Why Xinjiang is Emerging as the Epicenter of the U.S. Cold War on China

Vijay Prashad & Jie Xiong

On March 22, 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized sanctions against Wang Junzheng, the secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), and Chen Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB). These sanctions, Blinken said, have been put in place against Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo because they are accused of being party to “genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.” The U.S. Treasury Department followed suit with its own sanctions.

Both Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo responded by condemning these sanctions that were not only imposed by the U.S. but also by Canada, the UK and the EU. Wang Junzheng said that the sanctions “are a gross slander,” while Chen Mingguo said that he was “very proud of being sanctioned by these countries.”

The United States Pivots to Asia

In October 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced a “pivot to Asia,” with China at the center of the new alignment. While Clinton had said on numerous occasions—including in Hawaii in November 2011—that the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama wanted to develop “a positive and cooperative relationship with China,” the U.S. military buildup along Asia’s coastline told a different story. The 2010 U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review noted“China’s growing presence and influence in regional and global economic and security affairs” and called it “one of the most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape.” In 2016, U.S. Navy Admiral Harry Harris, head of the Pacific Command, had said that the United States was ready to “confront China,” a statement given strength by the U.S. military buildup around China.

The Trump and Biden administrations have largely followed the “pivot to Asia” policy, with a special emphasis on China. The United States has been struggling to keep up with China’s rapid scientific and technological advancements and has few intellectual or industrial tools in place to compete. This is the reason why it has tried to stall China’s advances using diplomatic and political power, and through information warfare; these elements comprise what is called a “hybrid war.”

Focus on Xinjiang: Information Warfare

Prior to a March 2019 event co-hosted by the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva, most people in countries like the United States were largely unaware of the existence of the Xinjiang region in China, let alone of the 13 million Uyghur people (one of China’s 55 recognized ethnic minorities). Given that the Uyghurs are the demographic majority in this westernmost province of China, the official name of the administrative unit is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The March 2019 event featured Adrian Zenz, a German researcher and a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organization founded in 1993 by the U.S. government to promote anti-communist views. In April 2020, this foundation—against all evidence—accused China of being responsible for the global deaths resulting due to the spread of COVID-19. Zenz is also associated with the conservative defense policy think tank the Jamestown Foundation, founded by William Geimer, who was close to the Reagan administration.

Zenz and Ethan Gutmann, another researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, would continue to repeat their conclusions regarding the genocide in Xinjiang to the U.S. Congress and in a range of mainstream publications. Hosted by the BBC and Democracy Now, Zenz provided what appeared to be documentation of atrocities meted out by the “Chinese authorities” against the Uyghur population. Zenz and Gutmann would be joined by organizations funded by Western governments but which—as NGOs—pose as independent research and advocacy groups (such as the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect and the Uyghur Human Rights Project; the former is funded by Western governments and the latter by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy).

In June 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the Chinese government, basing his statements on Xinjiang on the “German researcher Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations.” Zenz, who is a U.S. government-funded researcher from the intelligence-connected Jamestown Foundation, provides a set of scientifically dubious and politically charged papers, which are then used as fact by the U.S. government in its information war against China. Anyone raising questions about Zenz’s claims is, meanwhile, marginalized as a conspiracy theorist.

Diplomatic and Economic Warfare

The U.S. government’s information warfare against China has produced the “fact” that there is genocide in Xinjiang. Once this has been established, it helps develop diplomatic and economic warfare.

On March 22, 2021, the same day as the U.S. sanctions, the Council of the European Union unilaterally imposed asset freezes and travel bans on four Chinese government officials, including Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo as well as Wang Mingshan and Zhu Hailun. The United Kingdom and Canada also joined in this venture that day. It appeared to be a coordinated diplomatic assault on China in order to portray China as a country violating human rights. This assault came soon after China had achieved a major human rights goal, lifting 850 million people from absolute poverty. The U.S. government and its media outlets tried to challenge this remarkable human rights achievement.

