Who is responsible for Canada’s second, deadlier, wave of COVID-19?

Frédéric Charlebois

The coronavirus pandemic continues to run rampant across Canada with an exponential increase in cases that has driven the health care system to the breaking point. Given that health experts warned, as early as last spring, of a second wave of COVID-19 that would potentially be even deadlier than the first, the question that must be posed is: How is it possible that this catastrophic scenario has now materialized?

The answer lies in the class policy of Canada’s federal and provincial governments, which have worked to avoid all effective measures against the pandemic that are deemed harmful to the accumulation of profits.

Since the start of the second wave in September with the reopening of schools, the country has seen record numbers of infections and hospitalizations. If we compare the current figures with those of the first wave, which ended in early summer, the situation is more than alarming.

Source: Government of Canada.

According to data provided by the Canadian government, there were more than 8,800 deaths in the country (including more than 5,600 in Quebec alone) and nearly 109,000 infections during the first wave, which effectively ended in early July. As of January 22, more than 18,700 people have died in Canada, while the number of infections now exceeds 730,000.

If one excludes Quebec, which was disproportionately impacted during the first wave, the number of deaths in the second wave exceeds the total of the first wave by a factor of three. There are on average six times as many cases across the country.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s forecasts, the number of daily infections could reach 10,000 in February if the measures currently in place are maintained, and 30,000 if the situation deteriorates further.

The skyrocketing number of cases and deaths is clearly demonstrated by the federal government’s own graphs, shown above.

In many parts of the country, the number of seriously ill COVID-19 patients is overwhelming the health system. In Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous provinces, and the provinces most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, there is no room for maneuver. There is a critical shortage of equipment, and critical care beds are running out.

In several large urban centers, such as the Greater Montreal Metropolitan Area or the Windsor, Ontario area, the forced transfer of patients to outlying areas has already begun, and authorities are reviewing plans for “triage” under which some patients are denied treatment and left to die, due to the lack of intensive care beds and other shortages.

Many hospitals are reporting occupancy rates of over 100 percent. In addition to the shortage of beds and equipment, there is a crying lack of health care personnel, who have been hard hit by the pandemic. Not only have thousands fallen ill, but the inordinate workload—nurses in Quebec have been denied their vacations and forced to work endless hours of overtime—has taken a heavy psychological toll. As a result, many hospitals cannot function at their normal capacity.

The severity of the crisis is not the consequence of the unexpected nature of the pandemic, which was both foreseeable and foreseen, but of the disastrous response of government authorities.

They have refused to funnel the requisite resources into a health care system that was already ravaged by decades of budget cuts, thus ensuring its inability to carry out systematic mass testing and contact tracing and massively expand medical infrastructure to combat the pandemic.

At the beginning of the first wave last spring, the federal government and the Bank of Canada focused on rescuing the financial and corporate elite, providing them some $650 billion in bailout funds. The ruling class then turned to reopening the economy to make the working class pay—through increased exploitation in the workplace—for the monies they had just allocated to themselves. In this, they received the unstinting support of the trade unions, which demobilized working class opposition, and have helped reopen workplaces and schools.

With criminal disregard for human life, provincial governments, with the blessing of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberal government, began in late April to reopen nonessential businesses, factories and schools even as the virus continued to run freely. This campaign was led by Quebec Premier François Legault, who in May reopened all industries and most of the province’s schools (except in the Greater Montreal region).

Instead of using August to strengthen the health care system for a potential resurgence of the pandemic as temperatures cooled and people were forced to spend more time indoors, the federal and provincial governments expended their energies on countering widespread public opposition to their push to force children and teenagers to return to in-class instruction at the beginning of September. Their aim in doing so, despite hypocritical claims of concerns about pupils’ mental health and education, was to free parents from their childcare responsibilities so that they could be forced back to work and generating profits for big business.

As the number of cases began to rise in September and October, government officials rushed to announce that there would be no lockdown in the face of a second wave. Instead, amid calls from epidemiologists and other health specialists for urgent action, they imposed only minimal and ineffective restrictions, such as the partial closure of restaurants that Quebec’s government ordered in late October. They were particularly adamant in insisting that schools must remain open for in-class instruction, although they had emerged as a significant source of transmission.

Canada thus implemented the “herd immunity” policy adopted by governments across the US and Europe–and once openly advocated by Legault–of letting the virus spread throughout the population in order to keep the economy “open” and preserve the flow of profits.

Having rejected any serious measures to stem the pandemic, government officials are now adding insult to injury by scapegoating ordinary people for the spread of the virus. They are blaming private gatherings for the continuing rise in COVID-19 cases, while their own documents show that the majority of infections occur in workplaces, schools and long-term care facilities.

It is working people that are bearing the full weight of the coronavirus crisis. In addition to the staggering number of deaths, social misery and income inequality have dramatically increased across the country during the pandemic.

Unemployment has risen sharply, with hundreds of thousands of service sector jobs eliminated. In the spring, as hundreds of billions were handed out to big business, eligible workers received a meager $2,000 per month under the CERB (Canada Emergency Response Benefit). While right-wing forces were denouncing the CERB for incentivizing “dependence” and recipients as potential cheats, companies that had received millions in wage subsidies were, as the Financial Post subsequently documented, using the money for executive bonuses and shareholder dividends. The real COVID-19 profiteers are the rich: this year alone, the country’s top 20 billionaires increased their wealth by $37 billion.

