Irish health system on brink of collapse as COVID-19 figures surge

Dermot Quinn

The Irish health system was on the brink of being overwhelmed last weekend by the upward spiral of admissions to Intensive Care Units (ICU).

Micheál Martin (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On January 8, a record 8,248 COVID-19 infections and 20 deaths, were registered. Eight further deaths and 6,888 new cases were reported on Monday. In total, there have now been a staggering 135,884 infections and 2,237 people have died. In the last two weeks, more than 50,000 cases have been reported, accounting for 40 percent of all cases recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic last year.

Professor Philip Nolan of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) warned last week, “The number in hospitals is now increasing exponentially, so we’re at the point now where our health services are under threat”.

The number of people with coronavirus in hospital has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks. Latest figures from the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) put the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in hospital at 1,575, with 146 of these in ICUs. Of the 274 open and staffed ICU beds, 232 of these are occupied and only 40 available.

The head of the ICU at Mid-Western University Regional Hospital in Limerick, Dr Catherine Motherway, questioned last week whether the ICU's would be able to cope.

Speaking to the Irish Mail she said, “I don't know, nobody knows. We have a finite health resource, there are only a certain number of beds. We are hoping in some hospitals where possible to continue time-critical cases—i.e., cancers, high-risk vascular etcetera—where the patients can't wait."

She warned, “In a surge scenario contingency standards of care replace normal standards of care, and outcomes may not be as good for patients.”

Enda O' Connor, ICU director at St James's Hospital in Dublin, issued a statement last weekend saying that the surge in ICU admissions could be “longer and more severe than the first wave last March due to the increase in cases, and it's possible we could see scenes here like they had in Italy during the first wave.”

Dr Anthony Staines, a leading expert on the coronavirus, stated last week that the projected August deadline for vaccinating most of the population could be extended to December this year due to the slow rollout of the vaccine. The rate at which the Irish state is currently vaccinating people against COVID-19 is nowhere near what is needed to give the population immunity before next year.

Research by the Our World in Data website which is linked to Oxford University showed that Ireland now has the highest daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases per capita in the world.

The state broadcasting service RTE reported on January 11 that Ireland’s seven day rolling average is 1,394 cases per million, compared to the UK on 810, Portugal on 735, and the United States on 653.

The current Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition government presided over by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin has played Russian roulette with the lives of working people at the behest of business interests and the super-rich. Its priority throughout the pandemic has been to keep the economy open for as long as possible, whatever the risks to the population, in line with the interests of US and European capital, and the dictates of the local ruling elite who support Martin's government as a broker for their class.

In early October 2020, Martin's government rejected a call from NPHET and other health experts for the immediate imposition of the highest grade Level 5 restrictions.

Two weeks later, October 19, they reversed course and imposed a six-week lockdown to suppress rising infection rates. Even with these new restrictions the government let construction sites remain open and refused to close schools. The restrictions had a downward impact on the number of infections, but these gains were squandered in late November when Martin's government opened the economy again under pressure from business.

As infections accelerated over the Christmas period to a thousand a day, Martin's coalition government imposed a third lockdown on December 30. This is planned to last till early March, with periodic reviews. Bars and restaurants have been shut down along with retail outlets. Travel between counties and home visits have been banned. Construction sites closed from January 8 for all but essential building projects.

Most schools are closed until the end of January, but secondary school pupils in preparation for their final exams will attend three days a week and roughly 15,000 pupils in special schools and classes remain in school full-time. Martin insisted, “All the scientific and public health evidence shows [schools] remain safe environments” and Minister for Education Norma Foley promised “we are looking at the review [of the school closure policy] at the end of January.”

The effect of the pandemic is exacerbated by Ireland’s social and economic crisis. Growing social inequality and the worst housing crisis in the country’s history, as well as a severe deterioration in the health care system, has left the Ireland woefully unprepared for the latest surge in COVID-19 infections.

Between 2008 and 2014, successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments carried out massive health spending cuts worth €2.7 billion, which left the health service understaffed and with reduced bed capacity.

A decade of attacks on the living standards of the working class has left swathes of society extremely vulnerable. By the end of last month there were almost 529,300 people on the live unemployment register or claiming the pandemic unemployment payment. The housing and homeless crisis has accelerated. Data from the Central Statistics Office which was published by the Saint Vincent De Paul charity showed recently that there were more than 140,000 children living in homes that are cold and damp, with 12.3 percent of Irish children living in fuel poverty.

While living standards plummet amid the health and social emergency, the coalition government has looked after its financial backers and friends. Over €4.5 billion have been handed to employers since the pandemic began through the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme. Under the current lockdown introduced at the beginning of this month, a double payment of the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme (CRSS) was made to businesses, up to a maximum of €5,000 a week. Businesses affected will also be eligible commercial rates relief for the first three months of 2021.

Poorest UK schoolchildren sent meagre pandemic food parcels, as contractors reap massive profits

Robert Stevens

Millions responded with shock as the appalling contents of the “food parcels” being delivered to the families of 1.7 million schoolchildren who receive free school meals was exposed on social media.

Many expressed disgust and denounced the profiteering from poverty during the school closures necessitated by the pandemic.

One mother, using the handle “Roadside Mum” posted a photo of the contents of her food parcel which contained a loaf of bread, two carrots, two potatoes, a tomato, a tin of baked beans, some individual cheese slices, two mini cake bars, three snack tubes of fromage-frais and a small bag of pasta. The fruit in the parcel was bruised. The mother said that the parcel was supposed to last for two weeks and be worth £30.

Food parcel sent to UK school child receiving free school meals (Picture: @Roadside Mum/Twitter)

“I priced that like-for-like from Asda [supermarket] and it came to £5.22. Where’s the other £25?” Her photo was shared more than 30,000 times. She added, “The private company who have the #FSM [free school meals] contract made good profit here.”

She told BBC Breakfast, “As I unpacked that food parcel in my living room and looked at the contents, it felt very sad and very depressing. One of my children came in and saw me laying this out on the floor, and I said I was going to picture it because it didn't look like a lot. I could see the child's realisation that this is what I've been given to eat for a week and the sense of sadness.”