Trump had pushed a trade war with China as soon as he came into office in January 2017; his policy framework remains in place under Biden. To draw together the trade war and the Xinjiang information war, in mid-December 2020, Adrian Zenz and the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy (formerly the Center for Global Policy) released an intelligence brief on “coercive labor in Xinjiang.” The claims in this briefing—building on a 2019 Wall Street Journal article on the supply chains and Xinjiang—created a media firestorm in the West, amplified by Reuters and then picked up by many widely read outlets; it led to the U.S. government ban on Xinjiang cotton.

A third of the world’s textiles and clothing come from China, with the country accounting for $120 billion in exports of these products per year and $300 billion in exports of all merchandise annually. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, 87 percent of China’s total cotton output comes from Xinjiang. Most of the high-quality Xinjiang cotton—and the textiles produced from it within China—go to Western apparel companies, such as H&M and Zara. In 2009, many of these companies created the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which has—until last year—been upbeat about developments in Xinjiang (including co-ops of small farmers in Xinjiang). As recently as March 26, 2021, the BCI made a clear statement: “Since 2012, the Xinjiang project site has performed second-party credibility audits and third-party verifications over the years, and has never found a single case related to incidents of forced labor.”

Despite the BCI’s recent confident statement and its optimism, things are rapidly changing for Xinjiang cotton farmers as the BCI appears to get on board with the U.S.’s intensifying hybrid war on China. The BCI closed down its page on its work in China, accused China of “forced labor” and other human rights violations, and set up a Task Force on Forced Labor and Decent Work.

Officials from Xinjiang’s government contested these claims, saying that much of the field labor for cotton in Xinjiang has already been replaced by machines (many of them imported from the U.S. firm John Deere). A recent book edited by Hua Wang and Hafeezullah Memon—Cotton Science and Processing Technology—confirms this point, as do a range of media reports from before 2019. Facts like these don’t seem to stand a chance in the overwhelming information war. Xinjiang—two and a half times the size of France—is now at the epicenter of a cold war not of its own making.

Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for Agrifood Must Not Succeed

Colin Todhunter

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.

Failed Green Revolution

Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.

Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

In her latest report, ‘Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:

“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”

Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:

“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”

It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.

Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’ (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’ (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).

These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.

GMO value capture

As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.

The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.

Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvelous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper ‘The Myth of a Food Crisis’.

However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.

It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.

Many peer reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.

It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.

And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.

The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.

The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.

The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.

In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.

The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.

None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.

This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.

Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.

Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – ‘Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India‘) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).

When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:

“able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits”.

What can be done?

Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.

Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.

The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.

But is all of this inevitable?

Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.

The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.

The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.

The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.

Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.

He says:

“In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.”

Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.

As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.

Coronavirus Strikes Papua New Guinea

Binoy Kampmark

There was a time when it seemed Papua New Guinea had managed to dodge a bullet.  Instances of SARS-CoV-2 were minimal, along with its disease, COVID-19.  Through 2020, the country of eight million people recorded a mere 900 cases.  The World Health Organization praised the PNG government in a September 2020 news release in “taking the threat of the pandemic seriously with an all-of-government approach in strengthening the country’s health system and engaging communities to keep them safe from the virus.”

Officials acknowledged that a spike in cases could impair the medical system, despite the fact that three-quarters of the population are under the age of 35.  While the elderly population is small, the large number of youthful members poses the problem of asymptomatic transmission.  “We know that about 15% of COVID-19 cases will need some form of hospital care,” stated Dr Gary Nou, an important figure in the COVID-19 response in the National Capital District.  “If 10,000 people get sick – that’s about 1,500 people needing care.  This can easily overwhelm our health system.”

Last month, Nou found himself working to a state of exhaustion in the Rita Flynn Sporting Complex in Port Moresby.  The complex had become a centre of treatment and testing, taking in moderate and mild coronavirus cases.  He concluded that a nightmare was unfolding.  “The workload is normally a lot, we have one doctor per 14,000 people, that’s our doctor to patient ratio.”  The health system, he gloomily observed, was now in a “perpetual state of disaster”.