The ruling class’ homicidal policy was orchestrated with the full backing of the pro-capitalist trade union apparatuses, which have endorsed and implemented the back-to-work and back-to-school drive. For decades, the unions have served as watchdogs for the ruling elite, suppressing workers’ struggles and imposing the big business assault on jobs, wages and public services. The coronavirus crisis has provided them with an opportunity to collaborate even more closely with big business and its governments, in complete disregard for the health and lives of the workers they purport to represent.

A similar sharp turn to the right was carried out by pseudo-left organizations such as Québec Solidaire, which has come under criticism even from its own members for its open collaboration with Legault and endorsement of his government’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.

To halt the spread of the virus and prevent a massive loss of life, emergency measures must be taken now! The availability of vaccines makes it all the more urgent that a full lockdown be put in place across the country until the bulk of the population is vaccinated.

Schools must be closed, and millions invested in e-learning. All non-essential economic activity must be shut down. PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) must be made available to all those workers who must stay on the job for essential production and services. And full financial compensation must be provided to all workers and small businesses affected by lockdown measures.

The resources to finance such measures exist in abundance, but they are monopolized by the billionaires and multimillionaires, whose grip on society can only be broken by the independent political mobilization of the working class.

To fight for these demands, workers must build rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions. This must be combined with a broader political struggle on a socialist perspective, for the bringing to power of a workers’ government and the reorganization of economic life to meet the social needs of all, not the profit interests of a tiny minority.

Spain’s rich and powerful secretly monopolised COVID-19 vaccines

Alejandro López & Alex Lantier

Generals, royalty and ministers in Spain have secretly been vaccinated for COVID-19, skipping the vaccine wait-list even as vaccines suddenly and inexplicably run out for frontline nurses. This theft of vaccines destined for critically vulnerable elderly people and health workers exposes the criminal class contempt underlying the European Union’s (EU’s) “herd immunity” policy.

The billionaire parasites, far-right generals and endlessly corrupt officials in Spain’s ruling class each day needlessly send millions of workers and youth to risk infection and death, going to work and school in packed trains and trams. They refused to implement medically necessary lockdown orders in order to continue pumping corporate profits into the banks at the expense of lives. The lives they sacrifice are not, however, their own. While lecturing workers on “sacrifice” and the need to “save the economy,” they have selfishly stolen vaccines to save themselves.

2017 photo of Miguel Ángel Villarroya, Spain’s Chief of the Defence Staff. (Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday, Defence Minister Margarita Robles (Spanish Socialist Party, PSOE) was compelled to pledge she would ask Chief of Staff General Miguel Angel Villarroya why he and numerous top military officials in Spain skipped the vaccine wait-list. El Confidencial, a news site with extensive sources in military circles, confirmed that other top staff officers, including General Francisco Braco and Lt. General Fernando García González-Valerio, had also been vaccinated.

Spain has also vaccinated soldiers participating in its imperialist military interventions abroad. The Defence Ministry has its own vaccination schedule, undisclosed to the public. It has enough doses for the nearly 1,000 soldiers in its warships deploying off Somalia. Thousands more are preparing for deployments to Lebanon, Iraq or Latvia. For the moment the vaccines are stored in a new, €5 million refrigerator, at the military base of Colmenar Viejo.

There is little doubt that broad sections of the financial aristocracy have in fact secretly obtained access to vaccines, via the black market or other means. This was seen in the case of Iñaki Urdangarin, the brother-in-law of Spanish King Felipe VI, now serving a five-year prison sentence for his role in an embezzlement and financial corruption scandal.

Urdangarin was vaccinated because he works three days a week as a volunteer at a centre for people with disabilities. Significantly, he secured this job just three weeks ago, coinciding with the start of the vaccination campaign. On the same day, he was allowed third-degree prison regime, the lowest category within the prison system, allowing for day release. It raises the issue of whether his brother-in-law and commander of the armed forces, King Felipe VI, was also vaccinated.

High-ranking officials across Spain irregularly obtained the vaccine. In Murcia, one of the regions with the highest incidence rates—1,189 cases per 100,000—450 senior officials and family members working at the region’s Health Ministry got the COVID-19 vaccine. This took 72 hours and was done in total secrecy. These were not frontline health workers. At the same time, the region’s Ministry of Health refused to vaccinate 9,300 elderly people aged over 90, who were not considered a priority.

Murcia’s health minister, Manuel Villegas, who was vaccinated with his wife, refused to resign for two days. He caved in only under mounting pressure—not before the regional premier, Fernando Lopez Miras, defended him as “exemplary” and his performance as “impeccable.”

Irregular vaccinations of state officials took place in Spain’s African enclave city of Ceuta and the regions of Valencia and Alicante. In Alicante province, the mayor of La Nucía and a local councillor got the vaccine. The mayor cynically argued that he has a medical degree.

At the same time, unexplained shortages are suddenly appearing in official stocks of COVID-19 vaccines in Spain. The lack of doses for health workers is particularly criminal in that over 50,000 health workers have fallen ill, and 63 have died so far.