Other photos showed even less. Lisa T received meagre portions that looked like the modern-day equivalent of the slop served in Victorian workhouses. She explained in a twitter post, “We were given this in a paper bag. It consisted of a bag of pasta, granola, cheese and tomato soup mix (both in money bags!) etc.” The onion (quartered), tomato (halved) and pepper (halved) and carrot (a tiny piece) had been cut up and put into cling film. Lisa commented, “Our school was disgusted by our caterers! Food in money bags!!! Pathetic carrot stub.”

Food wrapped in money bags sent to Lisa (Picture: @LMT1180/Twitter)

Another image from Christa Lee showed food contents also packed in bank money bags for her 17-year-old daughter. Her school is in one of the ten most deprived areas in England. Christa told the Daily Mirror, “This tells our children that they do not matter. That all they are worth is food in unsafe packaging that will leave them hungry. Children as young as 11 years old are being given this and expected to be able to prepare it. Many of them will be preparing it alone due to parents having to work. Those on low incomes rarely have the luxury of a job that can be done from home."

Mother Faye Emery shared a picture showing five small bottles of water, a cheap loaf of white bread, a few slices of processed ham, a small package of cheese and four small, prepacked fruit cakes. Each of her two children received this package from their academy school in Norfolk.

According to government guidelines, food parcels should take into account family’s dietary requirements. Faye said that this had not been followed in the case of her children. “My daughter has a musculoskeletal disorder and severe joint issues and there is no way she’s getting the protein she needs from the package so it’s going to end up costing me the same amount as what the government is paying the school to feed her at home, which I obviously don’t have.”

Stating that “I don’t know if I’d feed the ham to my dog,” as “what I’ve got is a bunch of gristle,” Faye asked the school to use the £30 to provide her with ingredients to cook a hot meal instead. The Metro said she was told, “you either get it or get nothing.”

Amy Weldon was delivered a few rations in a black refuse bin liner. She said, “Every parent in the country needs this to be reverted back to the vouchers as some children will starve. The food companies are profiting massively from this. It's outrageous at what they've given for my daughter and considering it's meant to be a pandemic because of a virus they shouldn't be opening food and touching it to repackage it.”

Many of the parents shared the images of the parcels with Manchester United and England international footballer Marcus Rashford. Rashford, now 23 years old, had himself suffered from hunger as a child. In the summer, the government were forced into a series of U-turns after Rashford used his massive social media presence to demand that children from poor families be provided with free school meals during school holidays.

Despite having to back down, the Tories ensured a financial killing for their mates in the private sector. Government guidance was issued that instead of cash vouchers schools should be “strongly encouraged” to adopt a “food parcel first approach” sourced from existing catering providers, with a budget of £15 per pupil per week. It was only last week, as Britain entered its latest partial lockdown, that Education Minister Gavin Williamson announced that the national supermarket vouchers scheme would be re-introduced, but only if schools could not provide “food parcels or meals” for eligible children.

One of the main firms profiting is Chartwells, a subsidiary of the Compass food group. Compass serves more than 5.5 billion meals annually across 45 countries and is described by the Financial Times as the “world’s largest caterer”.

Entire tranches of services previously provided by the state have been handed over to the private sector for profit in the last decades. The Guardian reported, “Compass and its subsidiary [Chartwells] have won contracts worth almost £350m for school catering, typically including free school meal provision…” Chartwells has a multiyear contract with the Harris Federation, which runs 50 schools in the UK, worth £40 million. Other firms cashing in are Worcester-based Aspens Services who were “awarded contracts worth £75m between 2016 and 2020, followed by Cater Link with contracts worth £72m.”

Chartwells has close links to the Tory Party. Former chairman Paul Walsh stepped down as a director only last month and previously served as a member of the business advisory group to Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Walsh donated £10,000 to the Tories in 2010, the year Cameron took office.

Chartwells commented in response to Roadside Mum’s photo: “For clarity this shows five days of free school lunches (not ten days) and the charge for food, packing and distribution was actually £10.50 and not £30 as suggested.”

The wretched parcels sent out to the poorest are a far cry from the lavishly prepared gourmet food provided by the “Chartwells Independent” arm of the company to private prep and boarding schools. Social media was flooded with photos of the luxuries that Chartwells provides for the scions of the ruling elite. They included a canapés table and a dessert of oatmeal and panna cotta with orange and chocolate provided to Norwich School. Pupils at New Hall School were served up a dish of coconut, lemongrass and banana leaf wrapped salmon. One private boarding school had an entire gingerbread town created by Chartwells.

Rashford this week denounced the situation as “unacceptable.” This forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson into a hand wringing declaration that he would carry out a review as “these food parcels do not meet the standards we set out and we have made it clear to the company involved that this is disgraceful.” He admitted that the rations being delivered by private contractors are based on government guidelines.

Johnson’s abasing himself before Rashford to placate public anger highlights how the Labour Party and their trade union partners are refusing to lift a finger against the austerity programme and homicidal herd immunity agenda of the Tories that has already cost over 100,000 lives.

In Parliament, Johnson even declared cynically, “I’m grateful for Marcus Rashford who highlighted the issue and is doing quite an effective job by comparison with the right honourable gentleman [Starmer] in holding the government to account for these issues.”

Canada deepens support for US-led anti-China offensive

Laurent Lafrance & Roger Jordan

Tensions between Canada and China are growing sharper, as Ottawa swings ever more openly behind US imperialism’s aggressive diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the media at a hotel in Beijing, China on Dec. 5, 2017 (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

The federal government of Justin Trudeau directly intervened last month to prevent the takeover of gold miner TMAC Resources Inc. by China’s state-owned Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd. While the Canadian government refused to explain its rejection of the C$230 million transaction, a senior government official told the Globe and Mail it was motivated by “national security” concerns. Another source said Washington, which has responded to the capitalist breakdown precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic by doubling down on its efforts to militarily and economically counter China, had pressed Trudeau to block the deal. In 2018, the Trudeau government similarly cited national security concerns to block the $1.5-billion buyout of the construction and engineering firm Aecon Group Ltd. by a Chinese state-controlled firm.

