Spain’s defence chief resigns amid mounting anger over COVID-19 vaccine theft

Alejandro López

Spain’s Chief of Staff General Miguel Angel Villarroya resigned this weekend as anger mounts among workers at Spanish generals, royalty and politicians who obtained COVID-19 vaccines without medical justification. Vaccines are now suddenly and inexplicably running out for front-line health workers.

On Friday, El Confidencial Digital leaked that Villarroya and several other top officers recently received the first dose of the vaccine out of turn, skipping protocols. Villarroya resigned Saturday.

It is the first time a chief of staff has resigned since the position was created in 1984. In a statement Saturday, the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government’s Ministry of Defence defended Villaroya, saying he “never intended to take advantage of unjustifiable privileges which damaged the image of the Armed Forces and cast doubt on the general’s honour.” It cynically added that Villaroya “took decisions he thought to be correct” but which “damaged the public image of the Armed Forces.”

Members of Military Emergency Unit arrive at Abando train station, in Bilbao, northern Spain earlier this year. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)

This scandal exposes the criminal character of the European Union’s (EU’s) “herd immunity” policy. In the European Union, more than 650,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the past year and over 18 million have been infected. In Spain, nationwide infection rates have soared since late December, with over 40,000 new cases every day, bringing total infections to over 2.5 million. The death toll is now over 80,000.

The ruling class has refused to implement medically necessary lockdown orders in order to continue extracting profits from the working class. Workers are bombarded with endless calls to “sacrifice” to “save the economy,” including prominently from Villarroya himself.

As the pandemic began, the PSOE-Podemos government put forward Villarroya, who held regular press conferences alongside the health officials to talk about deploying the army to disinfect buildings, build makeshift hospitals and transport bodies. The army received unprecedented levels of positive news coverage.

The deployment exposed the disastrous state of the civilian health care system. After decades of privatisation and austerity, it was unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. The PSOE-Podemos government responded by trying to politically rehabilitate the Spanish army, which is historically associated with neo-colonial wars and fascist violence against the working class.

With his motto “every day is Monday” and his appeals to militarist sentiment, Villaroya told the public that “discipline,” “spirit of service” and “sacrifice” were necessary to “defeat” the pandemic. He portrayed the pandemic as a war, saying: “In this irregular and strange war that we have to live through, in which we all have to fight, we are all soldiers.”

What Villarroya did not say was that in this “war” the bourgeoisie treated the workers as cannon fodder. While soldiers in World War I were told to jump over the top of trenches in countless fruitless offensives into massed machine gun fire, today millions of workers and youth are packed into trains and trams to go to non-essential work and school. The aim is to ensure that profits continue pouring into the coffers of the banks, at the cost of infecting millions with COVID-19.

Like Spain’s wealthy “soldados de cuota” (quota soldiers) in the early 20th century whose families paid large sums to avoid universal military service, today’s billionaire parasites, far-right generals and countless corrupt officials skipped the wait-list to save themselves at others’ expense. This has provoked outrage.

Tens of thousands tweeted under the hashtag #QueremosLaLista (WeWantTheList), demanding that a public list be drawn of all those in public positions of power that have vaccinated out of turn.

One Twitter user said, “I’m joining WeWantTheList. To use your position in power to jump the priority of vaccinations in COVID-19 is miserable, with no justification.” Another user said: “They lie to us, they rob us, they privatise, they let us die, WeWantTheList.”

Another demanded of Defence Minister Margarita Robles: “WeWantTheList of the Chiefs of Defence who have taken the vaccine and for you to sack them. With this right-wing Minister [i.e., Robles], these people won’t fall.”

Another Twitter user said: “[T]hey say you should put the second dose to not squander the vaccine. The only way to not squander vaccines is putting a guillotine in each town square. You will be naïve if you think band-aids will conceal this. WeWantTheList”.

Anger is mounting amid revelations that the vaccination campaign is stalling due to vaccine shortages. The PSOE-Podemos government’s COVID-19 Vaccination Strategy specified that from January to March, it would vaccinate 2.5 million people, including nursing home residents and staff, health workers, and people with serious disabilities. It is now rapidly falling behind schedule.

Over the weekend, Spain’s most populous region, Andalusia, halted administration of the vaccine. “We must stop vaccinating on Saturday and Sunday to use the 10 percent” kept as a strategic reserve on Monday and Tuesday, the region’s Health Minister explained Saturday. This followed the Madrid region’s announcement that it was stopping the rollout of the vaccines for front-line health workers fighting COVID-19 because it has run out of vaccines.

The PSOE-Podemos government’s sacking of Villarroya amounts to nothing more than political damage control. Defence Minister Margarita Robles reacted to the scandal on Friday by requesting a report from the chief of defence, the usual procedure to buy time. Only when public anger mounted did Podemos request Villaroya’s head, in a desperate attempt to suppress the scandal.

The PSOE-Podemos government has refused to disclose how many vaccines the army has hoarded and name all vaccinated army officers. Other generals named in El Confidencial Digital ’s report Friday have remained in their posts: Generals Fernando García González-Valerio, Francisco Braco Carbó, Carlos Prada Larrea, and Francisco Javier Vidal Fernández.

In fact, and as the PSOE and Podemos officials well know, if everyone implicated in hoarding vaccines and skipping vaccination queues had to resign, the entire top echelon of the state would have to be sacked. The PSOE and Podemos are themselves politically implicated in the scandal.

This was implicitly acknowledged by the only public official who came out to defend Villarroya. Madrid’s Popular Party (PP) mayor, José Luis Almeida, said: “We are in a crisis situation, let’s face it. Those who lead the nation, those who have the responsibility to make decisions for the future, it seems very logical and very reasonable for them to be vaccinated.” Almeida differentiated between the “many cases of politicians” who “should not” have received the dose and those who “have to lead the nation at a crucial moment.” Spain, he cynically concluded, “cannot become leaderless.”