The regional government of Madrid has announced it will stop vaccinating frontline health workers fighting COVID-19 because it has run out of vaccines. Madrid health workers told elDiario.es many people have been vaccinated in hospitals over the past weeks. Sonia told the daily that she had an appointment at the health centre where she works as a nurse; however, “Today the coordinator sent us a message to tell us that it was being cancelled due to a shortage.”

The Madrid region has yet to say how it went from having one of the slowest regions’ vaccination rollouts—administering 14,000 doses or 14 percent of those received by January 9—to having now used 73 percent of its vaccines. This occurred while the region was brought to a standstill by a storm that coated it with snow. The obvious question is whether these vaccines were stolen in order to be illegally administered to wealthy, well-connected individuals.

The Spanish ruling elite’s vaccine theft come as, across Europe, cold weather and the emergence of new, deadlier variants of the coronavirus are leading to a staggering loss of life. Around 100,000 people die of COVID-19 every three weeks in Europe. There are currently 27,000 hospitalised cases in Spain, including 3,734 in intensive care, under conditions where the enforcing of back-to-work and back-to-school policies is set to claim even greater numbers of lives.

The official EU response to COVID-19 is hopelessly gangrened by an utterly corrupt, money-mad ruling class. While they implemented a “herd immunity” policy, fascistic moods and plans for a coup surged through the officer corps against workers’ strikes demanding a shut-down of non-essential industry. In now-leaked WhatsApp chats, senior officers said they were “good fascists” and called to “start shooting 26 million sons of b*tches” to “extirpate the cancer” of left-wing sentiment.

Villaroya downplayed these chats, insisting the army “exquisitely accomplishes the mission laid out in the constitution” and hailed the “many sacrifices” made by army personnel.

In the final analysis, this corruption is rooted in the grotesque social inequality created by capitalism. A society in which the wealthiest individual (Zara owner Armancio Ortega, net worth €57 billion) is “worth” more than 3 million individuals in the bottom 50 percent is incapable of administering a rational, scientifically guided health policy. As revelations mount of widespread irregular access by the rich to the vaccine, it is difficult to believe that Ortega and other billionaires across Europe have not also already been vaccinated.

The middle class, “left populist” Podemos party, which is in government with the PSOE, has made a few panicked calls for top officials implicated in the scandal to resign. Podemos deputy spokesperson and General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) Enrique Santiago tweeted: “If it’s true that the JEMAD [Chief of Staff Villaroya] has been vaccinated, he should resign or dismissed by the Prime Minister. … If the MinDefence has designed a protocol that allowed officers to be vaccinated before the population or other high-risk soldiers, Robles should explain.”

Podemos Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, who has spearheaded the back-to-work policy together with the union bureaucracy, said “all political leaders” who skipped protocols to be vaccinated “must resign immediately.”

In fact, after nearly a year in which Podemos has implemented the EU’s murderous “herd immunity” policy, the question that is posed is what Podemos knew about illegal elite vaccinations and, indeed, whether Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias or other Podemos officials were illegally vaccinated.

The central political lesson of this scandal is that the pandemic cannot be fought through the European political establishment. It requires the mobilisation of workers and youth, organised independently from the unions in workplaces and schools, in a political movement fighting for equality and for socialism. The only viable perspective for such a movement is to transfer power from the financial aristocracy to the working class.

In November, the PSOE-Podemos government announced its Covid-19 Vaccination Strategy to great fanfare. This plan divided the Spanish population into 15 groups in order to administer vaccinations during 2021 in three phases. In the first phase, from January to March, 2.5 million people were to be vaccinated, including nursing care home residents and staff, health workers and people with serious disabilities.

Government statistics reveal vast scale of UK school teacher and staff COVID-19 infections

Tania Kent

UK government statistics on “Covid related reasons” for school absences in the period leading up to the Christmas holidays have revealed the widespread exposure of school staff to COVID-19.

They are a devastating indictment of the Conservative government’s policy of forcing schools to stay open, supported by the Labour Party and the trade unions.

Children have breakfast at the Little Darling home-based Childcare after nurseries and primary schools partially reopened in England after the COVID-19 lockdown in London, Monday, June 1, 2020. (Photo: AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

The school workforce data for state schools in the week ending December 18 shows:

· Just over 4,000 (0.9 percent) of teachers and school leaders were off work with a confirmed case of coronavirus, and around 3,000 (1.1 percent) of teaching assistants and other staff.

· Around 10,000 (2.1 percent) of teachers and school leaders were self-isolating due to contact with a case of coronavirus inside school, and more than 8,000 (3.1 percent) of teaching assistants and other staff.

· Around 1,800 (0.4 percent) of teachers and school leaders were off work with a suspected case of coronavirus, and just over 1,000 (0.4 percent) of teaching assistants and other staff.

· Just under 5,000 (1.1 percent) of teachers and school leaders were self-isolating due to potential contact with a case of coronavirus outside the school, and around 3,700 (1.4 percent) of teaching assistants and other staff.

· Up to 20,000 teachers and teaching assistants were self-isolating on a single day, December 16.