The underlying claim that the acquisition of the Doris gold mine could serve as a means for the Chinese regime to conduct spying operations is rather absurd, considering that TMAC’s mine is located in Hope Bay, Nunavut, an inlet on the Northwest Passage more than 100 kilometers from the closest North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) radar station.

Trudeau’s decision is part of the tougher stance his Liberal government has adopted in recent years against China, under pressure from Washington, the most right-wing sections of the Canadian ruling class, and the corporate-controlled media. The leader of the official opposition Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole, is leading an hysterical campaign against China, repeatedly invoking the “threat to national security” posed by the presence of Chinese companies in Canada.

O’Toole’s criticisms notwithstanding, Canada under Trudeau has been increasingly involved in the vast US-led campaign against China that was initiated under Obama in 2011 with his Pivot to Asia, and intensified over the last four years under the Trump administration. Trudeau has also made clear that he is eager to work closely with a Democratic administration led by Joe Biden, who has pledged to intensify aggression against both Russia and China. Should Biden successfully enter the White House next Wednesday, one of his first foreign policy priorities will be the creation of a “coalition of democracies” against China. This proposal, which the Trudeau government is enthusiastic to join, is aimed at giving a phony “human rights” veneer to Washington’s bullying and threatening of Beijing. It involves the embrace of such paragons of democratic rights as the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi of India, and Australia’s Scott Morrison, who has refused to denounce the January 6 Trump-incited and orchestrated coup attempt in Washington.

The US’ provocative campaign against China includes growing trade-war measures such as the push to exclude Huawei from the 5G networks of NATO states, as well as the announced deployment of nuclear-capable medium-range missiles targeting Beijing. For both economic and strategic reasons, Washington is determined to block China emerging as a dominant player in high-tech industries.

Canada—unlike its Five-Eyes partners, the US, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—has not yet officially barred local companies from using Chinese giant telecom firm Huawei’s components in their 5G networks. However, in expectation of such a move, Bell, Telus and all the other major Canadian telecommunications companies have already taken the step of excluding Huawei, whose technology is in certain respects more developed than that of its US and European competitors, from their networks.

The offensive against Huawei is directly connected to the political aggression against China. In 2018, at the behest of the Trump administration, Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, on bogus charges of breaking US sanctions against Iran. China retaliated to what was in fact a political kidnapping by detaining two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur operating in North Korea. Two years on, Trudeau is more forthright than ever in defending Meng’s seizure. He has repeatedly spurned calls for Canada to end the extradition proceedings in exchange for the return of Spavor and Kovrig.

To pressure Ottawa to adopt an even more hardline stance towards Beijing, the Trump administration has attacked Dominic Barton, Canada’s current ambassador to China, for his alleged close relationship with the regime of president Xi Jinping. Before his current role, Barton was for nine years global managing partner for New York-based consulting firm McKinsey and Co. Senator Marco Rubio, a close associate and supporter of Trump, has denounced Barton for acting against US “economic and national security interests” by helping China advance its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) when he worked for McKinsey. The BRI, a mega Chinese-led infrastructure program that seeks to expand commerce through Eurasia and beyond, is viewed by Washington with deep hostility.

Trudeau chose Barton, a former advisor to the state-controlled China Development Bank, as his government’s envoy to Beijing in 2019 in an attempt to prevent a total collapse of bilateral ties. When he took power in 2015, Trudeau had raised the prospect of a free trade deal with Beijing, a proposal which enjoyed support among a faction of big business due to the potential to access new markets and profits in China and through the BRI. China is Canada’s second most important bilateral commercial partner after the US (or third if the 27 European Union member states are counted as a whole). However, under conditions of the rapid intensification of the US-China conflict, and due to the Canadian bourgeoisie’s dependence on access to the US market and reliance on its decades-long military-strategic partnership with Washington to advance its global imperialist ambitions, the free trade proposal rapidly unraveled. As part of the revised NAFTA or Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement, the US extracted from its partners the right to review any free trade deal they might sign with China in advance, and to abrogate the North America trade pact if such a deal was implemented against their wishes.

Canada is fully integrated in US imperialism’s three main military-strategic offensives: in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe against Russia and in the Asia-Pacific against China. To step up its role in these US-led offensives, the Liberals announced a 70 percent increase in military spending in 2017 as part of its new national defence policy. Significantly, that defence policy also identified China, together with Russia and Islamist terrorism, as a “global threat” to Canada.

Powerful sections of the military-security establishment, which is so closely tied to the United States that high-level military talks were held in 2013 on the possibility of merging the Canadian and US militaries, want Ottawa to go even further. In a Globe and Mail interview published this week, Gen. Jonathan Vance, the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff, called for Canada to adopt a “grand strategy” for dealing with China. The clear implication of this remark was that while Trudeau has accommodated himself to the bipartisan US-led offensive against Beijing, Canadian imperialism has yet to do what is required in terms of military rearmament and geostrategic planning to wage war.

Vance is not alone. Leading Defence Department and military officials have been complaining for months that Canada’s defence and foreign policies are out of date. Canada is already committed to spending untold billions of dollars on modernizing NORAD, the bilateral US-Canada military alliance that defends the North American continent against their geopolitical rivals, above all Russia and China. Many are arguing that a critical element of this modernization must be Canada’s joining Washington’s ballistic missile defence shield, the main goal of which is to wage a “winnable” nuclear war.

The Globe recently revealed that in 2019, Vance, at Washington’s urging, took the “unilateral” decision to cancel winter military exercises between the Canadian Armed Forces and China’s People’s Liberation Army. The secret documents show that government officials from Global Affairs Canada rebuked Vance due to their concern that this would be seen as an act of retaliation for the arrest of the Kovrig and Spavor, and could exacerbate tensions with Beijing. More significant, however, is a passage in the document that includes deliberations about how China might react if Canada took the provocative decision to send a warship through the Taiwan Strait. This it subsequently did, first in September of 2019 and then again in October of last year.