Workers can have no confidence in Podemos, the PSOE or any other faction of the political establishment to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers and youth should be warned that the damage control operation will not lessen the right-wing, authoritarian drive of the ruling class. Terrified by mounting mass anger, it will shift further to the right, and the coup-plotting conspiracies of the army general staff and the fascist Vox party will escalate even as the PSOE and Podemos double down on their “herd immunity” policy.

Club For Growth billionaires finance fascist Republican politicians

Jacob Crosse

A recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics, reported by the Guardian, reveals that 42 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the January 6 election results received a combined $20 million in funding from the Club for Growth (CFG). The CFG is a billionaire-backed conservative consortium dedicated to advancing the interests of the financial oligarchy by backing anti-tax, anti-regulation and pro-charter school politicians.

In his bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself as president-dictator, Donald Trump had the backing of substantial sections of the Republican Party, including many recipients of CFG donations over the years.

Within the last two weeks, two Republican representatives, freshman Colorado Congresswoman and QAnon adherent Lauren Boebert and Maryland Representative Andy Harris, were stopped by Capitol Police trying to enter the floor of the House, each with a gun on their person. Both voted to reject the Electoral College vote on January 6, hours after pro-Trump fascists had overrun the Capitol in a bid to stop the official counting of the votes, and both have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the Club for Growth. Broebert set off a newly installed metal detector outside the House chamber on January 12, while Harris is under investigation by Capitol police after trying to enter the House floor with a pistol on January 21.

Andy Harris at a pair of campaign events in 2020. (Image credit Facebook/harrisforcongress)

The CFG has been the primary financial backer of Harris since his election in 2010, giving his campaign roughly $345,000 over that time. As of October 6, Federal Election Commission Reports revealed that Club for Growth’s Super PAC, Club for Growth Action, had spent $706,000 on ads and pamphlets attacking Boebert’s opponent.

The current head of the CFG is former Indiana Republican Representative David McIntosh, who has led the organization since 2014. CFG money has been instrumental in electing leading Republican senators over the last decade, including Ted Cruz (Texas), Marco Rubio (Florida), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania).

In 2018, the CFG spent millions on negative ads targeting the opponents of Cruz and Hawley while giving generously to their respective campaigns, with Cruz receiving $234,832 while Hawley received $299,301. The CFG spent $3 million on attack ads against Hawley’s Democratic opponent, Claire McCaskill, while in Texas, it helped Cruz fend off a challenge by Beto O’ Rourke, spending $1.2 million on negative ads against the Democratic challenger. Cruz and Hawley led the Republican campaign in the Senate to reject the Electoral College vote as submitted by the various states, and both voted against accepting the results of the election in the hours following the attempted fascist takeover of Congress.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, the CFG initially opposed the candidacy of Trump, donating millions to his opponents, but after Trump bested Rubio, Cruz and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in the primaries, the organization quickly shifted to supporting Trump. As McIntosh recalled in a 2019 interview with the Daily Beast, “it was critical for the survival of the Club for Growth to pivot from having opposed Trump in the presidential primaries to being affirmatively supportive of Trump in the policy battles.” McIntosh added, “If they’re a Never Trumper, we’re not going to support them.”

This pivot to Trump and the fascistic politics he embodies is representative not only of the fascistic turn of the Republican party, but of substantial sections of the ruling financial oligarchy, which are turning toward fascism to defend their wealth in the face of growing militancy and anti-capitalist sentiment in the working class.

The Club for Growth was founded in 1999 by Stephen Moore, former Wall Street Journal writer, Heritage Foundation economist and adviser to Trump. Moore founded the CFG along with Thomas Rhodes, Harlan Crow and Richard Gilder. Since its founding, the CFG has played an outsized role in US politics, donating millions of dollars primarily to Republican candidates, while running negative advertisements against their opponents.

As of 2018, the latest data available, the CFG’s board of directors includes:

* Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state and member of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Center.

* Howard Rich, chairman and co-founder of Americans for Limited Government. Rich donated $225,000 to a super PAC that bought ads promoting the candidacy of another QAnon fascist, freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

* Virginia James, the widow of Club for Growth co-founder Richard Gilder. James has donated millions of dollars to far-right causes, including $250,000 in 2020 to the Charles Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity.

Since 2005, the CFG has released an annual scorecard that ranks politicians on their adherence to the CFG’s goals and announces a “Defender of Economic Freedom” award to those who score above 90 percent. For the 2018 congressional cycle, the CFG awarded 25 Republican politicians with scores above 90 percent, while four US senators and three representatives received perfect scores.

Those who received perfect scores from the CFG included two Arizona representatives, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, both of whom voted to overturn the election results and were instrumental in leading and organizing “Stop the Steal” rallies in Arizona following Trump’s electoral defeat, as well as the rally outside the White House on January 6. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Biggs received over $55,000 from the CFG between 2015 and 2020.

The biggest donors to the CFG are billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, owners of Uline Packaging, and billionaire Jeffery Yass, who co-founded the Susquehanna International Group, an options trading company. The Center for Responsive Politics revealed that Richard Uihlein donated $27 million to the CFG in 2020 and $6.7 million in 2018, while Yass donated $20.7 million to the CFG in 2020 and $3.8 million in 2018.

The Uihleins have played a leading role in mobilizing and organizing politically disoriented and fascistic elements against coronavirus-induced lockdowns. In April, the Uihleins, along with Stephen Moore, secretly organized an unsuccessful recall campaign against Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers, along with multiple protests at the state Capitol against any restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.

WBEZ in Illinois revealed on January 12 that Richard Uihlein gave nearly $4.3 million to the political action committee of the Tea Party Patriots, including $800,000 this past October. The marchtosaveamerica.com website, before it was taken down after the January 6 coup attempt, listed the Tea Party Patriots as one of the 11 groups “participating in the March to Save America,” as part of the “#StopTheSteal coalition.”