These figures confirm the findings of a survey carried out by the NASUWT teachers’ union for the week ending October 19 to the week ending November 20. Using school staff data provided by three local authorities, Leeds, Birmingham and Greenwich, the NASUWT found COVID rate among school staff were significantly higher than the rate for the general area—up to four times as high in Leeds.

The Conservative government claimed for months that “schools are the safest place for children to be” and that teachers were at no more risk of catching COVID than any other group. They resorted to manipulating statistics to play down these risks as propaganda in the service of their “herd immunity” policy, designed to protect the wealth of the rich at the expense of lives and wellbeing of educators and other workers.

Surging infections in schools prior to Christmas were an open secret. The period covered by the statistics was one of mounting opposition among teachers to the keeping open of schools, in response to a massive increase of infections amongst children aged 2-17, who constituted over 50 percent of new infection at that time.

The government was aware of the existence of a new, far more infectious, variant of the COVID virus, and that 75 percent of infections among children involved this new variant. It concealed this information and threatened legal action against Greenwich and other London local authorities for announcing an early closure of schools on December 14.

As the virus was allowed to run out of control, with over 60,000 daily infections and sharply rising numbers of deaths following the Christmas break, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that secondary and primary schools in the south would be closed for two weeks at the start of term in the New Year. Educators in their tens of thousands across the rest of the country refused to return to work on safety grounds and the government was forced to announce the closure of all schools in a “national lockdown” on January 4. Johnson had to admit that schools are “a vector for the virus”.

Johnson and the Tories were only able to peddle their lies about schools being safe thanks to the education unions who allowed them to be reopened in September. Feeling exposed by the government’s statistics, the National Education Union (NEU), the largest teaching union, now demands the government “explain” its actions!

Reviewing the figures, the NEU notes that teachers have been almost twice as likely to catch COVID-19 as the wider population in recent months. The NEU’s own analysis of the statistics shows that teachers in primary and secondary schools have been 1.9 times more likely to be infected with coronavirus—and special school staff twice as likely—as the general population.

The figures for support and other school staff with COVID-19 are higher, according to the NEU. COVID rates among other school support staff are estimated to be three times higher in primary schools and almost seven times higher in special schools.

The NEU ask of the government, “Why have the ministers repeatedly told school staff and the public that there was no reason for concern when these figures indicate that there should have been real concern about the much higher Covid infection rates of teachers and other school staff?

“Why did ministers deny clinically extremely vulnerable staff the right to work from home?

“Why has it taken ministers so long to release this data?

“What mitigating measures will ministers now propose?”

The most important question is why did the NEU and other teaching unions allow this to happen? As NEU joint general secretary Kevin Courtney admitted in a meeting earlier this month, “My union supported the opening of schools in September”. This was, he claimed, aimed at “pressing the government to put in place measures to make schools safe, more COVID secure.”

In fact, the union abandoned their safety demands for the reopening of schools in September when not one of those demands had been met. They were at one with Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer who insisted in August that schools must reopen, “No ifs, no buts, no equivocation.”

The NEU then blocked and opposed calls for strike action to close schools in December

It continues its rotten collusion with the Tories. Special schools and nurseries have been excluded from the national lockdown. Knowing that special school staff are at seven times greater risk, the NEU have not called for their immediate closure, with all appropriate safeguards and support put in place for children and their families.

Millions of parents are being forced to go to work and to send their children into unsafe classrooms. Department for Education figures show that 21 percent of primary pupils were taught in the classroom as of January 13, and 5 percent of secondary school students. These are roughly five times the figures seen in the first lockdown, when 4 percent of primary school and 1 percent of secondary school children were in classrooms. These average figures conceal an extremely uneven national picture, with poorer areas having significantly higher percentages in attendance.

More staff are required to go into school, including half of primary school teachers. Across all school settings, 39 percent of teachers and school leaders are still going into work, compared to 13 percent last April, according to the latest official DoE workforce census.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer's tweet of August 16, 2020 demanding the government reopen schools

Around 51 percent of “teaching assistants and other staff” were working onsite in open settings last week, including 57 percent in primary schools and 36 percent in secondary schools.

The essential position of the NEU on school reopenings was made clear as far back as May by Courtney’s co-general secretary, Mary Bousted, who tweeted asking Education Secretary Gavin Williamson “to set up a working party to really examine the practicalities of wider school opening when it is safe to do so. Reopening schools is a question of logistics, not of risks.”

The NEU is run by a privileged bureaucracy that defend their own social interests and maintain friendly relations with management, employers and government. They will do nothing in opposition to the priorities of the capitalist class and act only to dissipate, disorient and block the development of the opposition by educators to working in a proven unsafe environment.

Massive loss of jobs and hours continues in Australia, showing real face of “recovery”

Mike Head

While the government and the corporate media proclaim “recovery,” the latest data on jobs, working hours, wages, poverty and inequality point to the reality: as elsewhere internationally, the ruling class is exploiting the global COVID-19 pandemic to deepen the decades-long assault on working class conditions.

Workers queuing outside a Sydney Centrelink office [Credit: WSWS]

By the most reliable estimates, more than three million workers remain unemployed or “underemployed.” Another 1.5 million are on JobKeeper wage subsidies that the government is adamant must terminate in March. The government is also slashing JobSeeker dole payments back to sub-poverty levels, in order to further push workers into low-paid and insecure employment.