Currently, the number of coronavirus cases has almost reached 9,800 with 89 deaths recorded.  But these figures may well be skewed.  Moses Laman of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research told Devex at the start of this month that the figure of 100,000 was “closer to reality” given that 1 in 5 tests returned a positive result.  “That tells us there is widespread community transmission.”  Australian Doctors International’s Mimi Zilliacus does little to dissuade on that score, noting that minimal testing has taken place in the provinces.  “Lots of provincial governments have been reluctant to act, even when the response from the central government has ramped up.”

At the start of this month, the PNG Epidemic Response Group, an alliance comprising medical research institutes, NGOs, professional services and Australian churches, warned of an impending calamity, urging the Australian government to “immediately allocate one million of its domestically produced vaccines to PNG now, along with accompanying technical assistance and support for the PNG government and communities to address vaccine hesitancy and distribution.”

Concerning is the number of health workers being infected, a result largely due to a crawling vaccination program.  PNG’s Health Minister Jelta Wong promises that “558,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be made available to Papua New Guineans” by June, though she could not muster much certainty on the timing.

Structural problems are also bound to blight any vaccination distribution, not least because most of the country exists in a state of electricity deprivation.  In parts of the world “where electricity access is poor,” note three authors in The Conversation, “refrigeration of vaccines during transport and storage may prove very difficult.”

The rash of cases in PNG has done enough to worry the World Health Organization (WHO).  Its Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was gloomy at a virtual press conference on April 16.  The numbers might have been “smaller than other countries” but the increase was worryingly sharp.  PNG was, he argued, “a perfect example of why vaccine equity is so important.” The country had held COVID-19 “at bay for so long” but faced a rise in infections, fatigue towards social restrictions, low levels of immunity in the population and a fragile health system.

This has also worried Australia, a country so often inclined to treat PNG with a mixture of splitting headache, condescension and hopeless charity.  Ian Kemish, former Australian High Commissioner to the country, calls it Australia’s “blind spot” despite PNG being home to some 20,000 Australians.  The former diplomat is unabashed in stressing the virtue of self-interest, which he calls “an important motivator of public attention”.  What is good for PNG, he unequivocally asserts, is also good for Australia.

Kemish even goes so far as to praise representatives of Australian mining, with their “world-class testing and treatment protocols” (they can, the implication goes, teach the natives a thing or two).  In such praise, he chooses to avoid the obvious question: that PNG’s heavy reliance on mining provided another avenue for coronavirus to enter the country and thrive.  A stream of revenue may well have also constituted a viral route.

The Australian Council for International Development is blunter.  As Marc Purcell, its chief executive, stated with a note of alarm, any virus mutations in PNG threatened “to undermine the Australian vaccines program.”  (At this stage, there is not much to undermine: Australia’s vaccination program remains incipient, tardy and barely worth a mention.)

Canberra’s lack of a coherent vaccination strategy and lamentable planning has meant that parts of northern Australia are vulnerable to possible infection.  Proximity to PNG is a factor.  Of particular concern are the residents of the Torres Strait, their health potentially fragile to the ravages of the virus.  In the words of Bill Bowtell, famed for his role behind Australia’s successful HIV-AIDS response, “The Torres Strait is paying the same price as the rest of Australia for a lack of coherent planning about supply and then obviously distribution.”

Queensland deputy premier Steven Miles has expressed a growing worry from the view of the state government.  “There are islands in the Torres Strait where you can see PNG from the beaches and where it is very common for people to travel for traditional trade purposes between PNG and the Torres Strait islands”.  It was essential to “get as many of those folk that we know are vulnerable vaccinated as quickly as we can.”

In late March, Australia donated a paltry 8,000 doses while 132 thousand doses from the COVAX facility arrived last week.  Concerns remain with the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, given the bad press that has enveloped it regarding instances of rare blood clotting.  The road ahead for PNG looks bumpy and more than a touch vicious.

Workers at Continental in Hesse, Germany carry out 24-hour strike

Marianne Arens

On April 15 workers at the Continental Auto plant in Karben, Hesse carried out a 24-hour strike to protest against the decision to close the factory by 2023.