The Uihleins also funneled $800,000 into two Midwest Senate races, supporting Republicans John James in Michigan and Joni Ernst in Iowa. Ernst has fought against any restrictions on business to halt the spread of the virus, labeling it a “hoax.” Salon reported last October that James, along with Vice President Mike Pence, was photographed with the head of the American Patriot Council, Grand Rapids resident Ryan D. Kelley.

Kelley, who gave thousands to James’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns, organized the “Well-Regulated Militia” American Patriot Council rally on June 27 in Lansing to protest coronavirus restrictions and “government tyranny.” One of the attendees at the rally was Adam Fox, the alleged leader of the Wolverine Watchmen, which, according to the FBI, was planning to kidnap and assassinate Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. FBI affidavits allege that Fox used the rally to recruit accomplices.

Growing warnings of a Wall Street bubble

Nick Beams

As Wall Street climbs to new record highs on the belief that massive support from the Fed will continue virtually indefinitely, there are warnings from some within the financial oligarchy that the bubble is heading for a collapse.

The year began with a note from long-time financial investor Jeremy Grantham that Wall Street was heading into the final stages of a bubble as exemplified by the “market craziness” that has seen Tesla shares rocket by more than 700 percent since last March.

This warning has been joined by others. The head of the hedge fund Baupost Group, Seth Klarman, sent a letter to clients earlier this month, cited by the Financial Times(FT), in which he noted that, under the policies of governments and central banks to provide continuous stimulus to the markets, risk had “simply vanished.”

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

Klarman engages in what is known as value investing where some assessment is attempted to be made of a company’s underlying financial structure, the nature of its assets and its profitability as the basis for making decisions. Like other asset management firms who pursue this strategy, Baupost underperformed the rest of the market in 2020 in conditions where shares are being purchased simply because they are rising.

As an example, he cited, as others have, the rise of Tesla. The shares in the “barely profitable” electric carmaker had risen “seemingly beyond all reason” making its founder Elon Musk the richest man in the world.

The flooding of the market with cash from the Fed had made it impossible to judge the underlying state of the real economy.

“With so much stimulus being deployed, trying to figure out if the economy is in recession is like trying to assess if you have a fever after you just took a large dose of aspirin. But as with frogs in water that is slowly being heated to a boil, investors are being conditioned not to recognise the danger,” he wrote.

The biggest problem with “unprecedented and sustained government interventions is that risks to capital become masked even as they mount.”

He noted that, in their search for yield, investors were moving into ever riskier sections of the market, including below investment-grade junk bonds.

While the Fed’s measures had helped sustain the economy, they had resulted in two dangerous ideas: “that fiscal deficits don’t matter, and no matter how much debt is outstanding, we can effortlessly, safely, and reliably pile on more.”

Approaching the issue from a longer-term view, Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist Ruchir Sharma wrote an open letter to incoming President Biden, published in the FT, warning that fiscal deficits “still matter.”

He said the prevailing view was that, with inflation now dead and interest rates at historic lows, it would be “unwise, even irresponsible, not to borrow to boost the economy” and the inflow of “billions, trillions” hardly mattered, especially for the US which still had the world’s most coveted currency.

This year it has been calculated that the US and other major countries had a committed a median sum equal to 33 percent of their gross domestic product to stimulus measures compared to 10 percent in the crisis of 2008.

Pointing to longer-term trends, Sharma noted that public debt in the US and developed countries averaged about 110 percent of GDP, up from 20 percent in 170.

“Since the 1970s, the size of financial markets has exploded from about the same size as the global economy to four times the size. Most of those gains go to the wealthy, who are the main owners of financial assets,” he wrote.

As a result of constant financial stimulus, average wealth in the past three decades had risen by 300 percent for the top 1 percent and 200 percent for the next 9 percent, and zero for the bottom 50 percent, with one in 10 in that percentile owing more than they owned.

There was a connection between stimulus measures and rising wealth inequality, he wrote, which was ignored by its advocates such as Bernie Sanders. But Wall Street traders recognised it, seeing vows for stimulus and continued monetary support “as more money in their pockets.”

Like others, Sharma drew attention to the political consequences for the stability of the system over which the financial oligarchs preside. “Decades of constant stimulus have left capitalism weaker, less dynamic and less fair, fuelling angry populism.”

The use of the term “populism” in these circles is something of a code word for the underlying fear in ruling circles of a movement of the working class against the capitalist system. They fear an explosion of pent-up anger, accelerated in course of the pandemic, which has seen death and economic devastation for broad sections of the population while the wealth of the upper echelons of society has risen to stratospheric heights.

A recent article in Bloomberg, entitled “The Rich are Minting Money in the Pandemic Like Never Before,” noted comments by economist Peter Atwater who noted that “there has probably not been a better time to be wealthy in America than today.”

The article cited some of the more damning statistics on the conditions of life for tens of millions of people. Employment in the bottom quartile of income earners, making less than $27,000 a year, remains 20 percent below the levels of January 2020. Last month, according to the US Census Bureau, nearly 30 million adults lived in households where there was not enough to eat, an increase of 28 percent since the pandemic began. In Louisiana one in every five people faces food scarcity.

Pointing to the so-called “K-shaped recovery,” Atwater concluded: “You cannot have a sustainable economy and political system where you have a small population who believe they are invincible and a growing population who feel defeated. It’s in capitalism’s best interest to close this gap.”

Such measures, however, are impossible because any real diversion of wealth from Wall Street and the financial oligarchy it serves would bring an immediate collapse of the financial bubble. The policies of the Biden administration do not represent a step in closing the gap but will widen it—a fact that has already been recognised by Wall Street in its continued rise since the stimulus measures were announced.

The overriding fear of the financial oligarchy, which the Biden administration serves no less than Trump, is that the working class begins to take matters in its own hands and fight for its basic class interests.

This is why entire “left” political milieu, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Jacobin magazine, sprang into action to back the Teamsters Union betrayal of the Hunts Point food workers strike in New York lest it become the spark for a broader eruption of the class struggle.

Ford Motors to cut another 800 jobs in Germany

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Ford Motors’ German subsidiary, headquartered in Cologne, has announced 800 new job cuts.