This is part of the ruthless drive to “reopen” all workplaces, regardless of the ongoing danger of COVID-19 outbreaks, including of the more infectious UK and South African variants, which have arrived in Australia. Low-income and young workers are the most exposed to this offensive, on both the health and employment fronts.

The economy remains mired in slump, despite the federal, state and territory governments pouring more than $400 billion into business stimulus packages since March, the setting of record low interest rates, and the withdrawal of $36 billion from superannuation retirement funds by nearly 3 million financially-stressed workers.

According to the official figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last Thursday, the unemployment rate decreased 0.2 points to 6.6 percent in seasonally adjusted terms in December. That figure still represents 912,000 workers—up by 221,700, or 32 percent, over the year.

The youth (aged 15 to 24) jobless rate decreased 1.7 points to 13.9 percent, but that is still up 2.3 points over the year to December.

The ABS underemployment rate—a measure of how many workers are working less hours than they want—decreased by 0.8 points to 8.5 percent, producing an “underutilisation rate” of 15.1 percent, or more than two million workers.

Because of the narrow definitions used by the ABS, these figures are a vast under-estimate. According to the Roy Morgan polling company, total unemployment and under-employment rose from 21 percent to 21.4 percent during December, taking the number of workers who are jobless or wanting more work to more than three million.

In addition to the 1.7 million workers (12 percent) unemployed, 1.36 million (9.4 percent) were underemployed. That was an increase of 73,000 on a month earlier, driven by a rise in part-time employment, which hit a record high of 4.5 million in December.

Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine commented: “[S]ince the COVID-19 pandemic began to heavily impact Australia in mid-March there are now an extra 900,000 Australians either unemployed or under-employed, which will make for a very competitive jobs market for those currently looking for new work… there are clearly not enough jobs to go around for all those looking for new employment.”

Employers are exploiting this “very competitive” market to drive down workers’ wages and conditions, led by companies such as Qantas, which has just axed 2,000 ground staff, and Peters Ice Cream, which is trying to cut casual workers’ pay by $9 an hour.

That offensive will intensify in coming months as the JobKeeper wage subsidies end, along with rental eviction moratoriums and repayment holidays offered by banks and financial institutions for mortgages and other loans.

Minutes after the ABS results were released, Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that the dire predictions around unemployment from the gradual reduction of JobKeeper subsidies had not been realised. He claimed: “Jobs, Jobs Jobs. Jobs is our focus.”

Last month, the JobKeeper subsidies were cut back from $1,500 to $1,000 per fortnight for full-time workers and from $750 to $650 per fortnight for part-time workers, as a step toward ending them altogether at the end of March.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the ABS job numbers were “another indication that Australia’s economic recovery is well underway.” He insisted: “Around 90 percent of the 1.3 million Australians who lost their job or whose working hours were reduced to zero at the start of the crisis are now back at work.”

These claims are utterly false, as was underscored by research released by the ANZ bank. It indicated that most of the jobs being reopened are the lowest-paid.

Roughly 39 percent of all job losses from February to May were from six low-income occupations: waiters, sales assistants, bar attendants/baristas, kitchenhands, drivers and beauty therapists.

Young workers, who held many of these jobs, were over-represented, accounting for 37 percent of the employment losses, despite making up less than 15 percent of the pre-COVID workforce.

“Encouragingly, as restrictions have lifted, employment has rebounded quickly in the lowest paid occupations,” ANZ senior economist Catherine Birch said in an economic note distributed by the bank. That is no doubt “encouraging” for the financial elite, whose soaring fortunes are derived at the expense of low-paid workers.

Birch added: “Workers in the middle and second-lowest quintiles (income brackets) may suffer more hardship in the short-term from loss of employment and income. They tend to be older… and more likely to have dependent children than workers in the lowest quintile.”

These processes will accelerate the suppression of wage levels, which rose by average only 1.36 percent over the year to September 2020, as measured by the ABS. That was by far the lowest annual rate of increase for any 12-month period since the ABS began gathering that data in 1997.

The rise is barely above the official inflation rate. For most workers it indicates real wage cuts, because the ABS “average” includes high-income recipients, many of whom are reaping substantial increases.

Financial stress, poverty and social inequality will intensify. To boost the profits of construction companies and property developers, the government is pouring billions of dollars into grants to build or renovate homes—driving housing prices back up. Yet a Productivity Commission report on government services, released on Wednesday, found no progress has been made on homelessness support or rental stress in the past decade.

Rental stress—defined as spending more than 30 percent of gross income on rent—was affecting 50.2 percent of low-income households in the private rental market. That figure was “largely unchanged over the past 10 years,” the report said.

About 290,500 people were helped by homelessness services last financial year, up from 279,196 four years earlier, with the level of unmet demand for those services rising further. A third of those who needed accommodation were unable to receive it, up from 28.7 percent in 2015-16.

Even before COVID-19, social inequality was widening. A recent report, Inequality in Australia 2020: Part 2, Who is Affected and Why, found that the richest 20 percent of households, with average wealth of $3.3 million, have 90 times the wealth of the lowest 20 percent, with just $36,000 on average.

