to universal love and the welfare of their poorer brethren.

In reality, these two phenomena—increasing social inequality alongside the increasing social role of “charitable” handouts from the super-rich—are closely intertwined. Without extreme levels of social inequality, with vast fortunes piling up in the coffers of the tiny few while tens of millions sink into poverty, it would not be necessary to rely on the largesse of the billionaires to “donate” the funds back to society that are necessary to meet critical social needs.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos during the JFK Space Summit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Last month, the initial disbursement of grants took place for the Bezos Earth Fund, named after and financed by the world’s wealthiest individual, Jeff Bezos, who presides over the Amazon conglomerate, which has a total market capitalization of $1.5 trillion.

In February 2020, Bezos announced the launch of his climate change initiative on Instagram, writing: “Today, I’m thrilled to announce I am launching the Bezos Earth Fund... Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share... I’m committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer.”

The donations by Bezos towards climate change have been supplemented by his $100 million donation to Feeding America’s COVID-19 response fund in March. These sums, however, pale in comparison to the wealth which Bezos has accumulated this year alone, more than $70 billion.

A similar trend is reflected among the other American oligarchs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is now worth $12.7 billion, a massive jump from his wealth of $2.6 billion in April. He pledged $1 billion for COVID-19 relief, or about 10 percent of his earnings this year. Microsoft founder Bill Gates donated at least $350 million to COVID-19 relief through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. However, he has seen his wealth balloon from $98 billion in April to $120.1 billion at present, according to statistics maintained by Forbes. Meanwhile, Bezos’s ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, was reported to have donated $6 billion to charitable causes.

The pandemic has dealt an incalculable blow to the vast majority of humanity. According to the non-profit Save the Children, 5.25 billion people were substantially poorer in November than they were in January. The United Nations’ World Food Program issued a report in April that stated “an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people.”

The charitable activities of the oligarchs have to be understood in this context. From March to June 2020, 209 billionaires gave away $7.2 billion in funds and equipment for COVID-19 assistance, with Pricewaterhouse Coopers researchers suggesting “this is the greatest amount billionaires have given in a short space of time ever, even after allowing for inflation.” This is barely one percent of the more than $600 billion which US billionaires alone gained between May and June of this year. These billionaires have gained over $1 trillion over the course of the entire year.

The pandemic has accelerated the processes of monopolization and concentration of wealth already well apparent before the mass outbreak of the virus in February. The state response to the pandemic forced countless small businesses to shut their doors and lay off workers. Around the world, massive growth in unemployment and lack of government assistance is leading workers to pursue low-wage and strenuous jobs for survival despite the direct risk of infection and death. As part of this trend, Amazon itself saw extremely rapid growth in its workforce, from 798,000 at the end of 2019 to over 1.4 million today.

The increased demand for home delivery in the midst of an unmitigated commercial catastrophe for its brick-and-mortar competitors sent Amazon’s stock price soaring, and Bezos’s own net worth climbed to roughly $186.7 billion.

While refusing to take effective action to combat the spread of the coronavirus and secure the livelihoods of the vast majority, governments the world over placed vast financial resources at the disposal of the ultra-rich through trillion dollar fiscal bailouts like the CARES Act, together with several trillion dollars of monetary bailouts through central banks. Meanwhile, the capitalists refused to halt non-essential production, sacrificing workers’ health and lives in the pursuit of profits and accelerating the spread of the deadly pandemic. It is from these social crimes that the billionaires have accumulated the fortunes from which they now dispense their charitable donations.

The sheer scale of the hypocrisy of billionaire “charity” during the pandemic calls to mind what Frederich Engels wrote about capitalist philanthropy in The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845):

What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practicing your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.

But the “pharisaic philanthropy” of British capitalism in Engels’ day, which was scathingly portrayed in Oliver Twist and other works by Charles Dickens, pales in comparison to the present. In more recent times, philanthropies and charities have been transformed in many cases to resemble business operations in themselves: adopting organizational structures resembling that of venture capital groups, recruiting business managers to leadership positions, and courting venture capitalists as investors.