Last week the IG Metall trade union announced 600 job losses. On January 18, the management of GFT (Getrag-Ford Transmissions GmbH), a joint venture between Ford and supplier company Magna, informed the Cologne workforce that 200 jobs would be eliminated.

While the IG Metall union is not disclosing where the 600 jobs at Ford will be cut, the 200 jobs at GFT result from the closure of Ford’s transmission development centre, which employs a total of 400 people. This means 200 workers will lose their jobs, 100 are to transfer to new jobs in the Ford group, and the remaining 100 will be shunted off to a so-called “transfer company,” their ultimate fate unknown.

Assembly line at Ford Dearborn Truck. Credit: Ford Motor Company

On Wednesday, the 400 workers at the transmission development centre protested the planned closure by remaining in their cars in the company parking lot and honking their horns during a plant meeting.

Ford and the Canadian-Austrian auto supplier Magna had already decided at the end of August last year to end their cooperation with GFT. Shortly before Christmas the GFT management announced a holiday “surprise” when it informed its “venerable employees” that they had to prepare for drastic cuts.

The two corporations are splitting up GFT. Magna will get the transmission plant in Bordeaux, France, which will continue to make transmissions for the Ford Fiesta. Ford will keep its factory in Cologne, which produces light commercial vehicle transmissions, and its plant in Halewood, UK, which produces transmissions for some Kuga and Focus models, among others. The development centre will be wound up by the works council and management. Both bodies are determining who will move to the main plant in Cologne, who will join the transfer company and which workers will be made redundant.

As usual, the central role in the job cuts is played by IG Metall and its affiliated Cologne Works Council, chaired by Martin Hennig.

In March 2019, Ford announced plans to cut 25,000 jobs worldwide, including 12,000 in Europe and more than 5,000 in Germany. Plants have been or will be closed in Brazil, France and Wales, along with up to four production sites in Russia.

The job cuts have been implemented in every country by the trade unions and their company representatives, and in Germany and Europe by Hennig, who is also chairman of the European Works Council, together with his fellow union colleagues.

Shortly before Christmas, Hennig gave an interview to the German Press Agency (dpa) in which he summed up with satisfaction the job cuts he had already implemented. By the end of the year, the workforce in Germany will have been reduced by 4,900 to just under 20,000 compared to the beginning of 2019, Hennig reported. “The job cuts are painful, but in view of the overall situation, we have managed this reasonably.”

Just over 15,000 workers remain in Cologne, and 4,500 in Saarlouis, plus around 200 at the Ford development centre in Aachen. Hennig proudly explained that a total of 5,400 jobs were to be cut, 500 more than had been implemented by the end of last year.

Despite the difficult situation, Hennig claimed in his interview that the job cuts at Ford Germany were now over. “There will be no more major cuts for now.” This statement was a deliberate lie and served solely to pacify staff. The half-life of this lie was just three weeks!

The grandiose declaration that cutbacks at Ford had been reduced was also a lie. Instead, Hennig and the works council ensured that these cutbacks would take place in affiliated supply companies.

Employees whose jobs had been eliminated, Hennig said, had been retrained and are now working in areas where outside contractors were previously used. For example, Ford employees would now take over the final assembly of doors. In the style of a purchasing manager, Hennig explained, “The cost calculation showed this is more favourable for the company. Sometimes outsourcing does not pay off, top management has also recognized that.”

What Hennig did not tell dpa was that bringing previously outsourced jobs back to the Ford plant (insourcing) merely shifts job destruction to suppliers and plays off one part of Ford’s workforce against another.

When Magna and Ford announced the dissolution of their GFT joint venture late last summer, Hennig claimed, “For the workforce, this is a slap in the face.” The plans came as a complete surprise, he said. “We will fight tooth and nail to make sure no jobs are lost.”

The same spectacle was repeated only a short time later in October of last year. IG Metall reported that Ford had terminated its contract with Faurecia Interior Systems effective April 15, 2021. The union declared that a production cutback was planned at Ford in Cologne from January, which would result in surplus personnel at Ford. The union claimed these workers could be employed in the company’s own door production, while Faurecia workers, who had formerly assembled the doors in the immediate vicinity of the Ford plant, will lose their jobs.

Three months ago Kerstin Klein, deputy representative and manager of IG Metall for Cologne-Leverkusen, demanded that job cuts be cushioned by transfers to vacant jobs and training programs at Ford. “Employees affected by job losses must have access to existing retraining and education programs as well as the job exchange scheme at Ford plants.”

Once again, Cologne-based IG Metall claimed that both cuts in production and the “insourcing” of door manufacturing had not been discussed with Ford and Faurecia works councils.

Who can believe this? Such plans are discussed in all of the economic and personnel committees of the works councils, but not, workers are to believe, this time at Ford in Cologne?

IG Metall and its works councils have been implementing cutbacks for years. The union’s most favoured method is to divide workers between those employed in different factories all over the world, between the employees of the Ford factories in Cologne and Saarlouis, between workers at Ford and those working for suppliers, and even inside one production facility, between those working in administration and those in production.

For example, union representatives at Ford in Cologne are spreading the rumour that the 600 jobs to be cut were to be eliminated in administration, but that the workers there were not prepared to quit. The ones who will suffer ultimately are then production workers, whose jobs will allegedly be lost due to economic necessity.

As if the planned job cuts in administration could not be carried out because no one was willing to volunteer to quit!

The union’s policy of “slash and burn” will also be used this spring when Ford management announces where the company’s first electric auto is to be built in Europe. Two plants are competing for the contract, the factories in Cologne and Craiova, Romania.

It is safe to assume that Hennig is already trying to convince management in secret talks to build the e-model in Cologne. Possibly the elimination of another 600 jobs is already part of such a deal. Even now, Hennig has indicated that, despite the most recent cuts, there would be no let-up in downsizing.