Continental intends to wipe out 30,000 jobs worldwide and close a series of factories. The plan was decided by the corporation’s executive at the beginning of September 2020 in order to save €1 billion by 2023. The German engineering union IG Metall, which has known about the plans for more than a year, is focusing protest actions at individual plants in order to isolate workers and prevent a joint struggle by all Conti employees.

Along with the Karben plant in Hesse, where 1,088 workers produce car components, Conti factories in Babenhausen, Hesse (2,570 jobs), Roding in the Upper Palatinate (520 jobs) and Conti-Vitesco in Nuremberg (almost 500 jobs) are also to be closed. The planned cutbacks, however, go far beyond this list and affect around 13,000, or one in four jobs in Germany alone.

Strikers in front of the Continental plant in Karben (Banner reads “This factory is on strike” - Photo WSWS

Many of those losing their jobs have been with the company for decades, like Ms. Weber. She told the World Socialist Web Site, “We found out about the closure on April 9. That was the day I celebrated my 35th anniversary at the company. On the same day, new apprentices started work, only to learn at noon that the factory was closing.”

Ms. Weber confirmed that the workforce had suffered wage cuts for the past 11 years, all in order to keep the factory open and save jobs. “And then you get a blow like this!” She reported that she trained at the VDO works in Frankfurt-Heddernheim and worked in Bockenheim, before joining Continental in Karben when the company was taken over. She enjoyed her work and does not think she can find anything else comparable. Also she drew attention to the temporary contract workers—around 200 are employed in the factory—who are likely to be the first to be made redundant.

To prevent the risk of coronavirus arising from large gatherings, workers had been told to stay home and only a handful of strikers manned the strike post at the factory gate. They were mainly members of the works council and IG Metall, seeking to demonstrate “that we are capable of striking.” An indefinite strike has also been planned.

The entire auto and related supplier industry is facing a huge upheaval. Auto companies are converting production to electric mobility and using the pandemic as an excuse to implement long-planned strategies for rationalisation. Production is being relocated and concentrated, and tens of thousands of previously well-paid jobs are being wiped out. Production in Karben will probably be undertaken in the future in Eastern Europe, Romania, Lithuania or the Czech Republic, where workers are exploited under much worse conditions than those currently prevailing in Germany.

With 230,000 employees, Continental is the world’s second largest supplier to the car industry. The corporation, with a 150-year long history, has long since developed from a rubber tyre manufacturer in Lower Saxony into a globally active supplier producing components for auto, rail and air transport. During the Nazi era, the company employed tens of thousands of forced labourers and was an indispensable part of the Nazi armaments and war industry.

Today, Continental’s largest shareholder, with 46 percent, is the Schaeffler family, the country’s sixth wealthiest company and one of the world’s super-richest. The Continental corporation, which is currently laying off 30,000 workers, paid out €600 million in dividends to its shareholders as recently as last summer, despite the coronavirus crisis.

Ten years ago there was already a big wave of layoffs and plant closures at Continental. At the time, Schaeffler had just taken over Continental, which was three times its size, when the international stock market collapsed. In order to meet the banks’ demands, workers were subjected to a brutal austerity programme. Many plants were closed, including a tyre factory in Clairoix, France and the truck tyre plant in Hanover-Stöcken.

The French workers occupied the factory in northern France and contacted their German colleagues in Saargemünd and Hanover. When workers from Clairoix and Lower Saxony demonstrated together with those in Hanover on April 24, 2009, the company executive reacted with alarm. In order to nip any effective international industrial action in the bud, the management quickly offered workers relatively high severance payments.

They then recovered this outlay through wage concessions agreed to by the IG Metall and IG BCE. At Schaeffler, with the help of the trade unions, a wage cut of 17 percent was imposed, which the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party also supported. Workers at Continental have now undergone wage cuts for the past 12 years now, as Ms. Weber and the Karben works councils confirmed. Nevertheless, the plant is still being closed.

It is clear that workers can only defend themselves against these attacks by organising together internationally in the various Conti factories and across national borders. This is the policy of the Socialist Equality Party and its affiliated parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International. We propose that workers form action committees that can act completely independently of the IG Metall, IG BCE and all of the trade unions.