In its anti-China campaign, the Trudeau government has the full support of the union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP). Last November, this ostensibly “left” organization presented a motion supported by all parties of Parliament congratulating Joe Biden for his electoral victory and inviting the future president to visit Canada and address a joint session of the House of Commons and Senate. Some days later, the NDP supported a Conservative motion calling for action against Chinese “foreign interference” and urging the Trudeau government to make a quick decision on whether Chinese-based Huawei should be banned from Canada’s 5G networks.

For their part, the Conservatives are pushing for an even more confrontational policy towards China. This includes mimicking Trump, both by trying to maliciously scapegoat China for the pandemic, and by calling for “Canada First” measures to protect “Canadian jobs” from Chinese competition. In a piece last month for the rabidly right-wing National Post, O’Toole asserted that “standing up to China” is critical “for the safety of Canadians, both here and abroad.”

Warning that Wall Street bubble may burst

Nick Beams

The Wall Street surge, which last year saw hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the coffers of the financial oligarchy making Tesla chief Elon Musk the world’s richest man, has continued into the new year. So far this month the Dow has hit a record high three times.

Not even the events of January 6, when fascist forces at the urging of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in the attempt to carry out a coup, could halt its rise.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Amid the rising death and infection toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, the chief reason for the market surge, since the market plunged in mid-March, is the knowledge that any serious downturn will see the Fed intervene with billions of dollars to prop it up. The Fed has is already pumping in $120 billion a month—more than $1.4 trillion a year—and has pledged to keep interest rates at near-zero for the indefinite future.

A new factor has now entered into market calculations. It is anticipated that a Biden administration, assuming it takes office, will provide a further boost with increased stimulus packages to aid the corporations.

The nomination of former Fed chief Janet Yellen as Treasury secretary, regarded as a friend of Wall Street in her time at the central bank and the recipient of more than $7 million in speaking fees from major financial firms in 2018 and 2019, has been another boost for markets.

But concerns are starting to be voiced that the orgy of speculation, literally feeding off the death and destruction of the pandemic because of the actions of the Fed, could end in a major crash.

There has been commentary in the financial media over the warnings issued by Jeremy Grantham head of the investment firm GMO that the speculative bubble could be about to burst.

In a comment posted on January 5, he wrote: “The long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme over-valuation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investment behaviour, I believe this event will be regarded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929 and 2000.”

Grantham pointed to a number of indicators in support of his warning. He noted that one of the features the last stages of all previous bubbles was “really crazy behaviour.” In the first ten years of the latest bull-run “we lacked such wild speculation” but “now we have it in record amounts.”

Another indicator is the record number of initial public offerings (IPOs) this year as start-up companies seek to jump on the stock market escalator by going public. In 2020 there were 480 IPOs, compared to 406 in 2019. One of the most significant features was that 249 of these were special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). These are shell companies set up to take over another company which is looking to come onto the share market, enabling it to bypass the usual, sometimes lengthy procedures involved in a traditional IPO.

An even better measure of “speculative intensity” than the prevalence of SPACs, he wrote, was the character of the present bull market, which made it totally different from any previous bubble that all took place when the underlying economy appeared to be enjoying rapid growth.

The present-day “wounded economy” was “only partly recovered, possibly facing a double-dip, probably facing a slowdown, and certainly facing a very high degree of uncertainty.”

While the price-earnings ratio in the stock market is in the top few percent of the historical range, he noted, the economy is in the worst few percent. “This time, more than in any previous bubble, investors are relying on accommodative monetary conditions and zero real [interest] rates extrapolated indefinitely.”

While the markets have received a boost from the prospect of increased spending from a Biden administration, this is something of a two-edged sword. Increased government spending means an increased issuance of government bonds thereby tending to bring about a fall in their price and a rise in their yield or interest rate.

There are signs of this phenomenon with the interest rate on the 10-year US Treasury bond rising to above 1 percent for the first time in months.

This is being hailed in some quarters as evidence that investors expect there will be a revival of economic growth and profits. That might have been the case in days gone by when financial markets bore some relation to the underlying real economy. But this is not the case now because corporate profit is increasingly dependent on the maintenance of ultra-low interest rates to prevent a rise in their debt burden and to finance their increasingly speculative operations such as share buybacks.

If the yield on 10-year Treasuries continues to rise, pushing up the cost of money throughout the economy, the Fed will move to intervene with further bond purchases, lifting their price, and keeping interest rates down. It has already been discussing so-called yield curve targeting in which it intervenes to keep the interest on selected bonds within a target range.

The massive increase in debt, both corporate and government, has meant that financial markets are extremely sensitive to even small rises in interest rates. According to one estimate, a 1 percentage point rise in interest rates today would have the same impact as a 3 to 4 percentage point rise of 20 years ago.

The only way that further money can be handed out to the corporations, without provoking an interest rate rise, is for the Fed to buy up the new government debt as it is issued—a further stateisation of the economy and the financial system for the benefit of speculators and the super-rich.

The present situation is the outcome of long-term trends in US economy. As the editor of the Financial Times, Rana Foroohar, noted in a recent comment: “Low interest rates have encouraged a massive flood of debt, little of which is productive. Since 1980, total US debt rose from 142 percent of gross domestic product to 254 percent in 2019.”

She cited research by economist Atif Mifan who noted that, if all this additional credit had been used for productive purposes, “we should have seen an explosion of investment. Instead, the investment share of national output declined from an average of 24 percent during the 1980s to 21 percent during the 2010s.”

This signifies that an increasing amount of debt has been used for speculative purposes such as share buy backs, once regarded as rigging the market but now standard practice for major banks and corporations, as well as the financing of mergers and acquisitions.

Mifan also noted that the rise in finance despite stagnation could “only be understood in light of arguably the most important ‘structural break’ in American society: the rising share of income going to the top 1 percent.”