The potential for related job creation was limited, Hennig told dpa. After all, the platform, the substructure including the e-motor and battery, stems from Volkswagen with Ford responsible only for final assembly. “The value added would be significantly lower than if we produced our own auto with a combustion engine.”

The works council under Hennig is doing everything in its power to maintain Ford’s future profitability. This is evident not only in the job cuts that have now been taking place for two years, but also in its attitude toward dealing with the Corona pandemic.

Immediately after the first outbreak of the virus in Germany last year, it spread quickly among Ford workers, although the workforce does not receive exact figures on colleagues who have been infected and those who have died. Workers told WSWS that a company driver who delivers material and components for the assembly line died after contracting Covid-19 last year. The worker was due to retire shortly prior to his death.

To defend their lives, health and jobs, Ford workers must organise independently of the union and unite internationally. They must build independent action committees and establish contact with workers throughout the auto industry and other sections of workers.

12 dead and over 750 workers infected at Southern California ports

Marko Leone

As COVID-19 continues to break record numbers of infections and mounting death tolls in California, dock workers, shipbuilding and logistics workers at the busy ports in Southern Californian have been particularly hard hit in recent weeks. Currently nearly 700 workers have contracted the virus in Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, with another 60 workers infected at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.

Since the beginning of the year, over 35,000 confirmed cases have been reported in California every day, with Los Angeles alone seeing over 10,000 daily infections. A dozen longshore workers have died so far this year.

Eugene Seroka, executive director of the Los Angeles port, told the Los Angeles Times that nearly 1,800 dock workers are currently not working either due to self-isolation because of limited contact tracing or awaiting test results. Many are staying at home out of fear of contracting the virus. “We’ve got more cargo than we do skilled labor,” Seroka said.

The City of Long Beach, the Port of Long Beach, and the Los Angeles River (upper left) with its mouth at San Pedro Bay, Southern California. (Wikimedia Commons)

The high numbers of cases at the ports have been the direct result of indifference to the health of port workers. Union representatives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have cynically claimed that port executives have been failing to report widespread outbreaks to county health officials all while keeping workers on the job.

Only one of the 12 terminals in Los Angeles has officially declared a virus outbreak of just 15 workers, despite the hundreds who are reporting infections. In reality, the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association are colluding to keep workers on the job.

The response by the Democratic mayors of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, and Long Beach, Robert Garcia, has been to write to fellow Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom urging a faster distribution of vaccinations for dock workers. Joined by the ILWU and other elected officials, the call for vaccinations is aimed at creating a false sense of security to keep workers on the job under dangerous conditions.

Given that the vaccine requires two doses and several weeks before immunity, and the fact that the vaccine rollout has been a disaster, the move will not provide protection to workers who have been deemed “essential” and forced to remain on the job.

LA Port Executive Director Seroka recently declared, “My heart goes out to the dock workers. I’ve heard from many of them that there have been a lot of outbreaks. There is a lot of fear.” Such comments, however, could not be more empty since management, with the backing of the union, continues to force workers to move cargo as the death toll skyrockets in the region.

The fears of local authorities, mayors, and union bureaucrats are not, however, for the lives of workers, but of the economic consequences for corporations and the financial elite due to labor shortages. The port of Los Angeles is the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere, handling some $276 billion in cargo, according to 2019 figures.

The Long Beach seaport processes $56.7 billion in cargo and is one of the largest employers in the region, with more than 316,000 employees in Southern California. Much of the personal protection equipment that comes into the United States is from Asia and enters through the Southern California docks. Many economies in the state and the rest of the country depend on imported goods coming through the region.

Shipyard workers at BAE Systems, Inc. and NASSCO (National Steel and Shipbuilding Company) workers in San Diego are currently experiencing a similar outbreak and surge in infections. In the last three weeks alone, 60 positive cases have been reported at just the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.

NASSCO and union representatives are scrambling to cover up the extent of the severity of the outbreak. Workers have also reported in social media posts that the numbers of infections are grossly underreported, and NASSCO has not done anything to limit, prevent or react to the rising cases.

In large measure, workers have been kept in the dark about positive cases at their job sites, and names of the deceased go unmentioned in the press. These include Ignacio Uribe, who died last year from COVID after he had contracted it from the NASSCO shipyard owned by General Dynamics in San Diego. Many of his co-workers never received official notice of his death or were warned of his infection. By June last year, over 100 official reports of COVID infections had occurred at the NASSCO San Diego shipyard.

Video footage of the San Diego NASSCO site has emerged of filthy bathrooms, dirty sinks with no running water to wash hands, and unkept breakrooms with appliances that have not been cleaned in months. Even the most basic sanitary measures have not been upheld.

Last year shipbuilding workers from Virginia to Maine struck to oppose unsafe working conditions during the pandemic. Wildcat strikes emerged at the Bath Iron Works site in Maine April 2020 in response to the death of an engineer and multiple positive cases. The Bath Iron Works employees demanded that General Dynamics and BAE provide workers with personal protective equipment (masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer) in addition to a coronavirus safety plan.

There are currently 50 active cases of COVID at the Bath Iron Works site, and there have been 168 total infections since the beginning of the pandemic. COVID cases at the Ingalls Shipbuilding site in Mississippi are also on the rise.

Shipyard workers are being forced to remain on the job not because they are essential workers but because the US Navy does not want any delays in repairs on new warships as the Biden administration prepares new imperialist wars and saber rattling.

In order to prevent the further spread of the virus, to contain it and stop the strain on hospital systems, which have hung at zero percent capacity for the last month in the state, the only solution is an immediate halt to all truly nonessential production and the provision of full income for workers to stay at home and remain in safety until the virus is contained.

Greater numbers dying as COVID-19 infections spread in UK workplaces

Barry Mason

On Thursday, the death of a worker employed at the Muller Milk & Ingredients dairy in North Petherton, Somerset, was reported. The worker died after contracting COVID-19, amid a huge outbreak that has seen 47 staff members test positive. In total 95 of the 300 strong workforce are now self-isolating.