Earlier this year, the SGP launched the Network of Action Committees for Safe Workplaces. The appeal for action stated: “We created the network because we are no longer prepared to accept the mass redundancies planned for industry, dangerous working conditions and the cover-up of the infection figures in the factories. We are striving to organise the growing resistance independently of Bundestag parties and trade unions and coordinate it internationally.”

For decades, the unions have repeatedly pressured the Conti workforce into making concessions and forcing them to give up the gains fought for in prior contract struggles. The unions claimed that such concessions were necessary to secure jobs and factories. Now tens of thousands of jobs and entire plants are being surrendered without a fight.

IG Metall was involved in the planning of the mass layoffs and closures from the start. Its executive committee member Christiane Benner is deputy chair of the Conti supervisory board. The union has taken on the task of enforcing company policy in the factories, and the current protests are part of this. Instead of mobilising workers at all plants against the capitalists, the IG Metall is dividing the workforce on the basis of its long-standing “single location” policy.

In the media, union bosses complain that the company wants to relocate jobs to Eastern European low-wage countries “out of pure greed for profits.” In Karben the workers are being told: “We, the IG Metall, actually reject the closure outright. We are only negotiating a social contract in order to establish a legal basis for industrial action.”

In the end, however, the union’s signature will set the seal on the closure, coupled with its familiar methods of pressuring workers to take early retirement, severance pay and a transfer into a subsidiary company, which in turn leads to unemployment after a few months.

IG Metall has just repeated these tactics at the nearby Continental plant in Babenhausen. The union declares it has secured a great victory because the factory will not close in 2025 as planned, but instead three years later, in 2028. Up until then, most of the 3,300 jobs at the factory will be phased out.

The agreed severance payments, ranging from €20,000 to a maximum of €190,000 gross, are based on years of service and the readiness of workers to sacrifice their jobs. Those who decide quickly are to receive a “turbo bonus” amounting to an additional three months’ salary. It was also agreed that this severance offer would only apply to IG Metall members. The fate of one-third of the workforce, who are not union members, will be decided by arbitration. Temporary and contract workers can expect nothing at all.

Since the announcement of this deal, angry comments from employees have been piling up on social media. One commentator said that the agreement reached by IG Metall was “a very small crumb from a mouldy cake.” Another described the deal was a “slap in the face” and a “ridiculous” offer.

The statement of the chairperson of the works council at the Babenhausen plant, Anne Nothing, following the agreement is significant. In her opinion it had “never been realistic” to save all jobs at the factory. This should give workers in Karben food for thought.

UK capital London centre of new Covid-19 variants, as R value rises above 1

Ioan Petrescu

Four London boroughs had to begin “surge testing” after new cases of Covid-19 “variants of concern” were detected. The affected boroughs are Wandsworth, Lambeth, Barnet, Southwark, which have a combined population of over 1.3 million.

This comes as Boris Johnson’s Conservative government advanced to the next stage of ending the “last lockdown” last Monday, involving the opening of pubs, restaurants, gyms, hair salons and a host of non-essential retail shops. This coincided with the end of the Easter Break and a return to schools.

As of April 16, London’s R (Reproduction) rate stands at a best estimate of between 0.8 and 1.1. The figure marks a hike from the previous week, when scientists estimated that R was between 0.8 and 1.0 in the capital. The R rate represents the rate of the spread of coronavirus. When the figure is above 1, an outbreak can grow exponentially.

People walking past London Bridge underground station in London. April 12, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

An R of 1.1 means that 10 people can infect 11 others. It is London’s highest rate since England entered its third national lockdown three months ago. During the first week of January, after restrictions had to be imposed, the capital’s R rate hit a peak of 1.4.

Scientists anticipated infections to rise in line with greater social mixing alongside the gradual easing of lockdown measures. A lag time between the spread of coronavirus and the configuration of infection rates means the figure is likely to rise over the next few weeks. Last week’s estimate will not have factored in the impact of pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops reopening from April 12.