That is, the financial house of cards is the outcome of the institutionalisation of financial mechanisms through which increasing amounts of the wealth of society is transferred to its upper echelons.

Herein lie the objective roots of the fascist coup attempt launched by Trump and the Republican party. As the WSWS perspective of January 7 explained: “Above all, workers must understand that the disintegration of American democracy is rooted in the crisis of capitalism. In a society riven by staggering levels of social inequality, it is impossible to preserve democracy.”

Democracy can therefore only be maintained through the mobilisation of the working class on the basis of a socialist program as the only antidote to the growing fascist threat.

Over 600,000 dead from coronavirus in Europe

Will Morrow

More than 600,000 people have died of coronavirus in Europe, according to the official statistics tabulated by Worldometer, which includes Russia in its count. The continent surpassed the horrific marker earlier this week.

Every three weeks another approximately 100,000 people are dying from the virus on the continent. The total of 300,000 deaths was passed near November 10; 400,000 at the end of that month; and half a million three days before Christmas.

A woman wearing a face mask to help curb the spread of the coronavirus rides a subway car in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Jan. 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

More than one in 1,000 people alive in Europe at the beginning of 2020 have died from the coronavirus. Per million people in the population, the number of dead is over 1,700 in Belgium, 1,477 in Slovenia, 1,330 in Italy, 1,245 in the UK, 1,131 in Spain. Another 1,060 people were reported dead in Germany in the past 24 hours, bringing the country’s death toll to 43,203.

These numbers are a significant underestimate of the real number. In Spain, the official death toll is 52,878, but the number of “excess deaths” above the historical norm—a better indication of deaths due to the pandemic—is 83,700.

Yet scientists are warning that the pandemic is entering into an even more catastrophic stage than anything that has preceded it. It is propelled by the rapid spread of the new, more contagious variant identified in September in the UK, and consciously facilitated by the criminal policies of European governments. Even as health care systems are being overwhelmed, schools and non-essential workplaces are being kept open, despite their role as transmitters of the virus, to ensure that no amount of death prevents the smooth and profitable functioning of business.

The clearest warning of what is being prepared can be seen in the UK. Yesterday set a new record of 1,564 deaths. In a country the size of the United States, this would have meant more than 7,700 deaths in 24 hours. Another 47,525 new cases were reported over the same period.

The new strain of the virus is now the dominant one in the UK. In Ireland, where the new variant was first detected for the first time on Christmas Day, new cases have skyrocketed from 250 confirmed cases per million people at the beginning of the year to over 1,200 now, a five-fold increase in the space of two weeks.

Across Europe, variants identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been detected in over a dozen countries, yet it remains unknown to what extent it has already established itself throughout the population.

France gives a particularly clear example of the authorities’ failure to track the spread. The first case of the UK variant was detected in Tours at the end of December. As late as the second week of January, media reports on the number of detected cases indicated that there were between 10 and 20 confirmed such cases. On January 12, Olivier Véran, the health minister, spoke before the National Assembly and reported that the new strain contributed to “approximately one percent of the 100,000 tests conducted in France.”

Yet this appears to be a significant underestimate, and varies greatly according to location. Patrice Hérisson, regional director of the medical laboratory Cerballiance in Saint Denis, near Paris, told Le Parisien on Tuesday that “10 to 15 percent of our positive cases in Île-de-France are identified as suspected English variants.”

Laurent Kbaier, a biologist with the testing lab Biogroup, told the daily that “out of 826 positive PCR tests on Thursday and Friday at our laboratories in Ile-de-France, we found 74 suspected cases of the English mutant,” slightly less than 10 percent.

Philippe Froguel, a professor of genomics at Imperial College London and in Lille, France, told the Financial Times Monday that it was likely the variant was well established in France. He said that by February, “I’m afraid we’ll be in exactly the same situation as the UK with 50-60,000 new cases a day and a large number of dead.”

The variant has also been detected in Belgium, which saw a 76 percent increase in the seven-day case total to last Thursday compared to the previous week in the capital Brussels.

In Valencia, Spain, two patients with no connections to the UK were tested positive for the variant last week, demonstrating that community transmission is taking place. “It’s clear that there is community transmission, but we don’t know at what level,” Fernando González Candelas, a genetics researcher in Valencia, told the FT.

On Wednesday, EU health commissioner Stella Kyrikides declared that Europe “cannot be complacent” toward the new strain. “We cannot let it get out of hand. So we are ready to help member states in the area of genomic sequencing of samples. There is no way around this.”

Yet not only have European governments allowed the virus to develop “out of hand,” they are consciously pursuing policies that will allow a further uncontrolled spread of the virus. They are determined to keep schools open in order to allow parents to continue to work. Wherever schools have been forced to close, as in the UK, it has only been due to the action of educators or the government’s fear of popular opposition of teachers, parents and students to the de-facto policy of herd immunity.

In France, schools remain open, even though scientists have warned that the new strain appears to be particularly contagious among youth. On social media, French teachers have reported that even when there is a confirmed case among students, they cannot send children home for testing. “We can’t send them home if they are a contact case to get tested,” Laeti commented on the “Stylos Rouges” Facebook page. “For us children under 11 years old are not considered as at-risk contacts,” added Jucilou.

Yesterday, the Portuguese government announced a general lock-down, which it said would be the same as that imposed in April, with the exception that all schools are to remain open.

Last week, in the Westphalien town of Kamen, a 44-year-old educator died following an outbreak in a daycare centre. According to the Robert Koch institute, five educators have died from coronavirus since December in Germany.

If left in the hands of the capitalist governments across Europe, the result will be hundreds of thousands of further unnecessary deaths. Their policy of death must be countered by the unified struggle of the working class across Europe. Schools and non-essential workplaces must be closed, with living wages provided to everyone, and full compensation provided to small businesses.

Trump administration fuels tensions with China over Taiwan

Peter Symonds

Amid the ongoing coup threat and political turmoil in Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a loyal Trump supporter, has provocatively ramped up tensions with China over Taiwan, one of the most dangerous flashpoints in Asia.