As with many corporations, the firm has not closed its plant but only reduced production as it tests the workforce. Müller sources milk from 1,600 farmers in Britain and manufactures a wide range of branded and private label dairy products.

The Muller Milk & Ingredients plant in North Petherton, England (source Google Maps)

Last week, Teresa Gorman, aged 56, a manager at a Tesco Extra supermarket in Trafford, Greater Manchester died. She had worked at Tesco for 14 years. The UK’s largest supermarket chain was forced to close the branch after the death, which occurred during an outbreak of COVID-19 infecting up to 50 staff. Trafford saw a 35 percent surge in Covid cases in the week ending January 8. Tesco has not yet confirmed the cause of death.

Earlier this month, two employees who worked at a Tesco store in Greenock, Scotland, where there had also been a Covid outbreak, died. Outbreaks have occurred at Tesco stores in Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Elgin, and Port Glasgow.

The Just Food website reports on COVID-19 infections in the food industry. A January 8 entry noted 30 cases of the disease at the 2 Sisters poultry processing plant in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. The plant was temporarily closed in August last year after employees tested positive for the virus.

Data published by Public Health England covering January 4-10 showed a near 70 percent increase in reports of COVID-19 infections related to workplaces, with 175 workplace clusters. These workplaces were other than schools, hospitals or care homes.

Some employers are exploiting the loose wording of the government’s guidance issued for the latest January 5 lockdown, which states, “Where people cannot work from home they should continue to travel to their workplace.”

The list “includes but is not limited to, people who work in: critical national infrastructure, construction, manufacturing, childcare or education, essential public services.”

In November, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reported its latest figures on notifications of COVID-19 covering the period April 10 to November 14. It recorded a total of 14,428 occupation notifications of COVID-19, including 189 deaths. These were notifications reported to the HSE and local authorities.

The HSE figures showed a pronounced build-up from September in workplace infections as the impact of the ending of the first national lockdown began to show and schools and universities were reopened.

The report notes “the number of occupational COVID-19 notifications made to enforcing authorities has been generally increasing week-on-week since early September, (emphasis in original) with numbers in the latest week only slightly below the peak seen in April (1,183 weekly reports at the peak compared with 1,026 reports made in week commencing 8 November).”

The HSE receives notifications via the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) system. It states, “Where a worker has been diagnosed as having COVID-19 and there is reasonable evidence to suggest that it was caused by occupational exposure, employers are required to report the case to the relevant enforcing authority under RIDDOR.”

Employers abuse the system by claiming that there is no proof that an infection originated in their workplace. The HSE notes “the RIDDOR notification system suffers from widespread under-reporting which has the potential to give a distorted view of both the scale and spread of cases by important risk factors such as industry sector.”

Some employers have ordered workers who have the National Health Service track and trace app on their phones to disable it while at work. This includes Rix Petroleum, a Hull-based fuel delivery firm. The company’s managing director told the BBC , "I think there is a place for using the app, but not in the workplace where it takes no account of the measures that we've put in place to restrict transmission."

Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline told its employees not to use the app at work. According to a BBC News article, some teachers were ordered not to have the app activated while at work.

An article published by the People Management website on January 13 detailed the results of a poll commissioned by building technologies group Honeywell and conducted by the Wakefield Research group at the end of last year. It reported “nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of respondents did not feel completely safe in their workplace, with half (51 per cent) worried about contracting coronavirus by coming into contact with contaminated surfaces.

“The research, which polled 500 UK workers who are usually based in large buildings with 500 or more people, also found that just 45 per cent of workplaces had safety protocols in place such as social distancing and mandatory mask wearing.”

An hrmagazine article of January 2, “Companies risking lives by bending lockdown rules” explained, “A survey carried out by the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA)… found that one in nine workers said they had been ordered back to their workplace when they could have worked from home.”

Many on low incomes who should self-isolate are not doing so because they fear the financial consequences. The government’s own polling published Friday found that only 17 percent of people with symptoms are coming forward to get a Covid test, as they fear a loss of income if they stop work. Workers in the UK receive just £95.85 per week in Statutory Sick Pay.

The Observer newspaper reported January 17 that “no enforcement notices have been served on companies by Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspectors for Covid safety breaches since the country went into the latest lockdown, despite being contacted 2,945 times about workplace safety issues between 6 and 14 January. Overall, just 0.1% of the nearly 97,000 Covid safety cases dealt with by the agency during the pandemic appear to have resulted in an improvement or prohibition safety notice, with not a single company prosecuted for Covid-related breaches of safety laws.”

As well as non-essential workers forced into work, workers in essential jobs such as food production are not getting the necessary protection and can be at significant risk of COVID-19 infection. According to a European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report produced last year, the food processing sector had the third highest rate of COVID-19 outbreaks after hospitals and care homes.

Last September, Leeds based law firm Walker Morris issued a report on COVID-19 outbreaks in food factories. Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Warwick, Lawrence Young said, “Factories and, in particular, indoor areas which are cold and damp, are perfect environments for coronavirus to linger and spread. Virus-containing droplets from infected individuals are more likely to spread, settle and stay viable.”

Noise in such plants meant workers had to shout, promoting the spread of infected droplets. The report noted, “A lot of these factories have on-site or nearby accommodation where there are several people in each dormitory. The workers may be transported on a bus to the site of work, where they then spend all day together indoors and again in the evening.”

Corporations get away with operating unsafe workplaces not simply due to the toothless HSE enforcement regime, but because they can count on the trade unions to do nothing to oppose their nefarious practises. Workers must take matter into their own hands and form rank and file safety committees, independent of the unions, to safeguard their health and lives as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens.

Threat of fascistic coup grows in Brazil amid COVID vaccination failure

Tomas Castanheira

Vaccination of Brazil’s population against COVID-19 began on Monday. As in the rest of the world, after an intense media campaign around the vaccination, which was at the same time aimed at stifling any discussion of necessary social measures to combat the pandemic, the actual distribution of the vaccine in the country is proving a fiasco.