A total of 56 cases of the variant first identified in South Africa (B.1.351) were found in London during the week to April 14, according to data released Thursday, taking the total confirmed cases since it was first detected in December to 600, up by 56 in a week. The largest “surge testing” operation since the start of the pandemic was launched in the boroughs of Wandsworth and Lambeth last Tuesday, then extended to postcodes in Southwark and Barnet.

It may already be too late to stem the spread of the highly transmissible strain. Dr Zubaida Haque, a member of Independent SAGE (scientists who have criticised aspects of the government's COVID-19 response) said she was concerned that “the horse may have already bolted”. The relaxation of lockdown rules in England last week and children’s return to school were “the perfect storm” for variants to spread.

The South African variant has the potential to start a new wave of the pandemic, especially as several of those infected had received at least one shot of either the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine. This suggests the variant may have been able to resist vaccine protection, according to one test and trace official. Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London declared that the variant “could completely devastate us” if health officials were unable to prevent it from spreading nationwide, like B.1.1.7 (the Kent variant) did at the end of last year.

How rapidly the new variants can spread was revealed by the BBC who reported of the South African variant, “It is thought the virus was spread from that individual to members of their household and then to a care home in Lambeth.

“Twenty-three cases of the South African variant were detected in the care home—13 staff and 10 residents.

“Six of the 10 residents infected had received one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine two or more weeks before their positive test date. One of the 13 infected staff had a single Pfizer vaccine dose two or more weeks before their positive test.”

Schools are a main vector for the spread of Covid with the BBC noting, “Other clusters related to the first outbreak [of the South African variant in south London] were detected at two primary schools in Wandsworth.”

At least two cases of the Indian variant of Covid-19 (B.1.617) have also been detected in London. Public Health England (PHE) revealed on Friday that there are a total of 77 cases of the variant in Britain, though it said they are spread widely and there are no reported clusters. This is no reassurance, only revealing that the new variant exists all over the country. India now leads the world in daily new cases with more than 200,000 cases reported on Friday.

In February, a contagious Brazilian variant, known as P.1, was detected in Britain, after three Scottish residents had flown to north-east Scotland from Brazil via Paris and London.

That London is the centre of the spread of new and even more contagious variants of Covid is no surprise. The capital is the most populated area in the UK with nearly 9 million residents. Its densely packed population and cosmopolitan character make it the perfect incubator for the spread of the virus and for the creation of new, potentially more dangerous variants. London’s airports operate by far the largest number of international flights, makes it the main port of entry for the new variants. Unlike other countries, at no stage in the pandemic did Britain ban international travel altogether. It was only recently that the requirement for international travelers to quarantine in hotels was even implemented.

Scientists warned last week that mass surge testing might not stop the clusters of cases in the capital from growing and that local lockdowns may be needed. However, the government stated that given London’s role as the “economic powerhouse” of the UK it opposes implementing the necessary restrictions which would cut into the profits of the financial oligarchy. Johnson admitted last week that 'The bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown,' while insisting, “As we unlock the result will inevitably be that we will see more infections and sadly we will see more hospitalisations and deaths”.

The government has justified ending lockdown by claiming that the repeated mass testing of the population, via the lateral flow device (LFD), alongside the vaccination programme, will facilitate targeted interventions. It has bought millions of lateral flow tests as part of its £37 billion budget for the National Health Service Test and Trace programme.

The WSWS has documented extensively the lack of accuracy of such tests and how it can give a false sense of security to people, thus leading to an increase in cases. But the procedure’s shortcomings are now the focus of arguments that its main problem is to exaggerate the infection rate.

Ben Dyson, an executive director of strategy at the health department, declared in an email seen by the Guardian, “As of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test potentially as low as 10% (on an optimistic assumption about specificity) or as low as 2% (on a more pessimistic assumption).”

Government officials, backed by the corporate media, seized on the high rate of false positives produced by LFD to argue for stopping mass testing entirely. Dyson, one of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s advisers, stressed the “fairly urgent need for decisions” on “the point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing”.