In many cases, what are presented as “philanthropic” organizations function as little more than adjunct vehicles for the prosecution of the interests of their mega-rich donors. This is known within the nonprofit sector as “venture philanthropy.”

In 2007, The World Socialist Web Site reported a study by the Los Angeles Times which found that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest “charitable” organization in the world, had 41 percent of its holdings invested in corporations whose policies “countered its charitable goals,” as well as holdings in over 60 of the highest-polluting companies in the US. A separate report referenced in the article found that the foundation’s healthcare work may have “diverted medical staff from overseeing births and battling childhood diseases” due to the more lucrative pay for the Foundation’s high-profile initiatives battling infectious diseases.

Under its charitable auspices, this foundation has waged unrelenting warfare against public education in the United States, investing millions in private charter schools and pro-charter lobbyists. The Clinton Foundation is another infamous example of bourgeois philanthropy in practice. A particularly devastating memo in the tranche of emails published by Wikileaks in 2016 “detailed a circle of enrichment,” according to the Washington Post, in which a top aide “raised money for the Clinton Foundation from top-tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm ... while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president.”

In November, Bezos announced the initial disbursement of the $10 billion fund: $791 million dollars went towards 16 groups, with the largest grants going to the most “established” environmental charities. The Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Wildlife Fund each received $100 million with 11 other groups receiving grants between $5 and $50 million each.

The funds so far, according to the large non-profits receiving grants, will go to creating “mangrove development and seaweed farms,” launching satellites that track greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the “carbon footprint of farming practices in Northwest India,” and funding lobbyists to “build the political will for climate policies.”

While the funds disbursed by Bezos may find their way into the hands of scientists and specialists who will use them to the best of their abilities, the fact that so much important scientific research relies so heavily on billionaire oligarchs parting with a small portion of their fortunes is not a healthy social phenomenon.

Moreover, it is important to note that the EDF calls for “market-based” solutions to climate change and will use Bezos’ money to “build confidence in carbon-credits,” which are credits that allow companies to pollute and further function as speculative assets. The NRDC will use the $100 million to “build the political will for climate policies” by funding lobbyists and campaigners to push through market reforms.

Bezos has also gifted $43 million to efforts to promote identity politics in the form of funding to the Solutions Project, which gives grants to fund “local and state policy work” through the use of “a frontline leadership of color, with at least 80 percent going to organizations led by women.” In this way, Bezos’s charitable gifts will be used to divert public attention towards questions of race and gender identity and away from the fundamental class division of society, a diversion which has long been deliberately promoted by the corporate media and the Democratic Party in the interests of oligarchs like Bezos.

It is worth noting that Amazon itself is a significant world polluter. Its total environmental impact increased over 15 percent from 2018 to 2019 due to rising sales, according to its own reports. This was a record year in sales for the company, which means its impact on pollution has most likely significantly increased.

Meanwhile, the Thomas Reuters foundation recently reported that the emission reductions goals set by governments around the world in the Paris Accords in 2015, based in part on carbon credits, is set to fail. A major reason for this is that cement, steel and agricultural production were suggested to be curbed, but due to the profit motive, production has instead increased, contributing to a rise in global temperatures. The 2017 Carbon Majors Report showed that 70 percent of all greenhouse gases released from 1988 to 2015 came from just 100 major companies.

Charity and philanthropic patronage are aristocratic forms. They are a symptom of an unequal society in which resources have pooled to an irrational degree at one pole of society. It was Andrew Carnegie, a class-conscious representative of the American bourgeoisie, who pointed to the social role of charity in bolstering capitalist rule in The Gospel of Wealth (1889): “We accept and welcome therefore...great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”

He posed the question, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?” The answer: the “men of wealth” have a duty of “becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”

In similar fashion, the charitable donations of Bezos are designed to promote illusions in the “social responsibility” of the oligarchs. Such donations function to placate hostility against the rapacious activities of the capitalist class as a whole, which has refused to curb its profit drive even as its activities jeopardize the stability of the planet’s climate and have contributed to the runaway spread of a pandemic that was otherwise entirely preventable.