A new patient suspected of having COVID-19 is pulled into the Regional Hospital of Samambaia, which specializes in the care of coronavirus patients in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

The government of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro foresees the immunization of less than 50 million of the more than 200 million Brazilians in the first phase of its vaccination program, lasting four months. The rest of the population is supposed to be vaccinated afterwards, over an estimated period of 12 months, that is, well into 2022.

However, the first phase of the program is already quite compromised. The government has only six million doses of the vaccine available, enough to immunize three million people with the two doses needed. The production of the remaining vaccines is absolutely paralyzed.

The country is waiting for shipments from China to continue the production of the Coronavac vaccine, which is being manufactured by the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, and there is still no forecast for their arrival. The production of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which will be made by Fiocruz in Brazil, has not even started. After a commercial imbroglio, a shipment of 2 million vaccines from India should arrive tonight in Brazil.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 infections and deaths are growing at a frenetic pace. On Wednesday, Brazil registered 1,382 new deaths, the worst number in the last five months, followed by 1,316 deaths on Thursday. The country also registered more than 60,000 daily cases on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 59,119 cases on Thursday, bringing the average number of infections to the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.

Last week, the total collapse of the health system in the Amazonian capital, Manaus, shocked the country. The exhaustion of oxygen reserves in hospitals led to the deaths of several patients by asphyxia. This obscene situation was repeated in the neighboring state of Pará, where seven patients died on Tuesday night due to oxygen shortages in a hospital in the city of Coari.

Infectologists have indicated the incidence of a new, more infectious variant of the virus as the key factor in the explosion of a second and more intense wave of cases in Amazonas. This new Brazilian variant, which has genetic characteristics in common with those recently discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, was found in more than 40 percent of infected patients tested in late December in Manaus. Its inevitable spread throughout the country makes immediate action to halt the pandemic even more urgent.

Prominent Brazilian physician and scientist Miguel Nicolelis, who took over the coordination of the scientific commission of the Consórcio do Nordeste (Northeastern Consortium) dedicated to fighting the pandemic in that region of Brazil, has been warning of the disastrous consequences of keeping economic activities open.

He tweeted on January 4: “It’s over. The Brazilian equation is the following: Either the country enters a national lockdown immediately, or we won’t be able to bury our dead in 2021.”

In a statement to El País on January 18, Nicolelis declared: “The impact of this synchronized advance of the virus throughout Brazil tends to be worse than the first wave. The vaccine will take months to take effect here, and at this moment we have a minimum percentage of doses. It is time to reimplement the restrictive measures.”

No political force of the Brazilian establishment proposes to carry out these urgently needed measures. Nicolelis himself said that the states that make up the Consórcio do Nordeste, governed by the Workers Party (PT), the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and their allies, had promoted irresponsible economic re-openings that “generated agglomerations that synchronize the second wave throughout the country.”

Not even the limited lockdowns, with partial closure of economic activities and control of population flows, adopted by these states in the first half of 2020, are being considered today.

The disagreements between sections of the Brazilian ruling class exclude policies needed to save hundreds of thousands of lives threatened by the spread of the virus. However, the divisions within the Brazilian state are deepening in the face of the protracted COVID-19 crisis. The national economy is facing an impasse as part of the world capitalist crisis, along with growing geopolitical conflicts and the discontent of the Brazilian masses subjected to impoverishment and mounting COVID-19 deaths.

The crisis caused by the breakdown in vaccine production and the collapse of the health care system in Manaus have pushed new sections of the bourgeois establishment into opposition against Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro government’s foreign policy, hostile to China and aligned with the US, has been blamed by many for the delay in imports of vaccine ingredients from China. Discussions on Bolsonaro’s impeachment were also resumed this week, driven by accusations of criminal negligence by his government in Manaus.

Recently released documents from the Ministry of Health headed by Gen. Eduardo Pazuello show that on January 4 the government already recognized the “imminent possibility of collapse of the health system in 10 days.” On January 8, six days before oxygen reserves ran out, the ministry was warned of the “possible shortage” in Manaus by the local oxygen producer and advised to “seek other sources for the product.”

The Attorney General’s Office (PGR) has summoned Pazuello to explain why over the following 15 days he did not provide oxygen reserves to Manaus, even after repeated warnings. In addition to its failure to guarantee oxygen, the ministry imposed the “preventive” administration of medications that lack any proven efficacy in the treatment of COVID-19, chloroquine and ivermectin, to patients in Manaus.

Last Friday, the PGR received a request for opening criminal proceedings against Bolsonaro, signed by more than 300 public figures, among them jurists, medical authorities and former ministers of state. They demanded that the president be denounced for public health failures, public attacks on vaccinations, promotion of drugs that lack any scientific basis and gross negligence in Manaus.

In response to these developments, the Attorney General of the Republic Augusto Aras published a note on Tuesday declaring his refusal to investigate the president and other executive officials. He defended the preservation of “institutional stability” in the face of “the expectation of a worsening of the health crisis in the coming days.” Aras advocated that “the state of public calamity [decreed with the arrival of the pandemic in Brazil] is the antechamber of the state of defense.”

Aras’ distortion of the Brazilian Constitution represents a serious danger to democracy. By forging the concept of an “antechamber of the state of defense,” he is allowing the current legal situation in Brazil to be interpreted as a state of exception, i.e., the suspension of democratic rights. This threat is all the more significant in the face of Bolsonaro’s response to the attempted fascist coup by Trump’s supporters in the US.

Bolsonaro responded to the January 6 coup by defending Trump’s allegations that the US elections were rigged and threatened to repeat the same accusations in Brazil, launching a coup if he is not reelected in 2022. In recent days, these threats have been exacerbated.

Jair Bolsonaro at the Brazilian Air Force 80th anniversary, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, Brasília, Brasil. (Alan Santos/PR)

He is portraying all criticism of his government, and particularly of Minister Eduardo Pazuello, an active-duty Army general, as attacks on the Armed Forces themselves. He is seeking in this way to rally the military behind his fascistic objectives.