The “herd immunity” policy of the Conservative government has created a humanitarian disaster for the working class across the world. The UK B.1.1.7 variant—discovered in Kent, England in September last year—was ignored and allowed to spread until it became the dominant variant in the country and spread internationally. The variant, which is 60 percent more transmissible, is present in 125 countries and is behind a massive wave of new infections in Europe, US, Canada, and India.

India hit by tsunami of COVID-19 infections as daily new cases surpass 250,000

Saman Gunadasa

India has reported more than 200,000 COVID-19 cases daily since April 15, more than double the number recorded in any other country in the world. Despite this, India’s far-right Narendra Modi-led government has refused to take any measures to curb the spread of the pandemic.

On Saturday, the health ministry reported 234,692 cases during the previous 24 hours. A new daily record was set Sunday with 261,500 new infections, taking the number of active cases to a record 1.8 million. Underscoring the virus’ spread across India, the five states with the most new infections were Maharashtra in the west (67,123), Uttar Pradesh (27,734) and Delhi (24,375) in the north, Karnataka in the south (17,489), and Chhattisgarh (16,083) in the center-east.

Health workers screen residents for COVID-19 symptoms at Deonar slum in Mumbai, India, Saturday, July 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

According to epidemiologist and Public Health Foundation head Giridhara Babu, this dire situation is set to deteriorate still further. He warned the caseload could increase to 300,000-400,000 per day by May 5.

To date, India has had 14.5 million recorded COVID-19 infections, the second-highest number of cases in the world. But by May 1, this total could rise to 18 million.

The official death toll rose Sunday to 177,150 following a record 1,501 fatalities in the previous 24 hours. India’s relatively low official death figures have been disputed by medical experts, who say that authorities are vastly undercounting the dead.

An Indian news site, The Wire reported on the situation in Madhya Pradesh as an example of the undercounting of deaths: “There were 37 bodies waiting to be cremated on April 12 at Bhopal’s Bhadbhada facility whereas the Madhya Pradesh bulletin listed only 37 deaths in the whole state on that day,” noted the report. “Similarly, on April 8, 35 bodies had to be cremated in Bhopal alone, but the bulletin specified only 27 deaths; on April 9, it was 35 bodies vs. 23 in the bulletin.”

Criminal responsibility for the massive surge of cases lies with the Modi government and the Indian ruling elite as a whole. The Modi government has followed the policy of “herd immunity,” refusing to impose necessary lockdown measures or provide India’s impoverished masses with the means to shelter at home. After ending last spring’s ill-prepared lockdown, which triggered a social calamity due to the absence of assistance for working people, the Modi government and its counterparts at the state level—including those led by the opposition parties—have maintained an open-economy policy while downplaying the deadly risk of the virus raging throughout India and internationally.

Modi repeatedly boasted about India’s capability to produce vaccines and said that India was launching the “world’s biggest vaccination programme.” Authorities even put his photograph on the vaccination certificate issued to those who have been inoculated along with the slogan, “Together, India will defeat COVID-19.”

By March 23, at the beginning of the new wave, the Indian government had only vaccinated 39 million people or 2.7 percent of the population. By April 12, the percentage remained below four percent.

States like Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Delhi complain that they are facing a shortage of vaccines. Media reports have also emerged from several other states of vaccine centers shutting early or turning people away due to supplies running out.

To bolster the government’s propaganda of normalcy, New Delhi allowed the ongoing mega Hindu religious event Kumbh Mela to go ahead, with millions of Hindu devotees from all over the country congregating at Haridwar on the shores of the Ganges. However, yesterday Modi hypocritically told religious leaders the festival should be “symbolic.” At least 2,000 people, including religious leaders, are already reported as infected in the city of Haridwar alone.

The Modi government has also launched mass election propaganda campaigns in the state of West Bengal along with other political parties, without paying attention to public health rules, including social distancing. More than seven candidates, including candidates from Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party, have reportedly tested positive for COVID-19.

Fourteen states have reported their highest number of daily infections during the last few days. Among them, five states including Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala have 68 percent of the active cases nationwide.