In order to combat climate change, fight infectious diseases, and cure other social ills, it is necessary not to rely on the relatively small scraps donated by the oligarchs, to be used as the oligarchs dictate according to their own individual whims and prerogatives, but by the expropriation of all of the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class by the working class, to be utilized democratically and scientifically to meet social needs worldwide.

The Final Hours of Ethiopia’s TPLF Regime

Thomas C. Mountain

With their army destroyed and their last, best troops wiped out in one morning on the outskirts of their capital Mekele the last remnants of the leadership of Ethiopia’s TPLF regime were forced to retreat to the secret Hagarasalam underground bunkers near the capital. Built by the notoriously paranoid and cowardly TPLF godfather Meles Zenawi, the Hagarasalam bunkers were the bolt hole of desperation, a place to hide through thick and thin of warfare in safety. No engineer that helped build this secret underground bunker system lived to tell the story.

When their enemies, the Ethiopian army, surrounded them there the TPLF mafia capos escaped through a secret 300 meter long tunnel and literally headed for the hills, the nearest mountainside, to hide. They broke up into two groups and tried to find what shelter they could. Old, fat and desk bound for the past 30 years, they’re fighting fit days of the 1980s guerrilla war were long gone. Without access to food or water it was only a matter of time before their jig was up.

They were quickly spotted, surrounded and offered a safe surrender which they spurned repeatedly. Then the onslaught started, first heavy artillery bombardment, then worked over again by helicopter gunships.

When the final assault was done all that was left of the TPLF leaders on that mountainside were pieces of bones and body parts.

As happened so often in the past the acrid odor of high explosives had hardly settled when the winds carried the smell of fresh kill to their dens where the hyenas had taken shelter from shot and shell. With smoke still rising from craters in the mountainside, the hyenas, “zibee” in Tigrinia, mother tongue of the TPLF, were out hunting their dinner. Within a few days the site of the final hours of the TPLF regime was picked clean and the only thing left of the bane of modern Ethiopia was hyena skat spread across the mountainside.

This is no rumor, no “what might have happened”. This is what actually took place and is an open secret here in Asmara and confirmed by first hand accounts. I guess you could say this is the “unofficial” official story. Or maybe it’s the official “unofficial” story?

What really matters is that the CIA’s oldest. largest, most successful criminal operation in Africa came to its well deserved end. With the TPLF, the most feared regime in eastern Africa, now gone for good peace can break out and the long over due rebuilding of a independent, self reliant, eventually prosperous Ethiopia can begin.

Once the Ethiopian people are free to raise their heads in pride and start the hard work of feeding, housing and educating their people, and their lives begin to finally improve, the rest of Arica will have to take notice.

Ethiopia is potentially a wealthy country with trillions of m3 of natural gas, billions of barrels of oil, rich deposits of minerals lying in the pretty much unexplored Arab-Nubian geological shield and rich agricultural lands and lots of water.

When a people who were once best known for famine and war better their lives the rest of Africa have a “threat of a good example” that can’t be ignored. Then the neo colonialists who dominate Africa under the cover of the EU will no longer be able to plunder and loot our continent, no longer be able to buy the support of their populations with a rich lifestyle by bleeding Africa dry.

As Ethiopia begins to break the modern day chains of neocolonialism expect their leader, Nobel Laureate Abiy Ahmed to be continuously demonized in the western media. To see Africa’s sickest nation become a modern successful example of African independence and self reliance those bloodsucking western banksters and their lackey at the UN will be hard put to stand aside and let their system inevitably come crumbling down about them. For how can they continue as they have without the stolen wealth of Africa, to bribe their people and prop up their increasingly challenged regimes?