By 2017, the latest year of available statistics, 3.24 million people (13.6 percent of the population) lived below the poverty line, including 774,000 children under the age of 15 (17.7 percent of all children).

This worsening social crisis is, above all, an indictment of the Labor Party and the trade unions. They spearheaded the deregulation and privatisation of the economy and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, beginning under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s.

Over the past year, the unions have been the chief enforcers of the pro-business response to the pandemic, overseen by the federal Liberal-National government—doing everything they can to suppress strikes and other opposition from the working class.

That is why, in May, Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter called Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus his BFF (“best friend forever”) and Prime Minister Morrison phoned McManus to thank her for the ACTU’s “constructive” role.

Facebook purges left-wing pages and individuals

Andre Damon

On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred.

Screenshot of Facebook’s disabled account notification

At least a half dozen leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This included the public account of Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and the personal account of Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site. In 2016, Niemuth was the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US Vice President.

Facebook also disabled the London Bus Drivers Rank-and-File Committee Facebook page, which was set up with the support of the Socialist Equality Party (UK) to organize opposition among bus drivers. This follows a widely discussed call for a walkout by bus drivers to demand elementary protections against the COVID-19 pandemic.

None of the individuals whose accounts were disabled had violated Facebook’s policies. Upon attempting to appeal the deletion of their account, they received an error message stating, “We cannot review the decision to disable your account.”

With no explanation or warning, Facebook has effectively seized the intellectual property of those it has targeted, cutting them off from years of their photos, writings and online discussions.

Also targeted was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the UK. Its main national Facebook account was disabled, with approximately 20,000 followers, together with its student group, the Socialist Workers' Student Society, with approximately 5,000 followers, as well as its annual Marxism festival, with 12,000 followers.

Additionally, entire branches of the organization were disabled on Facebook, particularly in Scotland, as well as the Facebook accounts of individual members, according to SWP representative Lewis Nielsen. “This has been a concerted attack on us,” Nielsen told the World Socialist Web Site.

Following widespread protests on Twitter and other social media networks, Facebook reversed the ban of the SWP’s main page, although the pages of a number of local branches and members remain offline.

The attack on leading members of the SEP and other left-wing organizations is a calculated act of censorship, at the behest of the state and the ruling class, to silence opposition. These actions are part of a years-long campaign to create the framework for censorship in the United States and internationally.

Such acts of censorship are a desperate response to the growth of popular opposition to inequality, social misery, and the ruling class’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has put profits above the protection of human lives.

The World Socialist Web Site has for years warned about the crackdown on left-wing political organizations by Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Since the 2016 election, the US intelligence agencies have advocated internet censorship in the name of fighting “fake news.” While these actions have been presented as targeting far-right conspiracy theories, they have in fact disproportionately affected left-wing, antiwar and socialist organizations.

In 2017 Google announced that it would promote “authoritative” news sources over “alternative viewpoints,” leading to a massive drop in search traffic to left-wing sites.

World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North published an open letter to Google on August 25, 2017 demanding that it stop the censorship of socialist, antiwar and progressive sites. “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting,” North wrote. “The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.”

In congressional testimony this past November, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked, “Can you name for me one high profile person or entity from a liberal ideology who you have censored,” to which he replied, “We have had compliance issues with the World Socialist Review,” in an obvious reference to the World Socialist Web Site.

Facebook and Twitter followed Google’s example, removing left-wing accounts and pages with millions of followers. Friday was a new milestone in this campaign, with Facebook systematically removing the entire social media presence of a left-wing organization, on the same day as it erased dozens of other accounts.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in Washington. [Credit: Mandel Ngan Pool via AP]

Notwithstanding our differences with the Socialist Workers Party, we unconditionally defend its right and the right of its members to have unfettered access to social media, and demand the immediate restoration of all their accounts.

It is essential for all left-wing organizations to be able to freely express themselves in order to clarify the differences between them and to allow workers and young people to make up their own minds.

There must be a unified response by all left-wing organizations against this type of censorship. It is precisely in this situation that the historic slogan of the labor movement must be brought forward: “An injury to one is an injury to all!”

We urge all supporters of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site to vigorously protest all those targeted by Facebook. We urge our readers to make public statements on every platform available to them protesting the censorship of both members of the SEP and SWP. We call on workers at Facebook and other technology companies to register their protest against this action and demand that it be reversed.

In order to coordinate and take forward their struggles, workers must have unfettered access to information. As they enter into struggle against the corporations and the financial oligarchy they serve, workers must take up the demand for the defense of freedom of expression and opposition to internet censorship.

CO2 and the Rich

Graham Peebles

Only the most deluded denier can now question that the global climate is dramatically changing, and that the chaos is man-made. Extreme weather events – wildfires, drought, intense heat, hurricanes, are becoming more frequent, the impact on ecosystems and biodiversity, populations and infrastructure devastating. Fueled by industrialised nations (where the majority of the richest 10% live) and the lifestyles of the very rich, it is developing nations in the global south that are most severely impacted by climate change, with the poorest communities, particularly women and children hardest hit.