On Monday, the president declared to his supporters and the extreme-right press that “we the military are the last obstacle to socialism. Who decides whether a people will live in a democracy or a dictatorship is their Armed Forces.”

On Wednesday, in celebration of the Brazilian Air Force’s 80th anniversary, Bolsonaro gave a speech praising the military as the “major base for fulfilling our [government’s] mission.” He declared, “Brazil has been experiencing change over the past two years. One of the most important: We have a President of the Republic who, together with his staff and ministers, believes in God and respects the military, a rare fact in the last three decades in our country.”

Bolsonaro is the first president, since the end of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, who openly proclaims his links to this bloody regime and characterizes his own government as having a military base. He responded to criticism of his administration with a violent threat: “Depending on where these fires are coming from, we are sure we are on the right track. ... But the few sectors that are rowing in the opposite direction, be sure: you will be defeated.”

These threats must be taken very seriously by the Brazilian working class. It is the workers—not the spineless bourgeois opposition with the PT at its head—who are the ones “rowing in the opposite direction” of Bolsonaro. It is the working class, which is fighting against both social inequality and being sent to death in infected workplaces, that represents the only alternative to the fascistic program of the current government. This can be realized only through the fight for socialism.

Russia ends COVID-19 restrictions in major cities

Andrea Peters

Major cities in Russia are relaxing COVID-19 restrictions, even as cases and deaths surge around the globe. Authorities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg announced the policy changes this week on the grounds that a dip in the number of infections means that the situation in the country is improving and stabilizing. Inoculations with the Russian-made vaccines Sputnik V and EpiVacCorona, however, lag far behind initial targets, and a leading epidemiologist with Russia’s federal agency for consumer rights just declared Friday that officials are predicting a new uptick in coronavirus cases.

Paramedic in a hospital in Khakassia with an elderly woman

On Monday, the capital city’s schoolchildren were ushered back into classrooms. As of yesterday, colleges, sports clubs and gymnasiums, and other educational institutions were also authorized to reopen in the country’s largest urban center. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has further announced that museums, libraries, daycares, camps, theaters, concert halls, and performance venues can now operate at 50 percent capacity. On February 6, students will return en masse to Russia’s universities after an extended holiday break.

Thus far, nearly 1 million Muscovites—about 8 percent of the city’s population—have been infected with COVID-19, according to official data. Over the past two weeks, Moscow has continued to see between 2,000 and 4,000 new infections a day, a fall-off from peaks reached in December. Hospitalizations have also declined.

The very measures that are now being halted were the cause of this drop in infections and instances of severe illness. In short, the fact that the minimal public health efforts implemented by authorities actually had some effect is now being used to justify their elimination. Cases and deaths, which, according to official estimates now stand at 12,690, will now rise once again.

Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, with a population of just under 5 million, is undertaking similar moves. As of January 23, public and private schools, arts and sports venues, gyms, daycares and other facilities for children can reopen. According to city officials, COVID-19 spread is now under control and 30 percent of hospital beds are available.

The relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions is occurring despite the fact that the more contagious UK variant of the virus was detected in Russia a month ago. More than 2 million have died worldwide, including 68,412 in Russia itself. In reality, this number is far higher because when an individual with a comorbidity dies in Russia from coronavirus, the person’s death is frequently attributed to this concurrent condition. According to analyses made of recently released data by the federal statistical agency Rosstat, excess deaths in Russia last year were somewhere between 180,000 and 240,000.

News outlets continue to report findings by Russian doctors regarding the long-term impact of COVID-19 on patients, as well as previously unknown effects of the illness on the body. Dermatologists are seeing instances of rashes, a condition similar to frostbite in patients’ hands and feet, and severe cracking on the lips and around the mouth region, which creates a pathway for other infections to enter the body. Others are witnessing ongoing gastrointestinal problems among coronavirus sufferers. One media report described the lengths that doctors have been going to in order to save the lives of patients with 100 percent lung damage, including pregnant women.

As it has been everywhere, the vaccine rollout in Russia is a debacle. By the end of January, the government expects that just 2.1 million doses of either Sputnik V or EpiVacCorona will have been injected into people’s arms. With more than 144 million people living in Russia, this amounts to a tiny fraction of the population, particularly as both vaccines require a two-dose regimen. It is nowhere near the 75 percent of the population that government officials estimate is required to secure more general immunity. And at this rate, it will be impossible to achieve this metric by November 2021, as previously promised by government officials.

According to an investigation conducted by the Saint Petersburg think tank Peterburgskaya Politika, vaccines are only widely available in Moscow and a few areas in the Far East. Forty-two regions have either no or very little supply. Production and distribution problems have been cited as the main cause. Nonetheless, President Vladimir Putin announced last week that a mass vaccination campaign would begin on January 18.

Reports also persist of reluctance within the population to get either Sputnik V or EpiVacCorona, as neither has gone through the final stage of safety trials normally required before approval. In December, the head of the union Uchitel (Teacher), which represents educators across several regions, stated that many school employees are afraid to get the vaccine. An opinion survey conducted late last year by the Levada Center found that 58 percent of the population was not willing to be inoculated, with most wanting to see further evidence of the vaccines’ safety.

In Rostov-on-Don, a city of just over one million in southern Russia, doctors at one hospital staged a protest over being forced to receive the vaccine despite have being promised that they would be given a choice on the matter. They too cited safety concerns.

The economic impact of the pandemic for the year 2020 as a whole is just beginning to come into full focus. According to the latest news, Russia’s federal deficit grew by 4.1 trillion rubles last year ($54.45 billion), about 3.8 percent of gross domestic product.

In a particularly absurd moment that reveals the government’s combined ignorance and indifference toward frontline workers, a dispute has emerged between two federal agencies over whether data show that health care workers’ baseline wages rose or fell last year. The Ministry of Health insists they went up substantially across the board, whereas the Accounts Chamber reports that they went down by about 15 percent.