Diversion of Food Crops to Industrial Use Can be Very Harmful

Bharat Dogra

There has been an increasing tendency worldwide to divert a lot of high-nutrition food crops to industrial uses. In addition many other food crops are not being used as staple foods but instead are being processed in many complicated ways to serve as raw materials for food industry in very different forms. What impact will this have on food security  and food safety?

On the one hand if a lot of staple food crops are diverted to industrial use then there can be a shortage of staple food despite increase being reported in this crop production. On the other hand food safety can be compromised by highly complex processing, involving many chemicals, whose health impacts are not realized , or else are actively hidden or understated.

To give one example, a significant amount of corn has been steadily shifted to  high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which has several uses in food industry and other industrial uses as well. How is HFCS obtained from corn? Raj Patel has described this in his widely acclaimed book ‘Stuffed and Starved’, “Through a process known as wet milling, corn is first dried, sorted and dipped in sulphurous acid; the germ of the seed is removed, washed, filtered, spun and then heated with  weak hydrochloric acid to make corn syrup. At this point, the resulting mixture, once cleansed and treated, is about three-quarters as sweet as sugar. To raise the sweetness level, the amount of fructose is raised by reacting it with enzymes, and then it is made sweeter still by distilling and concentrating it. The resulting 80-90 per cent fructose is then diluted to get the industry standard 55 per cent high-fructose corn syrup.”

We leave it to the readers to decide how proper and safe it is to process a high nutrition staple food-crop in this way. An additional issue is that once such industrial uses become more important, crop-breeding is increasingly used to switch over to those varieties of food crops which are more amenable to industrial processing, and hence  availability of nourishing, healthy, safe food suffers at several levels.

There is a fast growing worldwide trend towards very heavy diversion of food crops for use as bio-fuels. While on the one hand there is a big diversion from food to fuel in this, the actual loss to food security can be even more if more fertile lands suitable for food are diverted to bio-fuel and  are used in unsustainable ways for monocultures of bio-fuel  crops on a large scale, using high external, chemical inputs. While bio-fuels can contribute to reducing use of fossil fuels, if fossil-fuel intensive inputs are used to produce bio-fuels, abandoning organic production of food in ways which reduce or absorb GHG emissions, then the net result may not be useful from the point of view of checking climate change.

Writing about trends and prospects in bio-fuel in India, the Petroleum Minister Mr. Dharmendra Pradhan recently wrote in The Hindustan Times ( article titled How Biofuels Can Double Farm Incomes published on December 28), “Ethanol supplies have improved from 380 million litres in 2013-14 to 1.89 billion litres (1890 million litres) in 2019. Offers of about 3.5 billion litres from both sugar/molasses and grain-based distilleries are expected this year.” In addition this article refers to a recent decision to “utilize surplus rice available with the Food Corporation of India and maize as an additional source of feedstock for ethanol production.”

Hence clearly there is need for concern, at a time of widespread hunger and malnutrition among the people, regarding the transfer of staple food crops to industrial uses and related factors.

A deadly Christmas in Germany

Johannes Stern

In his Christmas address, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) shed a few crocodile tears on behalf of the ruling class. But this cannot disguise the fact that governments at federal and state level bear full responsibility for the greatest mass deaths since the end of World War II.

For countless families, this year’s Christmas was not a happy, but a deadly one. Thousands of people are gasping for breath in intensive care units, and many families have already lost parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and even children.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, 2018 (Wikimedia Commons)

On Christmas Eve, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 24,470 new infections and a record number of coronavirus deaths in Germany in one day, 962. This already makes December by far the deadliest month since the outbreak of the pandemic. In the first 27 days of the month, 13,667 people died, more than 500 a day. In the 10 days before Christmas, the average was more than 680. Since the death toll reflects the infections four to five weeks ago, it is already clear that thousands more people will die from COVID-19 in the coming weeks.

The explosive spread of the virus is the direct result of the ruthless “profits before lives” policy of sending people into workplaces in unsafe conditions and keeping schools and day-care centres open at all costs. In doing so, the ruling class has provoked a situation like the one in Italy in the spring, when the health system collapsed due to exploding case numbers and tens of thousands died in terrible conditions.