The disruption to weather cycles is caused by global warming (increases in average surface temperature) which results from a build up of what are commonly called greenhouse gases (GHG). These gaseous compounds, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), trap heat which would otherwise pass out of Earths atmosphere resulting in a rise in average ground temperature. Burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and oil) is the primary source of GHG emissions, as well as industrial animal agriculture, which is not only a major source of GHG emissions, but is having a disastrous impact on the environment more broadly, including deforestation, air and water pollution.

With 28% of the total, China (population c.1.4 billion) is the worlds biggest producer of GHG emissions, however when measured per capita it ranks only 47th. China is also one of the worlds biggest investors in renewable energy, and plans to produce 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It is the USA (population c.328 million) – the second largest overall polluter that has the highest per-capita emissions in the world, and by some margin. Collectively the top four emitters (China, USA, EU + UK and India) produced 55% of all GHG emissions in the last decade.

No matter where they are produced GHG emissions effects everyone everywhere. Unsurprisingly the biggest single source, accounting for 73% of emissions is energy consumption from fossil fuels. A study by The Guardian in 2019, found that over a third of “all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane” emissions since 1965 have been produced by just 20 companies – Chevron, BP, Shell and Exxon top the carbon charts, producing over 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

While everyone, particularly everyone in developed countries, contribute to the clogging fog of global emissions, in addition to the global energy corporations the group burning colossal arsenals of fossil fuels and those who are therefore most/disproportionately responsible for climate change is the extremely rich. Research by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), published in September 2020, shows that between 1990 and 2015 (a critical period in the evolution of climate change) when GHG emissions grew by 60%, and cumulative emissions doubled, the richest 10% on the planet (c. 630 million) were responsible for a staggering 52% of carbon emissions. This huge intensification of climate change depleted “the global 1.5C carbon budget [the maximum amount of CO2 the world/country/company has agreed it will/can produce to meet warming targets in a particular time period] by nearly a third in those 25 years alone.”

As if this wasn’t shocking enough, drilling down on the figures reveals that the “richest one percent (c.63 million people)…were responsible for 15% of global emissions during this time.” In contrast the poorest 50% on the planet (c.3.1 billion people), all of whom live in developing countries, produced a mere 7% of cumulative emissions, and used just 4% of the available carbon budget.

From Growth to Social Justice

‘Carbon Inequality’ (differences in expenditure of the agreed carbon budget) reflects and amplifies the broader socio-economic imbalances in the world. In the 1990 – 2015 period global GDP doubled, wealth and income inequality grew, consumption levels increased (mainly among the rich), and although millions were raised out of the most dire levels of poverty ($1.90/day) the income of around half the worlds population remained at less than $5.50.

Even when the poor see some paltry change in their lives, within the present paradigm the main beneficiaries of growth are the rich; growth intensifies inequality, concentrating wealth, and with it political/corporate power in the silk lined pockets of a tiny percentage of the population. A diminishing few, mainly men, predominantly white, controlling more, consuming more, and greedily depleting the global ‘carbon budget’ at the expense of the rest of the population and future generations.

While the benefits of establishing a carbon budget, are debatable, the fact that virtually all of it is eaten up/used by those responsible for the majority of GHG emissions is particularly unjust. Greenpeace relates that an average citizen (its much higher for the rich) in the USA, Canada and Australia emit 150 times the amount of carbon compared to someone in Malawi in Southeast Africa. Adding injury and destruction to insult is the fact that poorer countries and communities, who have done little or nothing to cause climate change, are being most severely impacted by its/the devastating effects.

The breeding ground for climate injustice and social inequality is the competitive ideology inherent within the global socio-economic order, the values it promotes, the behaviour it encourages. Endless consumerism and perpetual economic growth are essential components, but for GHG emissions to stop, – not reduce, but stop altogether, this crude idea of development, which is a cornerstone of government policies and business plans around the world, must be rejected, and priority given to creating environmental responsibility, social justice and unity.

Heading

In December 2015 194 countries signed up to the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate change agreement, adopted at the Paris climate conference (COP21). The agreement sets out a framework to limit global warming to “well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.” To achieve this target countries have established nationally determined contributions (NDC), but even though some countries have announced headline grabbing targets (EU reduce GHG by 40% by 2030 e.g.), in its 2020 Emissions Gap Report, the UN state that not only are polices inconsistent with such figures, but that “countries must collectively increase their NDC ambitions threefold to get on track to a 2°C goal and more than fivefold to get on track to the 1.5°C goal,” which would be disastrous. Currently, despite Covid induced economic and trade restrictions in 2020, GHG emissions are climbing at an average rate of 1.3% per year; By the end of 2019, according to Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (NOAA), emissions had increased 41% since 1990,.

The resulting threat, to ecosystems animal habitat and human communities, is huge; in a recent report in Frontiers in Conservation Science (FCS), an international group of scientists outline a “ghastly future of mass [animal] extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” because of collective ignorance and inaction, primarily by government and big business. “Future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed” they state,…“the scale of the threats… is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.”

For years scientists have been making such warnings but politicians, business leaders the rich and complacent have routinely ignored them, unprepared to make the necessary sacrifices and changes in approach and behavior required in order to save the planet. FCS make clear that dealing with the crisis requires fundamental changes to “global capitalism” as well as education and equality. Under the shadow of Covid-19 governments around the world acted, some more effectively than others, but all responded.