The UK variant of the coronavirus is reported in 18 to 19 states or 70 to 80 districts in India, while the South African and Brazilian variants are also found in a lesser number of districts. Double mutant variants, which may be more infectious or reduce vaccine effectiveness, have been found in Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh.

Feigning concern at the raging pandemic, India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, said on April 16: “The number of cases is rising across the country. That is why we are visiting various hospitals to assess the situation and also talking to doctors and everyone for further preparations.”

However, India’s current health care spending is less than 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product, among the lowest in the world. As the pandemic has resurged, the government has not announced any supplementary budgets to improve health care infrastructure or to expedite the manufacturing of vaccinations. By contrast, it is lavishly spending on defence, including allocating an additional $18.5 billion for weapons procurement in the 2021-22 budget announced on February 1.

Shortages of hospital beds, including oxygen-equipped and intensive care unit beds, have been reported from around the country. The government has been compelled to import 50,000 metric tonnes of medical oxygen due to increased demand.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray announced limited lockdown measures last week, after saying the state’s active COVID-19 caseload could double in 15 days from the present half a million. However, public transport, including trains and bus services, and the manufacturing sector were all allowed to continue operating at a maximum of 50 percent capacity. Thackeray has requested military help from the central government to tackle medical personnel shortages.

Delhi has become one of the worst-hit cities in India, with close to 50,000 active cases, and infection rates on the rise. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced “a weekend curfew” that will not disrupt big business. Even cinema halls remain open at 30 percent occupancy.

At the end of March as the surge in infections began, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain declared: “Lockdown, not a solution, learn to live with Covid.” He went on to say, “It is a recurring disease. Experts said from the beginning, ‘Do not believe it will be finished immediately.’ We will have to learn to live with it.”

In Chhattisgarh hospital beds are no longer available. The press club in Rajnandgoan has been converted into a makeshift hospital and in the same town a garbage truck was reportedly used to ferry away dead bodies.

In Chhattisgarh’s state capital Raipur, the main government hospital’s freezers have run out of space to store dead bodies. Reports described bodies piling up everywhere, with trucks ferrying them ten at a time to the cremation grounds. According to Umesh Kumar, who watched as his father’s body was taken to cremation at a funeral pyre in Naya Raipur, “They are dragging the bodies like animals from the mortuary to the truck and then from the truck onto the funeral pyre.”

Under these horrifying conditions, the Modi regime and opposition parties are agreed that business must continue as usual. This policy of placing corporate profits ahead of the protection of human lives amounts to social murder. While hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and millions are suffering from the pandemic, the number of pandemic profiteers is rising in India as in other countries. According to an OXFAM study, India’s more than 100 billionaires increased their wealth by 13 trillion rupees ($US 174 billion), from March 2020 to January 2021.

Citing domestic demand, the Modi regime suspended vaccine exports during the last week of March, promising to resume them in June. This decision will have a devastating impact on many middle-income and poor countries which depend on India for cheaper generic drugs and vaccines.

Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer recently complained that since New Delhi pays it less per shot than it earns from exports, it needs 30 billion rupees ($408 million) from the government to boost its currently “very stretched” production capacity.

At the same time, US imperialism’s brutal vaccine-nationalist policy is heavily impacting India. In early February, newly elected US President Joe Biden invoked the Defence Production Act to ban the export of raw materials related to vaccine production.

“The US,” said Poonawalla last Friday, “needs to lift its embargo on raw material exports to help ramp up vaccine production.” “The US,” he continued, “has invoked the Defence Act and banned export of raw materials. This is as good as banning vaccines.”

According to the Washington Post, the aim of Biden’s export ban is to enable Pfizer and Moderna to step up US vaccine production so “mass inoculations against the coronavirus” can be accelerated. In reality, Biden’s actions have nothing to do with any concern for saving lives, and everything to do with boosting the profits and market share of these two US-based companies, whose life-saving products will be used by the US ruling elite to advance its predatory geopolitical interests. SII’s main customer for COVID-19 vaccines is the British-Swedish company AstraZenika.