In numerous German cities and regions, hospitals are completely overloaded. Due to the high death toll, bodies are kept in temporary storage. The dead would be stored “in the flood defence facility” and only brought to the crematorium “when released for cremation,” the city of Zittau in Saxony announced before Christmas. In Hanau, Hesse, the bodies of coronavirus victims are stored in a specially erected refrigerated container at the city’s main cemetery.

While politicians and the media had expressed shock at the pictures from Bergamo, Italy, in March, now, they play down the mass deaths. The RKI’s grim statistics can be read daily in the media, however, there are hardly any depictions of the terrible situation in hospitals or serious reports about the tragic fates suffered by so many individuals. Above all, the fact that measures could be taken to stop the catastrophe is kept completely out of the picture. The avoidable deaths of almost 1,000 people every day in Germany alone is now considered “normal.”

“All quiet on the Western front,” states the army report in Erich Maria Remarque’s world-famous novel of the same name on the day when the 19-year-old protagonist Paul Bäumer falls at the front towards the end of the mass deaths in World War I. Today’s indifference of the ruling class to the fates of individuals, such as the death from COVID-19 of the young teacher Soydan A. in Berlin a few days ago, can be summed up in the sentence: “All quiet in the pandemic.”

With the normalisation of death, the ruling class is pursuing definite social and political interests. In April, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) had already warned in a statement :

The ruling class aims to make the pandemic the “normal state of affairs,” i.e., to accustom the population to the idea that death will continue for the foreseeable future. Workers are supposed to accept this as inevitable. That is why reports about the number of deaths in the news are increasingly shifting into the background.

There is a vicious class logic behind these efforts. Workers are treated as a kind of disposable commodity. Their deaths are regarded as a normal part of the generation of profits. Those who succumb to the virus can be replaced.

And a few days ago, the World Socialist Web Site stated in a perspective :

Under capitalism, what is meant by “the economy” is the exploitation of the working class. To the extent that the “cure”—that is, the most elementary measures to save lives—impinges on the process of profit accumulation, it is unacceptable. Anything that undermines the extraction of surplus value from the working class, or diverts this surplus value from the capitalists through emergency measures and social services, must be rejected.

Governments worldwide have already sacrificed more than 1.7 million lives to their capitalist and imperialist interests and are willing to continue this course in the new year. The ruling class in Germany openly says this.

“This pandemic is indeed something that is first of all reordering the balance of power in the world economically, but perhaps also socio-politically,” emphasised Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) in her last government statement in the Bundestag (federal parliament). Germany must “look at how we are embedded in the global context” and “do everything possible to ensure that the path of recovery we have taken in the third quarter, after a massive slump in the second quarter, can be continued.”

In other words: there must not and will not be any measures that endanger the profits of the German economy and the orgy of enrichment on the stock exchanges. On the contrary, the hundreds of billions of euros that have flowed to big business and the banks in the course of the coronavirus bailouts are to be extracted from the working class again. “Public debt means ... of course, a burden on future budgets” and “the need to pay that back,” Merkel stressed.

With next year’s budget, the government has also underlined its determination to tighten its political trajectory, the basic direction of which is supported by all parliamentary parties as well as the trade unions. While the budgets for health, education and social affairs will be cut by a total of almost €12 billion compared to this year, spending on the military and domestic security will increase by more than €4 billion. This is a warning: instead of emergency measures to save hundreds of thousands of lives, the ruling class is setting its course on dictatorship and war.

Far-reaching political and historical conclusions must be drawn from this at the end of the first year of the pandemic, which has so far claimed half a million lives in Europe alone. The carnage of World War I was ended by the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and a wave of revolutionary struggles throughout Europe and the world. Today, too, the struggle against mass death, social inequality, war and dictatorship requires a revolutionary struggle against the social system that has brought about the catastrophe. Capitalism, which has discredited itself in the eyes of millions, must be replaced by socialism.