Last weekend, Pompeo announced a sweeping shift in diplomatic protocols in dealing with Taiwan, giving the green light for lifting all restrictions on contact between Washington and Taipei. The move is another step to overturning the One China policy under which the US has de facto recognized Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including the island of Taiwan, and has limited contact with Taipei.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, center, walks to her inauguration ceremony in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, May 20, 2020 (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP)

In his statement, Pompeo called Taiwan “a vibrant democracy and reliable partner” of the US and declared that interaction with Taipei was hamstrung by “complex internal restrictions.” He announced the lifting of “all of these self-imposed restrictions,” which he claimed were “an attempt to appease the Communist regime in Beijing.” All “contact guidelines” issued by the State Department were “to be null and void.”

What Pompeo described as the appeasement of Beijing flowed in fact from the shift in US foreign policy that was marked by President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1971. The rapprochement with the Chinese Communist Party was a quasi-alliance aimed at isolating and confronting the Soviet Union that also laid the basis for the subsequent restoration of capitalism in China. The establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979 was based on the One China policy, although the US continued to oppose any forcible Chinese takeover of Taiwan and continued to supply it with arms.

Over the past decade, first under the Obama administration and since intensified under Trump, the US has mounted an aggressive, across-the-board effort to undermine China diplomatically and economically, and has engaged in a massive military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region. No longer regarded in Washington as a useful strategic partner, China is now viewed as its chief rival and threat to US global domination.

From the outset of his administration, Trump openly called the One China policy into question, declaring that he would overturn it if China did not bow to his trade demands. Trump’s administration has ratcheted up tensions with Beijing across a range of issues from US naval provocations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, to trade war measures. This has included the development of closer military and diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which is regarded by the Pentagon as a critical element of any US war with China.

In a landmark speech last July, Pompeo effectively overturned three decades of US foreign policy, declaring that “the old paradigm of blind engagement with China” had to be replaced by a strategy whereby “the free world must triumph over this new tyranny.” Most significantly, he ruled out any return to the Cold War policy of “containment,” thus implying that all means, including war, were to be used in combating China.

The significance of Pompeo’s abrogation of previous US diplomatic protocols with Taiwan was not lost in Beijing. “Any actions which harm China’s core interests will be met with a firm counter-attack and will not succeed,” foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao told reporters on Monday.

The US had already announced that its ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, would make a three-day trip to Taipei this week. Craft herself publicly lunched last September with James K.J. Lee, director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, Taiwan’s de facto embassy, and described the meeting as “historic.”

In a statement last week, the Chinese mission to the UN warned that the US “will pay a heavy price for its wrong action,” referring to the trip. “China strongly urges the United States to stop its crazy provocation, stop creating new difficulties for China-US relations… and stop going further on the wrong path,” it stated.

On Monday, the US ambassador in the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, pointedly hosted Taiwan’s representative to the country at the US embassy, in the first such contact since Pompeo announced the end of restrictions. In a tweet, Hoekstra boasted: “Made some history today: Welcomed Taiwan Representative Chen to our Embassy,” accompanied by pictures of the two of them.

However, with Craft due to fly to Taipei yesterday, the trip was called off at the last minute, along with a planned visit by Pompeo to Europe. Craft would have been the third high-level US official to visit in recent months. US Health Secretary Alex Azar visited Taipei last August, becoming the most senior American official to do so in over three decades.

State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus declared in a statement that all planned travel had been cancelled citing the need to plan for the transition to a new Biden administration next week. The cancellation of trips undoubtedly has much more to do with the political chaos in Washington, under conditions where Trump refuses to declare defeat, sections of the Republican Party still falsely claim that the election was stolen and fascistic Trump supporters continue to plot to keep him in power.

Pompeo’s trip was called off amid concerns that he would receive a very cold welcome in Europe. One of the legs of the trip was to be Luxembourg whose foreign minister Jean Asselborn had declared on RTL radio that Trump was “a criminal” and a “political pyromaniac who must be brought before a court.” Citing unnamed US officials, Reuters reported that Pompeo’s visits to Brussels and Luxembourg were called off after Asselborn and EU officials refused to schedule meetings with him.

The Taiwanese government was publicly supportive of Craft’s trip, which under other circumstances would have been hailed as a diplomatic victory over Beijing. However, given the uncertainty over who will occupy the White House next week, the visit could potentially complicate relations with the US if Biden is finally installed.

While tactics might change under a Biden administration, there will be no let-up in the US confrontation with China. Biden, who served as vice president in the Obama administration, was a crucial element of its bellicose “pivot to Asia” against China that laid the foundations of Trump’s trade war and provocations against Beijing. Biden has already indicated that he will not immediately reverse the sweeping US trade sanctions on China.

In a further indication of his stance towards China, as reported in the Financial Times, Biden is to appoint Kurt Campbell to a powerful, newly-created position of Asia policy coordinator. Campbell, as assistant secretary of state of Asia and the Pacific in the Obama administration, played a central role in planning and implementing the “pivot to Asia” and will undoubtedly pursue an aggressive course towards China.

Australia: Highly infectious strain of COVID spreads in Queensland hotel quarantine

Oscar Grenfell

Over the past day, four new cases of the highly-infectious B117 variant of COVID-19 have been discovered among returned travelers in Brisbane hotels, sparking fears of a broader spread of the virus and again highlighting the inadequate character of the quarantine system in Queensland and across the country.

Last week, Queensland authorities revealed that a young cleaner who worked in the quarantine at Brisbane’s Hotel Grand Chancellor had contracted the new iteration of the virus. BII7 is up to 70 percent more infectious than other forms of COVID-19, and has driven the massive surge of cases and deaths in Britain that threatens to overwhelm that country’s hospital system.

Ambulances outside Brisbane's Grand Hotel Grand Chancellor this week (Credit: ABC News. Marc Smith)

The Queensland Labor government responded to the emergence of BII7 by instituting a three-day lockdown of greater Brisbane that spanned from Friday to Sunday evening.