The environmental crisis is a great deal more serious, it is the challenge of the age and demands a (UN) coordinated global response. Radical action is needed and urgently, specifically action that brings about changes in behaviour among the principle GHG emitters; the rich, the energy companies, big business and the consuming masses within developed nations. Environmentally responsible action by individuals, flying less, using less plastic, eating less animal produce, while important, will not deal with climate change. Systemic change is urgently needed, together with a shift in attitudes away from excess to sufficiency.

Farmers’ Protests Reflect Existential Crisis of Indian Agriculture

Colin Todhunter

With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture.

Given that India is still an agrarian-based society, renowned journalist P Sainath says what is taking place can be described as a crisis of civilisation proportions and can be explained in just five words: hijack of agriculture by corporations. He notes the process by which it is being done in five words too: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. And another five words to describe the outcome: biggest displacement in our history.

In late November 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations) to coincide with the massive, well-publicised farmers’ march that was then taking place in Delhi.

The charter stated:

“Farmers are not just a residue from our past; farmers, agriculture and village India are integral to the future of India and the world; as bearers of historic knowledge, skills and culture; as agents of food safety, security and sovereignty; and as guardians of biodiversity and ecological sustainability.”

The farmers stated that they were alarmed at the economic, ecological, social and existential crisis of Indian agriculture as well as the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination against farming communities.

They were also concerned about the deepening penetration of large, predatory and profit hungry corporations, farmers’ suicide across the country and the unbearable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and other sectors.

The charter called on the Indian parliament to immediately hold a special session to pass and enact two bills that were of, by and for the farmers of India.

If passed by parliament, among other things, the Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Bill 2018 would have provided for the complete loan waiver for all farmers and agricultural workers.

The second bill, The Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Commodities Bill 2018, would have seen the government take measures to bring down the input cost of farming through specific regulation of the prices of seeds, agriculture machinery and equipment, diesel, fertilisers and insecticides, while making purchase of farm produce below the minimum support price (MSP) both illegal and punishable.

The charter also called for a special discussion on the universalisation of the public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides that have been banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds without a comprehensive need and impact assessment.

Other demands included no foreign direct investment in agriculture and food processing, the protection of farmers from corporate plunder in the name of contract farming, investment in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based on suitable cropping patterns and local seed diversity revival.

Now in 2020, rather than responding to these requirements, we see the Indian government’s promotion and facilitation of – by way of recent legislation – the corporatisation of agriculture and the dismantling of the public distribution system (and the MSP) as well as the laying of groundwork for contract farming.

This legislation comprises three acts: The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020 and Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020

Although the two aforementioned bills from 2018 have now lapsed, farmers are demanding that the new pro-corporate (anti-farmer) farms laws are replaced with a legal framework that guarantees the MSP to farmers.

According to an article by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), it is clear that the existence of MSPs, the Food Corporation of India, the public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests who have sat with government agencies and set out their wish-lists.

RUPE notes that India accounts for 15 per cent of world consumption of cereals. India’s buffer stocks are equivalent to 15-25 per cent of world stocks and 40 per cent of world trade in rice and wheat. Any large reduction in these stocks will almost certainly affect world prices: farmers would be hit by depressed prices; later, once India became dependent on imports, prices could rise on the international market and Indian consumers would be hit.

At the same time, the richer countries are applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre agricultural subsidies; yet their own subsidies are vast multiples of India’s. The end result could be India becoming dependent on imports and the restructure of its own agriculture to crops destined for export.

RUPE concludes:

“Vast buffer stocks would still exist; but instead of India holding these stocks, they would be held by multinational trading firms, and India would bid for them with borrowed funds.”

Instead of holding physical buffer stocks, India would hold foreign exchange reserves.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital and India’s foreign exchange reserves have been built up by borrowing and foreign investments. The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows and maintain market confidence by ceding to the demands of international capital.

This throttling of democracy and the ‘financialisation’ of agriculture would seriously undermine the nation’s food security and leave almost 1.4 billion people at the mercy of international speculators and foreign investment.

But agricapital’s free-for-all bonanza and the planned displacement of tens of millions of cultivators mirrors what has been happening across the world for many decades: the consolidation of a global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping (often with non-food commodities taking up prime agricultural land) linked to sovereign debt repayment and foreign exchange inflows and earnings and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives.

The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the dominance of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of countries from food self-sufficiency to food deficiency. Little wonder then that among the owners of global agribusiness family firm Cargill 14 are now billionaires – the very company that profited from running down India’s edible oils sector in the 1990s.

It is not that India needs these people. It is already the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton. This is despite India’s farmers already reeling from the effects of 30 years of neoliberal policies, decades of public underinvestment/disinvestment and a deliberate strategy to displace them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations.

If unrepealed, the recent legislation represents the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable corporations. This legislation is wholly regressive and will eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces to feed its population – and a possible return to hand-to-mouth imports, especially in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.

A shift towards food sovereignty – encompassing local people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and their ability to define and control their own food and agriculture systems – is key to achieving genuine independence, national sovereignty, food security and facilitating farmers’ demands.