Given that the coronavirus incubation period is 14 days, the measure was manifestly inadequate. It was timed not to include any business days, so as to ensure the minimum impact on profit-making operations. The lockdown was concluded as scheduled, even as medical experts warned that the new strain could be circulating in the community, without yet being detected.

Shortly after the minimal restrictions were lifted, the cleaner’s partner tested positive, having previously returned a false negative. Then yesterday, a further four cases at the Hotel Grand Chancellor were identified among returned travelers.

While the numbers are low, chains of transmission have not been determined and hundreds have potentially been exposed. It is still not known how the cleaner initially contracted COVID-19. Health authorities have said it is likely there is a direct link between her infection and those of the returned travelers, but have been unable to definitively confirm this.

The result has been a shambles. People who had left the hotel since December 30 were suddenly instructed to get tested and to return to quarantine for another 14 days of isolation. The figure of those affected was initially placed at 250 but was revised down today to 147.

At least ten of them had already returned to the neighbouring state of New South Wales, which has been hit by a series of clusters over the past month centred in Sydney. Another 18 had travelled to Victoria, which in July was struck by the largest surge of the pandemic in Australia to date, resulting in more than 750 deaths and a months-long lockdown.

Those who were set to leave the Hotel Grand Chancellor will also be compelled to begin their two-week period anew. Some 220 staff have also been sent into isolation as the facility has been closed for deep cleaning and its occupants moved to other hotels.

Travelers said that yesterday, before they were moved out of the Grand Chancellor, the hotel was surrounded by dozens of police officers. They told the media that they were provided with hardly any information ahead of time.

A further four cases were announced today by Queensland authorities among returned travelers from South Africa and the United States. Indicating the stain that is being placed on the broader quarantine system, they are reportedly not linked to the Grand Chancellor and were identified at other hotels.

The infections, and the possibility of broader transmission, have shown that a year into the pandemic, hotel quarantines continue to be grossly inadequate.

The quarantine program in Victoria was one of the drivers of the July outbreak. Its operation was outsourced to private security companies, who employed low-paid casual workers without any medical training or expertise.

While governments proclaimed that the lessons of that debacle would be learnt, it is clear that many of the practices that contributed to the Victorian wave persist. Today, it was confirmed that hotel quarantine staff in Queensland are permitted to work multiple jobs, meaning that infections can be spread between hotels and into the broader community. This is clearly not best medical practice. Its sole purpose is to ensure that contractors can employ workers on a precarious contract or casual basis to slash their costs.

For months, epidemiologists have warned against placing private hotels, which are not equipped for major medical operations, on the frontlines of the pandemic.

In every state, the facilities chosen have been in the centre of the largest urban population centres, meaning that breaches threaten entire cities. The maintenance of the program has been dictated by the refusal of governments to devise safer alternatives because they would be more expensive. It has also ensured a continuous stream of income for major hotel chains that otherwise would have been hit by the decline in travel, first from government subsidies, and then for most of the past six months from returnees who have been compelled to pay for their own quarantine.

Moreover, only last Friday, at a meeting of the national cabinet, did state and federal government leaders institute basic safeguards, including a requirement for oversees travelers to be tested before departure and to wear a mask during their travel, and for hotel quarantine staff to be regularly tested.

Pointing to the limited character of infection controls in the hotels, Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said yesterday, regarding the source of the Grand Chancellor outbreak: “Was it in the air conditioning? Was it movement? Was it picking up something? We just don't know those answers yet.”

The dangers of airborne transmission, compounded by inadequate ventilation, have been known about for months.

Professor Marylouise McLaws, an infectious disease expert at the University of New South Wales, told the Australian Financial Review that “Quarantine hotels are not designed as hospital wards, which demand high 100 percent hourly fresh airflow change at a World Health Organisation-recommended rate of 12 full changes per hour.” The rate in a hotel would likely be closer to four-to-six airflow changes an hour, “So this is low if there is a COVID-infected traveler in a room or several of them on a floor.”

Only now has the Queensland Labor government indicated that it is looking at alternatives, including a possible transfer of quarantines to work camps in regional and rural areas. Details, however, have still not been provided, meaning it is possible that nothing has been concretely planned.

At the same time, police are involved in the investigation into the Grand Chancellor outbreak. During each rapid spread of the virus, governments have sought to scapegoat ordinary people, by insinuating or openly claiming that guidelines have been breached, often without any evidence.

The quarantine crisis, and the potential spread of the new strain into New South Wales and Queensland, comes as politicians and the corporate press again seek to minimise the dangers of the pandemic.

The New South Wales Liberal government has claimed that it is now “mopping up” the remnants of a cluster that originated in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, in an attempt to present the threat of last month’s outbreak as a thing of the past. New infections are continuing to be identified across Sydney’s working-class suburbs and in the inner-west, along with dozens of possible exposure sites.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, whose government has rejected calls for lockdowns amid the current outbreak, again denounced any strategy aimed at eliminating COVID-19 transmission in response to the new variant. Such attempts were “not realistic” for a “trading nation,” and it was necessary to “live with the virus.” Editorials in the financial press similarly railed against the “cult of elimination.”

Innes Willox, head of the Australian Industry Group, declared that “total elimination strategies only serve to crush and kill investment and job creation… With many businesses now returning to full operations after the holidays, there is an urgent need for state governments to resist broad lockdown options.”

The comments, featured in the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper, were directed against the Victorian government’s maintenance of some border restrictions, including an ongoing block on travel from Sydney to Melbourne, under a new “traffic light system.”

Those measures have been accompanied by calls from some premiers, including Western Australian Labor leader Mark McGowan, for a greater bid to prevent transmission in New South Wales, amid the emergence of the more virulent strain. McGowan and others who have echoed his calls are speaking for sections of the establishment fearful of the political and economic consequences of a possible mass outbreak, as in Europe or the US.

The response from Berejiklian and the business press again demonstrates that the dominant layers of the ruling elite are committed to preventing lockdown measures, however minimal and necessary, if they in any way impede the operations of the largest businesses. The same calculations that have led to disaster abroad, based on the subordination of health and safety to workers’ safety and lives, are at work in Australia.

Global food prices rise could spark social unrest, UN warns

Jean Shaoul

December saw global food prices reach a six year high, with analysts expecting prices to continue to rise in 2021, fueling inflation and adding to the pressure on families as hunger surges throughout the world.

This is particularly acute for the world’s poorest countries that are teetering on the brink of debt default, have no money to buy or subsidise food and little or no social safety net to cushion the blow to family budgets.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) food price index has risen 18 percent since May as dry weather has affected crops around the world; conflicts and the pandemic have impeded food production and distribution; governments stockpile supplies; hedge funds and other speculators have bought food commodities and demand rises with the reopening of the economy.

Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (source: FAOVideo-YouTube)

Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the FAO, said, “Food inflation is a reality. While people have lost income, they are as we speak going through a tremendously difficult hardship… The real impact is the access to food. People have lost their income. There are a lot of unhappy people and this is a recipe for social unrest.”

While prices have not yet reached the levels that in 2008 led to people dying of starvation and food riots, brought down the Haitian government and contributed to the 2011 Arab Spring, the upward trend in prices for basic food staples has potentially revolutionary implications amid a growing social, economic and political crisis of global dimensions.

Abbassian said, “If [people] realise the vaccine won’t solve the problems in the near term and they don’t have food, then things could get out of control. Although I still doubt we will hit those [previous] peaks, we will see volatility in the coming year.”

The world grows enough food to feed more than 9 billion people, far more than the current population of 7.6 billion, although up to one third is wasted through harvesting, distribution, storage and transportation. The threat comes from the “free market” and rising prices.

Soya beans, crucial for livestock feed and vegetable oil, are trading at $13 a bushel and palm oil, used in about half of all supermarket goods, is seeing its highest price in nearly 10 years. Corn is at a six-year high, while wheat is trading at more than $6 a bushel, due to dry weather in Russia, the world’s leading wheat exporter, and restrictions on grain export to limit domestic food inflation. Grain prices have risen in South America where Brazil and Argentina have been hit by hot dry weather, prompting the Argentinian government to suspend corn-export licences.

Tunis’ Central Market (credit: photo by Christopher Rose, flickr)

Rice prices have also risen after south east Asian countries threatened to limit exports as the pandemic hit production, while congestion at ports and a shortage of shipping containers as many remain stranded in the wake of the pandemic have caused some shipping durations to double and freight prices to soar.

Such is the anarchy of the market and the indifference of the financial oligarchs to anything other than their own interests that governments that have been able to do so have been shoring up their food supplies, setting in motion a ferocious national competition, adding to demand and fueling price rises. To cite one example, after releasing its grain and rice reserves to limit price increases during the pandemic, China has been restocking leading to forecasts that its imports for 2020-21 will triple from 7 million tonnes to 22 million.

Even before COVID-19 pandemic slashed incomes and disrupted supply chains, chronic and acute hunger were widespread and rising. In 2019, the number of severely undernourished people was nearly 750 million, or almost one in ten people on the planet, the majority living in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. This number rises to nearly 2 billion if those “moderately” undernourished are included.

While the UN had predicted hunger rising to 841 million people by 2030, this is expected to be closer to 909 million in the wake of the pandemic. This last year has seen a huge increase in global food insecurity, affecting the poorest and most vulnerable households in almost every country, including the richest.

According to a US Department of Agriculture survey last April, at the start of the pandemic as food supplies were disrupted and tens of millions lost their jobs or were temporarily laid off, more than 17 percent of mothers with young children said their children weren’t getting enough to eat because they couldn’t afford the food. Feeding America, the US’s largest hunger-relief organisation, estimated that more than 50 million people could experience food insecurity, or one in six Americans and one in four children—nearly a 50 percent increase from 2019—by the end of 2020.

Food insecurity in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America has increased, with UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, predicting that 10 million people will experience acute malnutrition this year. Food costs had increased by more than 10 percent in some countries as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and food production.

UNICEF warned that acute malnutrition for children will escalate in the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, north-east Nigeria, Yemen and South Sudan and appealed for $1 billion more to tackle malnutrition in 2021.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) predicted that the pandemic would cause food insecurity to increase by 80 percent, affecting 270 million, more than the entire population of Western Europe, meaning they were on the brink of starvation.

Its Cost of a Plate of Food 2020 Report estimated per capita average income across 36 countries and calculated the percentage of income people must spend for a basic meal, some beans or lentils for example, and a carbohydrate matching local preferences and compared the price someone in New York might pay with the price in a so-called developing country.

The WPF found that since the start of the pandemic, the daily income spent on food by someone living in South Sudan has risen 27 points to a staggering 186 percent of income. This takes place in the wake of the pandemic and the conflict in the east that has displaced more than 60,000 people and is crippling harvests and livelihoods that together have created the threat of famine. If New Yorkers paid the same proportion of their income on a similar basic meal, it would cost US$393. Seventeen of the top 20 countries paying the most are in sub-Saharan Africa.

David Beasley, the WPF’s executive director, said, “People in urban areas are now highly susceptible too, with COVID-19 leading to huge rises in unemployment, rendering people powerless to use the markets they depend on for food. For millions of people, missing a day’s wages means missing a day’s worth of food, for themselves and their children. This can also cause rising social tensions and instability.”

Food deprivation on such a massive scale exists alongside unprecedented wealth concentrated at the heights of society. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the world’s 500 richest individuals have increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion, while the world’s billionaires now control more than $10 trillion dollars in wealth. The WPF requires $13 billion to deliver food in 83 countries but has a shortfall of $4.9 billion for the rest of the year, a sum that would save 30 million people from famine.

The response of the working class must be to develop an independent political movement to expropriate this wealth and use it in the interests of society, instead of the selfish interests of the ruling class. This is the programme of socialism.